By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources, (www.originalsources.com)
March 30, 2000
Back many years ago, in my youth, one of my first jobs was typing insurance policies for a large insurance agency in Memphis, Tennessee. One of the requirements of my job was to make very sure that I put a small "c" besides the name of any customer who was black, or, to be politically correct in the year 2000, "African American." Only, back then it would have been insulting to use either "black" or "African American" to describe a "Negro" customer The "c" stood for "colored." "Colored" was the polite or correct business term of the day.
I can still feel the resentment I felt in typing the "c". Without that "c" it was, of course, impossible to tell by the policy who was white and who was black. And, the rest of the requirement, and the importance of the "c" was to make sure that at some later date some uninformed letter write did not make a mistake - like using "Mr" or "Mrs" or "Miss" in front of a "colored person's" name. Naturally, this was long before the feminist "Ms" had been invented as a form of address.
The years went by and I managed to lose not only that job but one or two more because of my extra-curricular activities as a political activist campaigning for an end to the old segregationist, or as we said back then, the "Jim Crow" laws of the South. I was active in the old "Race Relations" movement - the movement which existed long before the "Civil Rights" movement changed it to confrontational politics. The "Race Relations" movement was built on the notion of brotherhood, rather than victimhood. It was designed to create inter-racial understanding, harmony and brotherly love and many of its leaders were Quakers who did such outlandish things as teaching in black colleges to improve the education level of blacks and being active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, i.e. the NAACP, which also, back then, was built around the notion of racial harmony.
One of the reasons by I lost that job in the insurance company was because I had said a truly shocking thing. I said that I thought the company ought to hire a black typist. Before firing me one of the vice-presidents of the company asked me, "You don't really believe, do you, as a Southern girl, that any of the other typists would actually WORK beside a colored girl in the office do you?"
I said I thought that they would. That was in the era of McCarthyism and holding such a radical view was a sure way to get accused of being a closet communist. While the vice-president had nice things to say to me about the quality of my work and the speed of my typing, he fired me lest the company be accused of harboring a person with anti-American views.
More time went by and I continued to work to eliminate the discriminatory laws which made segregation the law of the land. By 1964, following the assassination of President Jack Kennedy, the national political debate centered on whether Americans wanted the federal government in Washington to continue an active interventionist role in the social and economic life of the country, or whether they wanted to slow down or reverse that policy and give a larger role to the states. "This dispute centered, not on the ends of the policy, but on the means. Both sides favored racial equality and full employment for all the people of the country. But they differed on how to achieve equality for the American Negro and they differed on tax policy.
"Senator Goldwater advocated leaving the question of the Negro's civil rights to the judgment of the states. President Johnson , though raised in the Southwest (Texas), favored federal action to assure the Negro's civil rights against the opposition of the South," wrote columnist James Reston.
Of course, Lyndon Johnson won that election and the top pundits of the day wrote about the "death of the Republican party." The 1964 Civil Rights bill was passed during that election year during the "long hot summer" of race riots in America's cities. In spite of the opposition of the States' Rights advocates, the Bill gave sweeping rights to the Federal Government, including prosecution, to enforce provisions which forbade discrimination by employers or unions (most of the craft unions at the time were all-white) and set up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The bill specifically prohibited employers asking for a person's race on an employment or any other kind of application. That put an instant end to the practice at the insurance company of putting little red "c's" beside the name of "colored" policy holders. To this day, that law is still in effect. It is illegal to ask a job applicant for his race or his age, because of the Civil Rights law of 1964.
However, by 1969 another phenomenon was in full swing - affirmative action. The first time the term "affirmative action" was used by Lyndon Johnson, in January 1964, it actually meant the opposite of what it meant later. It meant affirmatively halting racial labeling and racial stereotyping. By 1966 the term "affirmative action" was used by Johnson in a speech to "American management and American labor to take the affirmative action which is necessary to assure that inflation, resulting from the under-use of America's manpower potential, will not deprive us of the fruits of the most magnificent economic growth record in history."
