Knowledge And Decisions

Because “affirmative action” policies apply also to women, it should be noted that there has been a similar unwillingness to look beyond gross statistics for obviously systemic variables having little to do with intentional discrimination. With women the key variable is marriage. Even before “affirmative action” quotas, women in their thirties who worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men in their thirties who worked continuously since high school.¹²⁴ In the academic world, where many discrimination charges have been filed under affirmative action, female academics earned slightly more than male academics when neither were married¹²⁵ — again even before “affirmative action” — and unmarried female Ph.D.’s who received their degrees in the 1930s and 1940s became full professors in the 1950s to a slightly greater extent than did unmarried male Ph.D.’s of the same vintage.¹²⁶ In short, the male-female differences in incomes and occupations are largely differences between married women and all other persons. Sometimes this is obscured in data for “single” women, many of whom are widowed, divorced, or separated — that is, have had domestic and maternal handicaps in pursuing their careers. The clear-cut income parity (or better) among women who never married suggests once again that systemic variables have more to do with the statistics than the intentional decisions at the work place at which the statistics were collected.

SCHOOL INTEGRATION

The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education set in motion a chain of events that has resulted in a bitter controversy over what one side has characterized by its hoped-for results as “racial integration” in the public schools, and which the other side has characterized by its institutional mechanisms as “forced busing.” Racial integration, in turn, sometimes implied more than statistical mixtures, and suggested at least some improved sense of mutual regard. Forced busing referred to busing categorically imposed by higher — more remote — authorities (usually appointed judges) on locally elected officials, parents, and children, as distinguished from such busing as the latter might voluntarily choose for themselves as incrementally justified by the benefits.

The Brown decision was historic in many respects. It outlawed as unconstitutional a whole political and legal pattern of racial segregation in the South, extending far beyond public schools. It pitted the Supreme Court against the whole political structure of that region for many years, and indeed put the court’s general credibility and general effectiveness at stake on this particular issue. Had the Supreme Court been defied with impunity on this issue, its ability to enforce its other decisions in other areas could have been permanently jeopardized. Last but by no means least, it was the beginning of the era of Chief Justice Earl Warren and the increased judicial activism of the Supreme Court under his leadership. The high political and judicial stakes in the Brown decision are an integral part of the story of how school desegregation metamorphosed over the years into compulsory school busing to achieve prescribed racial proportions.¹²⁷ Even before the case was decided, Justice Frankfurter pointed out the great danger in a decision that might affirm a principle but be mocked in practice, through local defiance and evasion.¹²⁸ An immediate and categorical test of strength was avoided by announcing in the decision itself a delay for rehearings, followed by the conclusion after rehearing that the decision was to be implemented “with all deliberate speed” — i.e., incrementally, as political “realities” permitted. This highly unusual legal procedure¹²⁹ permitted lower courts and the Supreme Court to test the waters before proceeding, to assess and to some extent accommodate local circumstances, especially in the South. It also permitted time for opinion leaders to mobilize public support for “the law of the land,” given that the high stakes included the basic legal framework of the nation and not simply the school system or even race relations alone.