Compact continues to push Mass. diversity benchmarks

The Bay State Banner
Kenneth J. Cooper
July 9, 2009

In 1721, as an outbreak of smallpox caused panic in Boston, an African slave spoke up and helped solve the public health crisis.
Onesimus informed his master, Cotton Mather, the city’s most powerful man, that Africans of that era stopped the deadly disease from spreading by extracting fluid from the blisters and scratching it into the skin of healthy people, using a thorn.
Despite the enormous difference in their social status, Mather listened to his slave and enlisted Dr. Zabdiel Boylston to experiment with the African practice, which was rudimentary but medically sound. Smallpox inoculation was the first major innovation made in Massachusetts with a person of color as prime mover. It was not to be the last.
A 2006 study of 60 significant innovations in Massachusetts during the last 400 years found that more than a third involved people of color, women or immigrants. To give a few examples, African Americans participated in a big way in the first pamphlet calling for the total abolition of slavery (David Walker), the invention of the telephone (Lewis Latimer) and the first infant formula (Louise A. Giblin).
Launched a year ago, the Commonwealth Compact aims to make the state’s future resemble its innovative past by fostering more diversity in businesses, governments and nonprofits.
This spring, the initiative, based at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, published aggregate numbers on the level of diversity up and down the ranks of 111 institutions, which have committed to making their workforces and boards of directors more representative.
“We thought we’d get eight or 10 to sign up. We got 111,” says Stephen P. Crosby, dean of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass-Boston. “This is an unusual initiative. We can’t find anything like this.”
Since May, the number of entities that have joined the Commonwealth Compact has grown to 140, including the governments of the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts. All have volunteered to provide, annually and on a confidential basis, information on their personnel broken down by race and ethnicity. Those data are totaled and also aggregated by industry, then published to provide benchmarks for institutions to measure themselves against competitors and other parts of the state’s economy.
“I commend the compact and its research, but time will tell if measurable progress will be made as a result of the compact’s efforts,” says Shirley J. Wilcher, a Mattapan resident who is executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action. “Improving Boston’s reputation as a ‘welcoming’ city for minorities would be admirable and desirable and, given the changing demographics, just good business.”
The first benchmarks, covering about 180,000 employees or 5.5 percent of the state’s labor, may make the workforce appear more diverse than it actually is.
Crosby, a co-founder of the compact along with former Suffolk County district attorney Ralph Martin II and Boston Globe Publisher P. Steven Ainsley, acknowledges that the initial participants tend to be predisposed to diversity.
Persons of color were reported to comprise 34 percent of all employees and 22 percent of managers and senior executives. In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Hispanics and members of a racial minority made up 20 percent of the state population.
“Our goal is to reach at least 1,000 companies so we get representative data,” says Georgianna Meléndez, one of the compact’s three co-directors. The former assistant commissioner of the state Department of Transitional Assistance emphasizes the benchmarks are not intended to be “a shame or blame thing” for participating institutions.
A traditional pattern of minorities being concentrated in the lowest-level jobs is reflected in the current, aggregated data. That concentration was greatest in the health care field, a fast-growing part of the state economy. In the lowest-paying health jobs, 55 percent of employees were minorities. At the top end of the employment ladder, minorities accounted for just 12 percent of managers or officers at for-profit companies.
“I would be looking for sincere efforts to recruit and a demonstrable commitment from the very top of the member organizations, not only to diversify the entry levels, but the executive suites as well,” says Wilcher, who directed the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs during the Clinton administration.

Full Story: http://www.baystatebanner.com/local12-2009-07-09

Reverse discrimination ruling leaves confusion

San Francisco Chronicle
By DAVE COLLINS, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The Supreme Court ruling in favor of white New Haven firefighters who said they were victims of reverse discrimination will probably leave employers confused, civil rights advocates and labor attorneys say.
The court ruled 5-4 Monday that the white firefighters were denied promotions unfairly because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as a federal appeals court judge.
The majority of justices said the city was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results. The city said it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
While the court upheld that employers still have an obligation under civil rights laws to avoid discrimination in hiring, promoting and compensating workers, the ruling creates confusing standards on how to meet that obligation, said Wade Henderson, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
"Employers will now face a convoluted minefield when attempting to protect workers from discrimination," Henderson said. "Employers are looking for bright lines ... they're looking for clear directives to help them better understand how they can engage in nondiscriminatory decisions."
The ruling is confusing, Henderson said, because the high court seemed to say that while New Haven officials tried to avoid discrimination, throwing out the test was discriminatory. "It puts employers in a real quandary," he said.
The Obama administration should direct the government's civil rights agencies to offer guidance on the ruling, said Shirley Wilcher, executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action.
"In the meantime, we're scratching our heads," she said. "We're concerned about the impact on employers who want to comply with the law and do not want to discriminate ... and it's not clear how to do that."

Full Story: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/06/29/national/w070244D76.DTL

Nebraskans approve affirmative action ban

The Cavalier Daily
Colorado voters faced similar proposition; University will continue to practice affirmative action in admissions decisions
Shea Connelly, Cavalier Daily Senior Associate Editor
Published: Monday, November 10 2008

On Election Day last week, 58 percent of voters in Nebraska supported a measure to end the practice of affirmative action in public employment, public education and public contracting.
Colorado voters faced a similar choice on their ballot this year, and although votes are still being counted, the votes to keep the practice currently outweigh the alternative, 51 to 49 percent.
Bill Harvey, University vice president and chief officer for diversity and equity, noted that he was pleased that voters in Colorado looked at the proposition on their ballot carefully enough to understand that “there is a need and opportunity for us to provide a chance for people who are historically not represented to get a chance to be involved in higher education and employment.”
Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity based in Falls Church, Va., which supports banning some kinds of affirmative action, however, holds a different perspective. He noted that his organization recently conducted and released a study showing the “heavy weight” the University of Nebraska College of Law gives to race in its admissions policies.
“African-Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos were admitted with much lower qualifications than whites and Asian-Americans,” Clegg said. “We think that’s unfair and divisive and really serves no one’s interests, so we oppose that.”
Clegg noted, however, that the term “affirmative action” means different things to different groups of people, and his organization does not oppose all forms of affirmative action. He cited President John F. Kennedy’s reference to the term affirmative action in a 1961 executive order in which he urged employers to take “affirmative action” to avoid engaging in prejudicial policies as an example of a type of affirmative action that his organization approves.
On the other hand, he said, “we think that actually taking race or ethnicity into account in deciding who gets admitted into a school or who gets hired or who is awarded a government contract is discrimination, and it’s wrong no matter what racial or ethnic group is being discriminated against,” Clegg said. “In 2008, it is untenable to have a legal regime where people are sorted according to skin color and some people are treated better and others worse on that basis.”
In contrast with Clegg, Shirley J. Wilcher, executive director of the American Association for Affirmative Action, said affirmative action is still necessary.
“Until we have no evidence of discrimination, affirmative action will continue to be necessary,” she said. “Diversity is still a compelling interest with demographics indicating that by 2042, a majority of Americans will be minorities. It is important to ensure colleges and universities have qualified students of all backgrounds.”
Wilcher also said people supporting the bans on affirmative action have been engaging in “deceptive practices” in order to convince other people to also support the bans.
“People thought they were signing an initiative that was pro-civil rights,” she said, when they were actually signing a petition to ban affirmative action.
Wilcher said the future of the United States depends on qualified people of all races being able to graduate from college and to ascend to positions of leadership. [Full story: http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2008/nov/10/nebraskans-approve/]