Bias Police Wear Emporer’s Clothes

The author Peter Drucker says no other group in world history has ever made so much economic progress so fast as American blacks have since World War II. Three-fifths of African Americans rose into middle-class incomes, he wrote in The Atlantic Monthly. Before World ar II, the figure was one-twentieth.

Nobody would call this picture totally rosy, of course. College-educated black men still make only 72 percent of what their white counterparts earn. And we can certainly quibble about what a middle-class income really is. But a lot of the news is upbeat. The black dropout rate from high school has come way down and is now 5 percent, vs. 4 percent for whites. There are almost seven times as many black college students today - 1,410,000 - as in 1960. Among college-educated full-time workers, 28 percent of blacks have executive, administrative or managerial jobs, vs. 30 percent for whites - a dramatic improvement. Doors are opening every day. America is changing.

Now here is the well-known sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset commenting in The New Democrat magazine on all this: “Awareness of such gains is not widespread, however. This is partly because the leadership of blacks, women and Hispanics generally does not admit to significant progress.”

Ah, yes. Here is a problem nobody talks about - the mandatory doom and gloom of race and gender spokespeople. Never is heard an encouraging word. No matter how much progress is being made, it is always brushed aside and fresh evidence of oppression is detected. Refusing to acknowledge any good news keeps the pressure on for more concessions. It keeps constituencies resentful and loyal, and it keeps the lines of the new balkanized America nice and sharp.

We pay a high price for this strategic negativism. Progress is made to seem hopeless. Blacks come to think that whites will never let them in, even as the doors swing open. With so much money spent, whites come to think that blacks must be at fault for an impasse that doesn’t really exist.

The same problem distorts the immigration debate. Some natives seem to regard Hispanics as an unassimilable horde. But the statistics tell a different story - Hispanic immigrants are succeeding, assimilating and inter-marrying with native stock at about the same rates as the white ethnic immigrants of a century ago. The wages of second-generation Mexican Americans are nearly identical to those of similarly educated non-Hispanic whites - quite an accomplishment. My own Irish and Italian immigrant ancestors took much longer to reach parity, under far better economic conditions. But don’t breathe a word of this. It’s good news.

The recent report by the Glass Ceiling Commission is a wonderful example of desperately rooting around for bad news. To bolster female support for affirmative action, the commission was determined to highlight some allegedly impenetrable barrier placed before white women.

The trouble is that women are rapidly running out of barriers. In a single generation, women have gone from low-level sex-typed jobs to a point where they account for roughly 40 percent of medical and law students, executives, administrators, managers and Ph.D. candidates. Women are now 44 percent of economists and 59 percent of public officials. It’s a spectacular and ongoing transformation, accomplished with amazing speed.

Scanning this sunshine-soaked weather map for a bit of drizzle was hard work indeed, but the invisible-barrier commission finally spotted some: Women account for only 3 percent to 5 percent of senior managers - vice president or higher - in Fortune 1,000 companies.

Well, sure, it’s an issue. The most elite jobs at the most elite companies are always the last to open up to new workers. It’s partly a pipeline problem, too. Many women just haven’t been with their companies long enough to challenge for top jobs. Even the 3 percent to 5 percent represents real progress - a tripling of the number of women holding those jobs in the 1980s. And women are already doing much better as entrepreneurs and in companies outside the Fortune 1,000. A recent New York Times article featured a fairly long list of women who run billion-dollar companies or billion-dollar divisions of companies. Does anybody really think this progress will slow or stop?

When Sylvia Nasar, the talented economic reporter for The New York Times, did her roundup of what working women accomplished during the 1980s (when the war against women was allegedly being waged), she contrasted the professional downbeat comments of the feminist establishment (“All we got was a few little crumbs,” said Pat Reuss of the NOW Legal Defense Fund) with the stunning gains women were actually ringing up.

There’s a serious disconnect between the official race-and-gender rhetoric and the progress that’s being made. Next year, with a presidential election and affirmative action on the ballot in California, the Glass Ceiling people will go into overdrive and find even more undiscovered horror in the workplace. Count on it.

MEMO: John Leo is a columnist for U.S. News & World Report.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Leo Universal Press Syndicate