The slog toward erasing bias: Long, complicated and incomplete
By Charles Mitchell
Seventy years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that using laws to group people by race in public schools was not allowed by the Constitution. A slew of other decisions followed, and 60 years ago Congress started passing laws directed at voting and extending openness to the private sector including employment, hotels, restaurants and transportation.
The court decisions and lawmaking continue. The admirable policy goal has always been to assure that people aren’t judged or classified by things that don’t really matter – pigmentation, national origin, marital status, gender, religion or age. It has been, and continues to be, a slog.
At first, the collective reaction to the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was to ignore it. Nine African-American teens were admitted at gunpoint to an all-white high school in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, but other Southern states resisted another 16 years or longer.
Buzz words of the era were “integration” and “segregation.” Any politician in the South who favored integration was doomed. Former Mississippi Gov. William Winter, who first ran for the state’s highest office in 1967, said his chances in his first bid were erased by a whisper campaign that he was “moderate on race.”
Not satisfied with the pace of change, especially in workplaces, a new buzz term came into play. It was “affirmative action.” The root idea stemming from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was that employers and others should cast a wider net when seeking qualified employees. In response, many institutions, public and private, created quotas. Firm numbers were set to match goals.
That approach ended, again at the Supreme Court, with a 1978 plurality decision regarding Allan C. Bakke, a white veteran had who applied to medical school at the University of California, Davis. The school had decided to reserve 16 of its 100 seats for minorities. Bakke had higher scores than some of the minorities who were accepted, but was rejected due to the quota. In essence, the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action was OK, but not if it extended to fixed numbers. That would be using discrimination to end discrimination, and that would be unconstitutional, too. (Bakke became an anesthesiologist.)
Because “affirmative action” continued to strike a sour note, it gave way to “diversity.” Factually speaking, there are countless instances when bringing people with different expertise and backgrounds to a situation or challenge, large or small, yielded better results. As demonstrated in recent movies, the key scientists in “Oppenheimer” all brought different expertise in the effort to develop the atom bomb and end World War II. That might not have happened if all the scientists had attended the same universities with the same professors and engaged in similar research. In “Hidden Figures,” it was an African-American woman, not one of the countless white men in short-sleeve white-shirts, whose calculations led to a safe return from space for John Glenn.
Those are big examples of the dividends of diversity, alone, but they did not specifically encompass two other considerations – equity and inclusion. Equity recognizes that how a person starts out in life doesn’t (or shouldn’t) control where they end up. Inclusion relates to overcoming our implicit biases. In other words, the adage “birds of a feather flock together” is certainly reflected in social and cultural spaces, but there’s no defensible reason to extend such preferences to the realm of opportunity. A person’s sexual orientation, for example, has nothing to do with working as an accountant. If a firm needs a new CPA and all the partners and employees are heterosexual, there’s still no valid reason – nothing but implicit bias - to exclude a person who is gay. “DEI,” as might be expected, has met the same resistance as “integration,” “affirmative action” and “diversity.”
Nine states – Florida, Alabama and Tennessee in the South, along with Utah, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas – have enacted laws with varying provisions keyed to blocking use of state funds, especially in public higher education, for DEI purposes. Another 18 states have or are considering legislation related to DEI.
In Mississippi, where an anti-DEI law was proposed this year but not debated or passed, the state’s elected auditor is on a campaign to eradicate DEI programs in higher education.
“I have real concerns about what DEI staff may be teaching or doing at our taxpayer-funded universities,” Shad White said in a news release. “For example, during the Trump Administration, President Trump shut down federal government DEI programs because some taught that ‘virtually all white people contribute to racism.’ This kind of language tears us apart, not brings us together.”
That is not at all what DEI is about. It can certainly be wielded as the wedge issue of our time, but, again, the initiatives are designed to overcome implicit bias when attracting faculty, staff and students and have nothing to do with anything in any classroom or curriculum.
Still, in what could be seen as a nod to the prevailing winds, large corporations that recently made bold DEI pledges have encountered public pushback and softened their initiatives. Also, Mississippi’s three largest public institutions have all redesigned, redefined and shed use of “DEI” in their initiatives. The mission of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement at the University of Mississippi has been both broadened and sharpened and has received College Board approval to become the Division of Access, Opportunity and Community Engagement. It’s a better name, perhaps, and certainly a more precise definition of the purpose.
Properly administered, no DEI initiative is about taking from the deserving and giving to the undeserving. Seventy years on, it is, in the vernacular, about “being real” and accepting that unfounded factors have no place in the opportunity equation.
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Charles Mitchell is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi and a member of the Overby Center panel of experts.