For Mignon Williams, 42, a black marketing executive in Rochester, N.Y., affirmative action means opportunity. Recruited by Xerox Corp. in 1977 under a pioneering plan to hire women and minorities, Williams rose from saleswoman to division vice president in just 13 years. While Williams attributes her success mainly to hard work and business savvy, she acknowledges that her race and her sex played a role in her rapid rise. Affirmative action, she says, "opened the door, but it's not a free pass. If anything, you feel like you're under a microscope and have to constantly prove yourself by overachieving and never missing the mark."
For Roy V. Smith, 40, a black 18-year veteran of the Chicago police force, affirmative action means frustration. Since 1973, court-ordered hiring quotas and the aggressive recruitment of minorities have expanded black representation on the 12,004-member force from 16% to 24%. Smith contends, however, that gender and race have not opened doors for him but shut them. He has been denied promotion to sergeant so that Hispanics and females who scored lower on exams could be given the higher-ranking positions set aside for those groups. He worries that even if he is promoted, the achievement may be so tainted by affirmative action that he will be perceived as a "quota sergeant." Last fall he joined a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the city of Chicago by 313 police officers, mostly white. "I am not anti- affirmative action," he says. "I am just against the way it is being used. It's something that started out good and now has gotten out of hand."
Williams and Smith reflect an increasingly acrimonious debate among African Americans about the effectiveness and desirability of affirmative action. On one side of the argument, a small but widely publicized group of black neoconservatives contends that efforts to combat racial discrimination through quotas, racially weighted tests and other techniques have psychologically handicapped blacks by making them dependent on racial-preference programs rather than their own hard work.
Shelby Steele, an English professor at California's San Jose State University, has emerged as the most eloquent proponent of this view. He asserts that affirmative action has reinforced a self-defeating sense of victimization among blacks by encouraging them to pin their failures on white racism instead of their own shortcomings. Says he: "Blacks now stand to lose more from affirmative action than they gain."