Question:

I would love to see your response to this article, A New Kind of Affirmative Action Can Ensure Diversity. You always have powerful, well researched insights. My thoughts are these:

• I appreciate the author’s efforts to address the reality of economic disadvantage.

• Just because racial discrimination, racial disadvantage and affirmative efforts to address those issues make the author uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean ignoring racial disadvantage and eliminating all race-aware selection processes make for good public policy.

• Today’s greatest racial disadvantages come not from the type of overt racism that is subject to legal actions and protections, but from micro-inequities, the insult of low expectations and other subtle forms of discrimination. These subtle but very damaging forces cannot be curtailed by enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, as the author suggests.

Answer:
This is an outstanding question, one I’ve been giving a lot of thought to.

I think we need to face the reality that affirmative action as we know it is going away, almost certainly with the pending Supreme Court decision. I’m writing this as a proponent of affirmative action, so bear with me.

There are legal arguments for and against affirmative action, but the emotional argument always has an influence. Since 2004, I’ve perceived a decrease in public support of affirmative action, and polls back up my perception. The Supreme Court in 2004 was arguably more liberal—but most people don’t know that the justice widely perceived as having saved affirmative action, Sandra Day O’Connor, had a horrible (from my perspective) record on decisions based on race. So as good as we thought we had it then (and it wasn’t so good), I think it’s worse now. Further, the Millennial generation is firmly against affirmative action, including well over 40 percent of Black and Latino students.

With that reality, I think those of us who see affirmative action as our chief viable solution to social injustice must adjust. We’re a business publication, so I’m going to make the case why this is a pressing business concern later in this column. But first, let’s address the problem. I have a combined total of 21 years of board experience among Bennett College (historically Black), New Jersey City University (Hispanic serving) and Rutgers University, where I chair the fundraising committee for Rutgers Future Scholars. I focus all of my board work on enabling poor students to attain the education their potential shows they can attain. I’ve endowed scholarships at all three schools and have donated roughly $750,000 since 2006. Here’s what I see:

In my opinion, today’s greatest racial discrimination is economically based. Pew Research Center analysis shows that Black and Latino households were dramatically and disproportionately clobbered in this subprime crisis and subsequent recession. Unemployment rates show the same bias. The prison-industrial complex feeds on poor people and is part of the depressive economic cycle for Blacks and Latinos. Our country imprisons people at by far the highest per-capita rate in the world; 58 percent of prisoners are Black and Latino. Our four-decade-old “war on drugs” is supported by the people who make money off it—nobody wages a war for 40 years unless they’re winning it. In my opinion, our president made a huge mistake in ending No Child Left Behind.

I’ve heard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speak several times and he frankly makes no sense to me; it’s as if he digs up every non-fact and cliché and strings them together. (Here’s a transcript of his latest speech.) His position is passive—what we should do—as if he just arrived on the scene. The fact is that our public schools do a criminally poor job. I find it amazing to be asked to speak at dozens of economic-development events where people from cities with shrinking or stagnant economies wring their hands—yet are able to segregate their school systems into successful/white and criminally negligent/Black and Latino districts. Then they ask me for advice on how to lure companies to their employee-desert brown fields. Please.

In short, there are economic forces that benefit by crushing Black and Latino households. This is no micro-inequity, unless you would describe being sucker-punched by Sonny Liston in his prime as “subtle.”

But this is impacting more than just Black and Latino households. In today’s New York Times, there is an article about the national declining standard of living. According to the Times, “By last year, family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Census Bureau. On average in 11-year periods in the decades just after World War II, inflation-adjusted median income rose by almost 30 percent.” That’s a lot of white people being ground up by the same forces. To quote Frederick Douglass: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”

On to the compelling interest for corporate decision makers: The combination of forces behind economic discrimination is destroying this “recovery.” There are millions of jobs open—and many more millions of unemployed people who are incapable of filling these jobs because they are not prepared. The negative cycle of decreasing household wealth, incompetent schools and predation by the prison-industrial complex is attacking our country’s consumer base AND talent pool.

