SHOFAR ALEPH ZADIK ALEPH (AZA) B'NAI B'RITH GIRLS (BBG) BETHL THEM, BRIDGE PA RD 18017 B'nai B'rith Youth Organization COOK DECEMBER, 1972 B9 "If you're white it's all right. But if you're Black, get back get discrimination in reverse." back get back get back!" For years this folk song was the fact of life in Washington Evening Star-News columnist Smith Hempstone puts it more most colleges and in personnel offices of most companies. It didn't apply only bluntly when he claims, "It has reached the point in many instances where to Blacks, but also to the Chicano, Puerto Rican, and-yes-even the Jew, for a Black of inferior qualifications is preferred to a White with superior ones. a period of time. A Black with a modest academic record can frequently take his choice of But today, "There's a new world dawning ." More and more colleges, half a dozen prestigious colleges; a White with the same or better grades often universities, and industries are seeking out minorities for admissions and jobs. will have to settle for a state university. The old quota systems set up fixed percentages of Jews, Blacks, and Catho- In response, syndicated columnist Carl Rowan asks: "Then will someone lics who were to be admitted to colleges. In addition, many industries were please explain to me why Whites have 98 percent of the choice jobs in govern- known to be off-limits for minorities. Application blanks for schools and jobs ment while Blacks have a monopoly on the messenger, janitorial, and other included questions about religion, race, where your parents were born, etc. menial positions? Will someone tell me why Blacks are jobless today at twice In 1949, more than one hundred educators, deans, admissions officers, the rate of Whites? Will someone tell me why one Black out of three lives and university presidents from across the country gathered in Chicago to below the poverty line-or why the normal Black family must live on only face the 30-year old problem. In the keynote address to that gathering, Dr. 60 percent of the income of a comparable White family. This 'quotas' Andrew C. Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois and chairman of fuss is phony hokum!" the conference, began by saying-"Discrimination against deserving students Much of the confusion revolves around whether the action of employers and who want to get into college is evil. It causes great loss and damage to the college admissions officers is affirmative action or preferential treatment. United States. It violates the democratic credos which educators are supposed The difference is clear. As Benjamin Epstein points out, "affirmative action to hold sacred connotes adding qualified minority group members to other qualified appli- Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, we are again concerned over quota cants for college admission, employment, etc. Preferential treatment, on the systems and similar devices. This time, however, things are reversed and the other hand, means to benefit some, without regard for qualifications, by quotas are supposed to bring in-not keep out-minority group members. excluding others." Today, we are defining minority group members as women, Blacks, Puerto According to J. Stanley Pottinger, director of the Office for Civil Rights of Ricans, Orientals, American Indians and Chicanos. The new catch-phrase is the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, numerical goals are a "preferential treatment." proper and useful tool to measure a college's progress in remedying past Does this "preferential treatment" work? Is it fair? Is it legal? The answers to discrimination. these questions differ greatly depending upon whom you talk with. Pottinger, the man in charge of civil rights "goals" for HEW, sees them as Benjamin R. Epstein, National Director of B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation "targets," "levels of expectancy" or "honest guesses." Quotas, on the other League says, "while the intent is eradication of the all too pervasive reality hand, he said, mean setting a rigid number of persons of a given racial, ethnic, of unequal opportunity for oppressed minorities, the means constitutes religious, or sex group to be employed or admitted to an academic institution (Contd. on page 2)