Racial and Ethnic Diversity: The Paradigm for the New Millennium

By

Sherman N. Miller

[2/15/1999 Speech to Delaware Technical & Community College]

Black History Month is a time to take inventory of the accomplishments of Black Americans and to assess where Mainstream America is heading that impacts its non-White population. Vestiges of America=s racist past made us look at things in terms of Black and White. This narrow-mindedness helps us to miss the paradigm shift to the browning of America and the growing potential of Balkanization in the new millennium if the ethnic fighting around the rest of the world is our model of tomorrow.

 Let me share comments from a column entitled, AA Skilled Labor Force or Risk Extinction,@ I released in December 1990 to get a peek at where my mind set was at that time.

AThe demolishing of communism and totalitarian rule in Eastern Europe coupled with the advent of the European Common Market will reshape the United States of America's psyche. The need for new civil rights initiatives shall go the way of the dinosaur. Civil Rights legislation shall be viewed as mere minority group security blankets in the next 30 years.

"..Minorities are 30% of the student population today, and will be about 40% by 2000. Together with women, these are the groups in which we must find increasing numbers of our future scientists and engineers."

Bloch=s projection will be correct considering that in Fall 1995 minority students accounted for 35.1 percent of the elementary and high school enrollment.

Legal immigration is accelerating the movement away from a Eurocentric United States of America to a multiracial and a multi cultural economic mainstream. The U.S. Department of Justice, in their January 1999 Annual Report, gives us plenty to ponder.

ANorth America was the leading region of birth of 38.5 percent of legal i

“The above assertion is not far-fetched when we examine the rise and fall of African-Americans' socioeconomic leverage in America. In 1790, African-Americans were 19.3 percent of the U.S. population. This percentage eroded to 16.8 percent in the next fifty years.
AIn the next ten decades (1840 - 1940), roughly 34 million European immigrants came to the U.S. These European immigrants diluted the African American percentage of the U.S. population down to a mere 9.8 percent.

@America's business community, therefore, had no incentive to develop the human resource potential in the African-American community. The nation's riches and freedoms were sufficient incentive to attract European immigrants to drive America's industries.

AIn 1896, at the zenith of the European immigration epoch, the U.S. Supreme Court legitimated African-Americans' second class citizenship. The Court's infamous "separate but equal" ruling in the Plessy vs. Ferguson case validated racial segregation in the United States of America.

 AIn 1945, World War II ended and the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. broke out. People in Soviet dominated Eastern Bloc nations, with repressive governments, looked upon America as the cradle of freedom. Yet this immigration catalyst offered no long-term comfort for America's segregationists in maintaining a European complexion in the United States.

AIn the decade of the Fifties, Europeans were 59 percent of the immigrants coming to America's shores. This percentage plummeted to roughly 18 percent in the decade of the Seventies. These data suggest that America's non-white population is once again too large to be ignored in developing strategies for the long-term health of the nation.

AThe strategic importance of America's non-white population is brought out by Erich Bloch, Director of the National Science Foundation. In an August 1990 article, published in Science Magazine, entitled, "Education and Human Resources at the National Science Foundation," Bloch speaks to the complexion of America's population in the year 2000.

"Immigrants in fiscal year 1997, followed by Asia (33.3 percent) and Europe (15.0 percent). The top five sending countries . . . . include Mexico, which was the country of birth of 18.4 percent of all legal immigrants in fiscal 1997, followed by the Philippines, China, Vietnam, and India. These five sending countries were the birthplace of 39.3 percent of legal immigrants in fiscal year 1997. .. .@

The impact of America’s growing non-white population boom led to California’s public school enrollment becoming 57.8 percent non-white in the 1993-94 school year. New Mexico and Hawaii have non-white majority public school populations of 59.4 percent and 75.3 percent respectively. Georgia and Arizona have minority populations slightly over 40 percent.
          The White Supremacy leadership understood the socioeconomic disaster in allowing non-white people to gain mainstream equality for it would wipe out their privileged way of life. Whilst White Supremacists controlled the Mainstream American psyche, they exploited the law to preserve White racial purity which meant that mass upward mobility was solely in the province of White America.

In the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the infamous “separate but equal@ doctrine that said laws segregating people because of race did not violate the U.S. Constitution. This legitimated the White Supremacists, and an era known as Jim Crow got the underpinning it needed to explode. Black injustice became the order of the day.

In the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka case, the U.S. Supreme Court banned racial segregation in public schools, thereby destroying the underpinning of segregationist laws. The White Supremacists recognized that this Supreme Court ruling also meant the socioeconomic devaluation of those Whites who overly relied upon their race privilege as their key mode of advancement in the economic mainstream.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act legitimated Blacks and non-Whites as U.S. Citizens. Non-whites now had the vote and public accommodations which were major steps towards full participation in Mainstream America. Blacks achieved desegregation, but the Black leadership misguidedly equated it with racial integration. The above laws and the U.S. Supreme Court knocking down the Aseparate but equal@ doctrine, however, left in place the White Supremacists prize possession of legalized racial purity laws.