Five short years after the passage of the bill which prohibited employers from asking the race of their employees, I was being confronted with a requirement from the federal government when I bid jobs in the inner city to write an "affirmative action" program for my bid in which I informed them how many of my plumbers or electricians were "black." I had bid, and won, a contract based on being the lowest bidder to rehabilitate an inner city residence. However, the government rescinded the bid and required new bidding along with a newly written "affirmative action" program which actually was based on John F. Kennedy's 1961 Executive Order which called for "stringent non-discriminatory provisions in all Government contracts."
I attended a meeting held by the Housing and Urban Development bureaucrats to explain the new provisions and was told I must promise, in order to be re-instated as a bidder for the job I now no longer had a contract to do, that "10% of" my electricians and plumbers had to be black. I asked what to me were two perfectly obvious questions: 1. How can I determine who is black and who isn't since I can't ask the question and 2. Since I only needed one plumber and one electrician to work on that contract, how do I make 10% of one man black?
I was told that I just needed to "do the best you can and trust the Federal Government to be reasonable." By then, of course, I'd already had too much experience in government contracts to expect the Federal Government to be reasonable.
And, that brings me to the Year 2000 Census which contains the most blatant violation of the 1964 Civil Rights law that I think I've ever seen. From the day of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill to the present I have NEVER answered questions about race on applications. It will probably surprise most of the younger generation to discover that those questions ARE a violation of their civil rights. Yet, my kindergarten grandchildren, who don't even read or write, are asked what their race is. I urge my children to not respond to the question - which in the past has been worded as a "voluntary" action on the part of the school asking the question.
I received the short year 2000 census form. However, it has the most complicated group of questions I was supposed to answer about my racial identity that I have ever seen. All of us, apparently, are supposed to identify the ethnic origin of our thousands of ancestors. The Census website explains that I am supposed to "Answer the question on race" by marking the "appropriate box(es) for the category" I consider myself to be. It further states that if I consider my "race to include both an ethnicity and racial group, such as "Canadian-White," "Cuban-Black," "Mexican-Korean," mark the appropriate box(es) for the racial group(s), e.g., White, Black, Korean."
If I consider myself "to be two or more ethnic groups, such as "French-Canadian," "Spanish-Mexican," "Irish-Mexican," mark the "Some other race" box and enter the name of the group in the space provided for the Some other race write-in."
What in the world is a "Canadian" or a "Mexican" ethnic group? I always thought that a Canadian was a national identity, not an ethnic origin. The instructions say, "Multiracial, interracial, biracial, mixed race, American, Canadian, European, Spanish, French, or Italian are general terms. Mark the "Some other race" box and enter the response in the space provided."
This promises to be a bonanza for the lawyers, if enforced. How can you force someone to identify their race, which is a violation of all our civil rights laws, and/or ethnic group, when you don't identify what you are talking about? What race, for example, is a person whose father is black, and whose mother is from India, such as the children of Alan Keyes? What ethnic group might they fit in? How far back into one's genealogy does one go to decide what "ethnic" group they fit in? What if a person has, for example, a Zulu South African mother and a European father whose parents were a mix of Italian, German and Danish. What is their race and their ethnic group?
And, provided most Americans can figure all this out in time to fill out their Census reports, exactly why are these questions being asked by the Federal Government, 36 years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights bill was signed into law forbidding the questions from being asked?
Hopefully, some enterprising lawyer will bring that up in the inevitable lawsuits that will occur over those census forms. I was born in America and I consider myself an American. Evidently in this new age an "American" is also a racial or an ethnic group - based on the undefined terms used on the Census questionnaire. So, if they want to know what my ethnic group or race is, it's American. And that is how I filled out the form. If I get fined for my incorrect answer, the Feds will simply have to figure out what my race is and make their definition of it stick in a court of law.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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