[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 142 (Wednesday, September 13, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1769]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



[[Page E 1769]]


      THE CASE FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FROM ONE WHO HAS BEEN THERE

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                       HON. ESTEBAN EDWARD TORRES

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 13, 1995

  Mr. TORRES. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to 
place in the Congressional Record an article that was sent to me by 
Harriet Blair of Montebello, CA.
  Harriet Blair has been involved in community affairs in southern 
California for many years and knows the valuable role affirmative 
action has played in our society.
  She has asked me to share with my colleagues an open letter written 
by Prof. Dave Malcolm to the five Supreme Court Justices who voted to 
place serious limitations on affirmative action. I believe Mr. 
Malcolm's open letter on the subject of affirmative action should be 
given strong consideration by my colleagues in the House of 
Representatives, and I am happy to place it in the Record at this time.
                    An Open Letter to Five Justices

       Gentlepersons: On Monday, June 12, 1995, at 10:50 a.m. I 
     left the office of my cardiologist having just been informed 
     that my aortic valve implant was ``leaking'' and that 
     replacement surgery would be required sometime within the 
     next three to six months.
       At 10:55 a.m., same date, I heard on the radio in my car 
     about two new Supreme Court 5-4 decisions, each apparently 
     placing serious additional limitations on programs of 
     affirmative action. I drove homeward, feeling sick at heart--
     not from feelings of anxiety about my imminent open-heart 
     surgery but from feelings of dismay at the direction in which 
     my country seems to be moving, especially in regard to 
     affirmative action.
       You see, I know a lot about Affirmative Action. I count 
     myself an expert on the subject. After all, I have benefited 
     from it all my life. That is because I am white, I am male, I 
     am Anglo and I am Protestant. We male WASPs have had a great 
     informal affirmative action program going for decades, maybe 
     centuries. I'm not speaking only of the way our ``old boy 
     networks'' help people like me get into the right colleges or 
     get jobs or get promotions. That's only the surface. 
     Underneath, our real affirmative action is much more than 
     this, much more than just a few direct interventions at key 
     moments in life. The real affirmative action is also indirect 
     and at work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year 
     in and year out. Because it is informal and indirect, we tend 
     to forget or deny just how all-important and all-pervasive it 
     really is.
       However, far be it from me to put the direct ``old boy'' 
     surface stuff down. I was admitted without difficulty to the 
     ivy league college my father had attended. This was back in 
     the days when the only quotas were quotas to keep certain 
     people out, not to help them get in. There were no limits on 
     reasonably bright kids like me--the admissions people spoke 
     of the children of alumni as ``legacies'', but whether this 
     was because the college was inheriting us as students or 
     because the college hoped to inherit money from our families, 
     I was never quite sure. I got a teaching job right out of 
     college in the heart of the depression--my father was a 
     school superintendent well liked among his colleagues. After 
     World War II, when I became a university professor, I 
     received promotion and tenure in minimum time, more quickly 
     than many of my women colleagues. Of course, the decision 
     makers knew me better--I was part of the monthly poker group 
     and played golf every Friday afternoon. Yes, direct 
     affirmative action, direct prefential treatment because of my 
     gender and my color and good connections has been good to me, 
     there is no question about that.
       But, like other white males, I have benefited less 
     obviously but far more significantly from indirect unequal or 
     preferential treatment based on color or gender or 
     nationality or religion or some combination thereof. This 
     indirect aspect of informal affirmative action is subtler and 
     less visible even though it is the really big one and it 
     begins practically from birth. Indirect affirmative action is 
     at work to greater or lesser degree on behalf of virtually 
     all white males, whether one is aware of it or not. Indirect 
     affirmative action is what didn't happen to me, the 
     destructive, painful stuff that I didn't have to endure that 
     so many other folks did. Real early in life I knew that boys 
     were more important than girls--and so did the girls. I never 
     have had to endure the pain of having any of my kids come 