In 1965, President Lydon B. Johnson created Affirmative Action in Executive Order #11246 because he wanted to ensure that ethnic minorities were recruited and had real opportunities to be hired and promoted. In 1969 President Richard M. Nixon gave Affirmative Action the necessary items for business clout. He incorporated a system of Agoals and timetables@ to evaluate federal construction companies according to Affirmative Action criteria.

Presidents Johnson and Nixon=s actions and others that followed only legitimated the ABlack Talented Tenth.@ The doors of opportunity opened and the Black Talented Tenth rushed in as fast as they could, perceiving that it would be foolhardy to miss the fruits of this second U.S. Reconstruction era. The Black middle class and upper class began to flourish from Affirmative Action, but this newfound Black wealth did not reach the Black masses. A Black schism resulted from only the Black Talented Tenth garnering the fruits of Affirmative Action, and today we have a house divided along class lines.

But let=s turn our attention back to the subject of White racial purity because it helps to comprehend the mind set that impeded efforts by Non-whites to rise up the socioeconomic ladder. The Jim Crow period allowed the White Supremacists to build what appeared as an impenetrable fortress against race mixing. In the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Loving versus Virginia, the Court knocked down miscegenation laws. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, AVirginia=s statutory scheme to prevent marriages between persons solely on the basis of racial classifications held to violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.@

The anti-interracial marriage (race mixing) mind set is very clear in this case. Chief Justice Warren continued,@ In June 1958, two residents of Virginia, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia pursuant to its laws. Shortly after their marriage, the Lovings returned to Virginia and established their marital abode in Caroline County. At the October term, 1958, of the Circuit Court of Caroline County, a grand jury issued an indictment charging the Lovings with violating Virginia=s ban on interracial marriages. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail; however, the trial judge suspended the sentence for a period of 25 years on the condition that the Lovings leave the state and not return to Virginia together for 25 years. He stated in that opinion that:

AAlmighty God created the races White, Black, Yellow, Malay and Red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.@

Yet the infrastructure of deviousness against interracial marriage in Virginia got its blatant legitimacy from their 1924 Racial Integrity Act. Chief Justice Warren writes, AVirginia is now one of 16 states which prohibit and punish marriages on the basis of racial classification. Penalties for miscegenation arose as an incident of slavery and have been common in Virginia since the Colonial Period. The present statutory scheme dates from the adoption of The Racial Integrity Act of 1924, passed during the period of extreme nativism which followed the end of the First World War. The central features of this act, and current Virginia law, are the absolute prohibition of a >White person= marrying other than another >White person,= a prohibition against issuing marriage licenses until the issuing official is satisfied that the applicant=s statements as to their race are correct, certificates of ARacial Composition@ to be kept by both local and state registrars and the carrying forward of earlier prohibitions against racial intermarriage.@

To make sure there was no doubt in anyone=s mind that Virginia=s leadership saw interracial marriage fraught with evil and deleterious to the White race, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals legitimated the anti-interracial fervor at the state level. Chief Justice Warren offered us more. A. . .In Naim, the state court concluded that the state=s legitimate purposes were >to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens,= and to prevent >the corruption of blood,= >a mongrel breed of citizens,= and > the obliteration of racial pride,= obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy. . . A

You do not have to guess where Virginia=s leadership stood on Black and White interracial relationships. But what was their thinking on other races? It is here that they shoot themselves in the foot.

Chief Justice Warren gave the ruling, A. . .While Virginia prohibits Whites from marrying nonwhite (subject to the exception for the descendants of Pocohontas), Negroes, Orientals, and any other racial class may intermarry without statutory interference. Appellants contend that this distinction renders Virginia=s miscegenation statutes arbitrary and unreasonable even assuming the constitutional validity of an official purpose to preserve >Racial Integrity.= We need not reach this contention because we find the racial classifications in these statutes repugnant to the Fourteenth Amendment, even assuming an even-handed state purpose to protect the >integrity= of all races.@

 This Lovings ruling is a catalyst that portends an amalgamated U.S. population in the new millennium. This Loving ruling is starting to change the complexion of United States of America because in 1992 there were 1.1 million interracial couples and 1.9 million children of different race than one or both parents.

The Lovings ruling also echoed in the advent of the age of racial and ethnic diversity in Mainstream America. Once U.S. business leaders got enchanted with developing multinational corporations and operating in the global marketplace, having racial and ethnic diversity made good business sense. It goes without saying that one has to know how to handle different races and cultures to survive in the world marketplace.

