Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Acronyms and Initialisms -- Introduction -- 1 "The Best 'Affirmative Action Program' Is Creating Jobs for Everyone": Organized Labor Responds to Affirmative Action, 1960-1974 -- 2 "This Strange Madness": The Origins of Opposition to Higher Education Affirmative Action, 1968-1972 -- 3 "This Issue Is Getting Hotter": The Struggle over Affirmative Action Policy in the Early 1970s -- 4 "Treat Him as a Decent American!": DeFunis v. Odegaard (1974) and Colorblindness in the Courtroom -- 5 "Do Whites Have Rights?": White Detroit Policemen and the "Reverse Discrimination" Protests of the 1970s -- 6 "The Fight for True Nondiscrimination": The Politics of Anti-Affirmative Action in the 1970s -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Essay on Sources -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

A lightening rod for liberal and conservative opposition alike, affirmative action has proved one of the more divisive issues in the United States over the past five decades. Dennis Deslippe here offers a thoughtful study of early opposition to the nation's race- and gender-sensitive hiring and promotion programs in higher education and the workplace. This story begins more than fifteen years before the 1978 landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Partisans attacked affirmative action almost immediately after it first appeared in the 1960s. Liberals in the opposition movement played an especially significant role. While not completely against the initiative, liberal opponents strove for "soft" affirmative action (recruitment, financial aid, remedial programs) and against "hard" affirmative action (numerical goals, quotas). In the process of balancing ideals of race and gender equality with competing notions of colorblindness and meritocracy, they even borrowed the language of the civil rights era to make far-reaching claims about equality, justice, and citizenship in their anti-affirmative action rhetoric. Deslippe traces this conflict through compelling case studies of real people and real jobs. He asks what the introduction of affirmative action meant to the careers and livelihoods of Seattle steelworkers, New York asbestos handlers, St. Louis firemen, Detroit policemen, City University of New York academics, and admissions councilors at the University of Washington Law School. Through their experiences, Deslippe examines the diverse reactions to affirmative action, concluding that workers had legitimate grievances against its hiring and promotion practices. In studying this phenomenon, Deslippe deepens our understanding of American democracy and neoconservatism in the late twentieth century and shows how the liberals' often contradictory positions of the 1960s and 1970s reflect the conflicted views about affirmative action many Americans still hold today.

Abstract
This essay examines the history of economic citizenship in urban America in the 1990s by focusing on Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (known more commonly by its acronym BUILD). In 1994, this "citizens power organization" of churches and congregations won the first living wage ordinance in the United States. Its response to the urban redevelopment regime of the 1980s and 1990s focused on the needs of the Baltimore poor and working-class service workers. Although BUILD was a self-described "multiracial, ecumenical, city-wide institutionally based organization," its agenda was attentive to the way differently situated workers experienced urban decline and redevelopment. This was the case in Baltimore where African American citizens—especially African American women—constituted a significant proportion of its service-workers ranks.

This issue's Up For Debate features Dennis Deslippe's revisionist argument about labor's response to affirmative action. Contrary both to those scholars who have fixed the unions as a primary obstacle to affirmative action plans pushed by civil rights organizations and public officials and to those who have identified affirmative action as an unalterable stumbling block for collective (as opposed to individual) rights on the job, Deslippe suggests a middle path of accommodation to the letter and spirit of the equal-opportunity cause on the part of an identifiable "labor liberal" sector of unions and their leaders, who opted for a progressively modified version of traditional "contract unionism." Though such accommodation to the demands of minorities and women proved easier in relation to hiring than layoffs (where nearly all unions took a stand against the abridgment of the seniority principle), Deslippe finds that the labor movement as a whole was not the benighted monolith turning its back to the future that it appears to be in some accounts of the 1970s. Moreover, rather than an inevitable clash between union "solidarity" versus the "rights claims" of the new social movements, Deslippe suggests that the most successful unions of the period were precisely those that embraced the spirit and constituencies associated with the civil rights and women's movements. The respondents give Deslippe mixed marks. For Paul Moreno, the only good union seems to be a weak union, for to him any union preference or job protection is an economically inefficient "privilege" inevitably blocking minority access to authentic "freedom of contract." Ava Baron welcomes Deslippe's attempt to identify a historical move among unionists to overcome divisions of race and gender, but she fears that he underestimates the basic contradictions of a labor law based on collective bargaining (and never constitutionally anchored) and employment law rooted in a deeper-sanctioned civil rights agenda. While welcoming Deslippe's challenge to the either/or view of unionism versus new social movement dichotomy of the 1960s and 1970s, both Joseph McCartin and William Jones insist on a more sector-specific (and, for McCartin, more time-sensitive) approach to the unions' evolving affirmative action policies. The large nonwhite and female memberships of the unions that chose the "egalitarian" policy path, suggests Jones, are perhaps both telling and limiting qualifiers to the expanded reach of contract unionism. Deslippe, of course, enjoys the last word.

AbstractThis essay examines working-class white ethnics' rejection of middle-class suburbanite notions of racial innocence, meritocratic individualism, and idealized equality in post-Civil Rights America. Most scholarly attention on white ethnics has tended to dwell on well-documented racism or on their crass embrace of programs earned by others' hard-fought activism (a kind of "me-tooism"). I argue that these interpretations do not adequately capture the complex and often contradictory expressions of "ethniclass" identity in a decade characterized by working-class revolt, backlash, and retreat. I focus on white ethnic leaders allied with the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs (headed by civil rights veteran Msgr. Geno Baroni); seizing on the capacious definition of "disadvantage" common in the early 1960s, they worked with African Americans and others for increased job training, formed coalitions with organized labor, and lobbied for expanded affirmative action. As they stumbled to construct an economic vision beyond the fading deindustrializing cities from which mainstream liberals seemed disconnected with their version of "rights consciousness," ethnic leaders articulated positions based on an unwieldy mix of principle and parochialism that defies easy generalization. Given the waning of the white ethnic movement by the late 1970s, their significance lies less in legislative or policy gains and more in their imprint on civic and popular discourse in a period where, despite its powerful effects in the corridors of power, color-blind conservatism fails to capture the views of a majority of white Americans today.

Second-wave feminism, scholars argued until recently, was a product of middle-class educated women who rejected inequality masquerading as domestic tranquility in the postwar United States. Women unionists were either invisible in these accounts or dismissed as unimportant to the development of feminism's objectives and strategies. Recent labor history research has called this portrayal of working women into question. Whether considering a single union or broad national patterns of political change, several historians have pointed to unionists' contributions to campaigns for equality. These came in the areas of pay and job discrimination as well as in the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).