     home crying and asking ``Daddy, why can't I be white?'' Only 
     quite late in my life did I discover how frequently young 
     black or brown parents have to live with this pain.
       I never have had to worry about whether my skin color was 
     light enough or dark enough. My only concern about my skin 
     has been not to get too badly sunburned the first hot day 
     each summer and not to get skin cancer from too much 
     exposure. For two of my long--time colleagues and closest 
     personal friends, it has been a very different story. Raymond 
     was the lightest skinned member of his family. He recalls 
     that he was the only one who could get his hair cut down 
     town--but the family had to drop him off a block away from 
     the barber shop. He once told me that he had probably spent 
     more time worrying about his light skin than any other one 
     thing in life. Would his fellow African-Americans think he 
     was black enough? When whites thought he was East Indian or 
     South American, should
      he let them think so? Maria had the opposite problem. As a 
     child, she was called ``la prieta'' (``the little dark 
     one''). Even though she knew the diminutive was a mark of 
     affection, she still was aware that the label was no 
     compliment. When she became a young woman, well-meaning 
     whites told her ``You don't look Mexican'', meaning that 
     she looked more Spanish and hence almost white. The 
     message always hurt deeply--not simply because the 
     speakers personally so clearly believed that there was 
     something inferior about being Mexican but also because 
     they had unhesitatingly assumed that she did too and hence 
     would consider such a statement to be a compliment.
       I never have had to endure ``what-is-he-doing-here?'' looks 
     any time I walked along a residential street in a suburban 
     area. I have not had to notice white women clutching their 
     purses more tightly when they meet me walking along the 
     street. I never have seen the ``For Rent'' or ``For Sale'' 
     signs figuratively snatched out of the window as I walked up 
     to the front door. I cannot even begin to imagine the barrage 
     of insults, large and small, that send a five- or six-year-
     old running tearfully home to ask Mommy or Daddy ``Why can't 
     I be white?''
       Out of the dozens of times I have crossed the border from 
     Tijuana to San Diego, the one time I was pulled over to have 
     my car inspected was when returning with Raymond and another 
     African-American male as passengers. I was furious, but they 
     restrained me--assuring me it was no big deal, that it 
     happened to them all the time. That day I got some small 
     sense of the rage and fury and helplessness and frustration 
     that persons different from me experience daily and are 
     forced to smother, to hold bottled up churning around 
     furiously somewhere deep inside.
       I have never been so bombarded by negative messages that I 
     began to internalize them, to half-way suspect they might in 
     part be true. I have never had to try to participate in 
     class, all the while holding my anger tightly inside lest it 
     explode. As a professional person, I've never had to carry 
     the burden of knowing that the slightest mispronunciation or 
     grammatical error on my part will be seized upon by some 
     people as validation of their negative stereotypes, not only 
     about me but also about my people. But entire populations of 
     my potential competitors have labored and still are laboring 
     under disadvantages of this very sort as they compete with 
     me. This is white male
      ``affirmative action'' at its most effective--the flip side 
     of destructive life-long bombardment by negative messages. 
     [White women benefit at the expense of their darker-
     skinned sisters from the very same processes that put them 
     at disadvantage compared to white males!]
       Yes, affirmative action for some folks remains alive and 
     well and unthreatened by court decisions. I ought to know. 
     All my life I have been an indirect beneficiary because 
     indirect affirmative action has been so effective at 
     crippling or eliminating so many of those who might have been 
     my competitors. As a white male, I never have had to compete 
     with them on a level playing field.
       The promise of the American dream is a society which is 
     color-fair, not color-blind. Formal affirmative action 
     programs play a dual role. They make the playing fields a bit 
     more level and they remind us that we still have far to go. 
     It is no solution for society to trash its current formal 
     efforts to make opportunity a little more equal as long as so 
     many powerful informal barriers to equality of opportunity 
     still persist.
       Think about it.
                                                     Dave Malcolm,
                                            San Diego, California.
     

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