But the Age of Corporate downsizing challenged the wisdom of Affirmative Action because it implied a competitive advantage for minorities and women at the expense of White males. Affirmative Action became a charge word and this malevolent mind set tainted Blacks with the enigma of being sub-par and always needing help to compete.

In July 1995, the University of California Board of Regents came out against preferential treatment (affirmative action) in admitting students to the university. Their action was a catalyst for the State of California to pass Proposition 209 in the November 1996 election. Proposition 209 outlawed preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, and public contracting.

The anti-affirmative action psyche also took hold in Texas where it changed the admission policies at Texas A & M University by encumbering their ability to recruit Black and Hispanic students. The Hopwood decisions forced a shift to race and ethnic neutral admissions policies at Texas A & M. In 1995 the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the University of Texas Law School=s affirmative action plan was unconstitutional because they had separate admission committees to review minority and non-minority applications for admission.

With affirmative action forces being crushed in California and Texas, U.S. Representative Frank Riggs (R-CA) stepped forth to seize this golden opportunity to make anti-affirmative action the law of the land. Riggs hoped to exploit the sentiment of Proposition 209's use of the charged phrase Apreferential treatment@ as a euphemism for Affirmative Action. But he made the fatal mistake of failing to realize that the American people now had data on which to judge the impact of his proposed new law, so his ability to exploit the ardor surrounding equating affirmative action to preferential treatment vanished.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) provided the proof of the deleterious impact of Proposition 209 in Riggs= home state of California. She stated, ASince the University of California System eliminated affirmative action, admissions for Black and Latino students have plummeted. Black undergraduate admission dropped 66% at UC Berkeley, 43% at UCLA, 46% at UC San Diego, and 36% at UC Davis. Latino undergraduate admissions dropped 40% at UC Berkeley, 33% at UCLA, 20% at UC San Diego, and 31% at UC Davis.@

The Riggs amendment to the Higher Education Act failed by a vote of 249 against to 171 for it. This Riggs failure suggests that the national leadership cannot afford to succumb to yesterday=s policies that limited opportunity based on race and gender because the global marketplace makes these efforts economic suicide. Texas is working on ways to get around the constraints of the Hopwood ruling because there is a radical shift occurring in the racial and ethnic make up of its workforce.

A Texas Higher Education Status= report offers us plenty of food for thought on where the population in Texas is going. ABlacks and Hispanics made up approximately 11 percent and 22 percent respectively, of the state=s labor force in 1990. By 2030, Black are expected to account for about 9 percent, but Hispanics are projected to represent nearly 46 percent of the work force in Texas, according to the Texas State Data Center at Texas A & M University.@

The above figures offer the Texas lawmakers little option but to find ways of opening opportunity to minority people or simply become non-competitive in the global market because their labor pool is too substandard. Texas law now requires public universities in the state to automatically admit high school graduates who rank in the top 10 percent of their high school class. Universities can also increase automatic admissions to include students who rank in the top 25 percent of their high school class. The universities have a combination of 18 other factors to consider when admitting other students such as the student=s academic record, the student=s socioeconomic background, the performance of the high school the student attended, the financial status of the student=s school district, the student=s personal responsibilities while attending high school, the student=s performance on standardized tests, and the student=s extracurricular activities.

Texas actions prove the proverb, AWhere there is a will there is a way.@ UC California is now starting to see the light. Syndicated Columnist Bonnie Erbe writes, AIn desperation, the UC system is now trying to adopt a measure to guarantee the top 4 percent of the graduating high school students a spot in its freshman class.@

The affirmative action taint on college admissions is now spawning a redefinition of the concept of diversity. In the past, Affirmative Action was a euphemism for altering Black and White relations. The University of Delaware is now using a definition advanced by their director of admissions Larry Griffith. The News Journal reported in an article entitled, AUD=s goal applies to diversity,@ that Griffith said, AIt=s difference in values and lifestyle that diversify a campus. It=s not a student=s racial background that=s really going to mean anything. It=s what your cultural and ethnic heritage is. That=s what really [shows] perspective and, experience.@

What Griffith is finally bringing to light is the fact that Blacks include people from many nations in Africa, the Caribbean, and a host of other nations throughout the world. These people have the same color but their culture can be radically different. A similar scenario is true for people of European, Hispanic, and Asian decent.

In closing, we journeyed through the epochs of Racial Segregation, Racial Desegregation, purported Racial Integration, and now we are in the Age of Diversity. These cultural mind set changes are eroding the infrastructure of yesterday=s White Supremacy groups who abhor racial amalgamation because it threatens their privileged way of life. Nevertheless, our evolution through the above epochs will assure America=s strength in the new millennium. If we think about it, we recognize that Black slavery was driven by a business need for cheap labor and, on the other hand, today a first-class multi cultural and multi racial educated workforce is a must for American corporations to be competitive in the world marketplace.

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