'Diversity, however we define it, is politically constructed and politically maintained,' Louis Menand writes. 'It doesn’t just happen. It’s a choice we make as a society.'
And they did. Study after study suggests that it is just not the case that “it would have happened anyway.” In 1981, for example, as Urofsky tells us, the Reagan Labor Department commissioned a report on gains in hiring among African-Americans and women.
“Almost always” would indeed be hard to prove. Obviously, just by the nature of the policy, some significant number of whites and males who would have been admitted or hired before affirmative-action programs were in place were not. But, since no employer or admissions officer ever says, “You were not hired because you’re white” or “You were admitted because you’re black,” proving discrimination is complicated.
The marketplace matters because the biggest defenders of affirmative action are not the N.A.A.C.P. and the Democratic National Committee. The biggest defenders are corporations and the military. Thousands of firms adopted affirmative-action programs after 1969, when the Nixon Administration began insisting on diversity benchmarks for government contractors, and “in little more than a decade,” Urofsky says, “affirmative action became a way of life for many large corporations.
If, to achieve this result, a company diversifies on its own, it is open to lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination. But when a company adopts a race-conscious hiring program under government guidance it is immunized. When Reagan made noises about abolishing affirmative-action requirements, the National Association of Manufacturers lobbied him to leave the program alone. It was helping manufacturing companies do what they could not have done without it.
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