Affirmative action collides with reality on the way to the top
Ever since affirmative-action programs were first launched in the 1960s, the absence of significant numbers of blacks in managerial ranks has been a source of frustration and embarrassment to U.S. business. Many companies make strenuous efforts to recruit, hire and nurture black men and women. So too have blacks striven to meet the demands and pressures of corporate life. Yet there is a growing debate over how well business has done its job, how well blacks are doing their jobs, and how many invisible barriers keep blacks from important jobs that carry big responsibilities and big salaries.
The conflict is sharply limned in Black Life in Corporate America, a book that says integration in the upper levels of the white-collar work force is a sham. The coauthors, George Davis, a novelist, and Glegg Watson, who helps direct educational grants at Xerox Corp., explain that they might have paraphrased an old Jamaican-sect expression as a theme: "How can African man live at IBM without losing himself?" The answer: he cannot. They conclude that even where overt discrimination does not exist, black managers feel they must not only outperform their white competitors to get ahead, but also hide their racial identity behind the mask of the organization man. As a result, less accommodating or more outspoken blacks do not get promoted, and companies are deprived of their particular viewpoints and skills.
The appearance of the Davis and Watson book preceded a rosy report on black employment issued by the New York City office of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In it, Commissioner Samuel Ehrenhalt contends that the ranks of black professionals, technicians and managers more than doubled during the 1970s, to 2.3 million. For example, Ehrenhalt claims that the number of black men with jobs like computer specialists or bank managers rose by 156%, "or roughly quadruple the 40% rise for white men."
The Ehrenhalt report was quickly challenged last week by the Washington office of his own agency for faulty methodology that produced grossly misleading results. Officials asserted that he ignored a classification change made during the decade that significantly raised the number of blacks counted as managers and administrators, and hence made their progress seem more dramatic. Ehrenhalt later admitted that his figures "have a little bit of a problem," but he insists that his conclusion is accurate.
A more authoritative, and considerably more downbeat, analysis came in a comprehensive article published in June in the Government's Monthly Labor Review. Its author, Diane Nilsen Westcott, a BLS economist, asserts that blacks have actually made smaller gains in the workplace during the past ten years than they did during the 1960s. In 1972, she says, black men filled 2.6% of all management and administrative jobs and only slightly more, 3.2%, in 1980; even that rise, notes Westcott, could be wiped out by statistical error. Moreover, blacks commonly fill positions, like restaurant managers or school administrators, that pay relatively poorly and provide little status. Concludes Westcott: "Blacks were still much less likely to be employed as managers or administrators than their white counterparts during the decade."