We must wage a war on poverty and we can’t wait for the government to lead the way. Corporations can be convinced to do what’s good for them and take the problem firmly in hand by forcing school systems to stop gerrymandering proper education standards. My experience is that progressive companies are increasingly interested in building their own pipelines, so they can convince the schools they recruit from to start using the Rutgers Future Scholars model (or something like it). The reason is simple: People are created equally, therefore talent is distributed equally, and if you subvert the potential of groups of people, companies cannot possibly recruit the best and brightest—much less expect to sell to them. The fact that racially based economic discrimination has now ensnared a growing group of white people enables us to build some force behind this effort. It’s distasteful but true—by including white people, you can disarm the bigots who have been whipping up a portion of our electorate for the past six years by appealing to overt bigotry. You also appeal to people of every group, especially the Millennial generation that is far more progressive than older generations but ironically is at the tipping point of ending affirmative action; these people grew up watching injustice on YouTube and are far better connected than my generation could ever hope to be.

Here’s your hope for the future: Undergraduates at Rutgers can apply for a for-credit course to be a mentor in the Rutgers Future Scholars program. There are 10 times the number of students (representationally white, by the way) wanting to be mentors than there are spots available—and we have 1,000 middle- and high-school students in the program to mentor.

Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on DiversityInc.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.

The post Ask the White Guy: Racism and Affirmative Action—Why White Victims Are the Key to the Solution appeared first on DiversityInc.

The report, Putting Men’s Health Care Disparities On The Map: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the State Level, documents the persistence of disparities between white men and men of color—and among different groups within men of color—on 22 indicators of health and well-being, including rates of diseases such as AIDS, cancer, heart disease and diabetes, as well as insurance coverage and health screenings. It also documents disparities in factors that influence health and access to care such as income and education.

This new analysis provides state-level data for men of many racial and ethnic populations that have not been available before. Among the findings:

• American Indian and Alaska native men had higher rates of health and access problems than men in other racial and ethnic groups on nearly all health indicators. They also had the highest poverty rate and second worst educational attainment, unemployment rate and incarceration rate.
• More than four in 10 Latino men lacked insurance (46 percent) and a personal health care provider (49 percent), and more than a fifth (22 percent) had no doctor visit in the previous year due to cost. Latino men also had the lowest median household income, the largest wage gap compared to white men and the lowest educational status.
• Black men had much higher rates of poverty and incarceration and lower rates of high school graduation than whites. The most striking health disparity was that nationally Black men were more than seven times as likely as white men to be newly diagnosed with AIDS, with a rate of 101.5 new AIDS cases per 100,000 Blacks ages 13 and older compared with 13.5 new cases per 100,000 whites. The disparity was even larger in some states, such as Nebraska,Pennsylvania, and Maryland, where the rate of new AIDS cases was more than 10 times as high among black men compared to whites.
• Nationally, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander men had the lowest rate of health problems and the fewest barriers to access of all subgroups of men, even white men.
• While white men fared better than minority men on most access and social indicators, they had higher rates of some health problems than men of color, such as higher rates of smoking and binge drinking. For example, inWisconsin35 percent of white men reported binge drinking compared with 20 percent of minority men.
• Some of the states with the greatest access disparities between white and minority men included Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., all of which also exhibited some of the greatest disparities in income between white and minority men. Several states with relatively large Native American populations—Arizona,North Dakota and South Dakota—also had large disparities in access between white and minority men.

The full report, including detailed state-by-state data tables and related fact sheets, is available online.

A companion report released in 2009 examines similar racial and ethnic disparities among women, and includes state fact sheets and interactive data tables, also is available.

For more on decreasing disparities in healthcare, watch the video below on WellPoint’s innovative Community Ambassador Program:

For closed captioning, press the “CC” icon in the YouTube player.

Also read:

Eliminating Healthcare Disparities: How Kaiser Permanente & Trinity Health Close Racial Gaps

The Business Case for Diversity in Healthcare

Can Culturally Competent Healthcare Close Disparities Gaps?

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