A Bid for Justice
On Adarand Constructors, Inc., another victim of racial politics.

By By Peter Wood, associate provost, Boston University
August 16, 2001 9:05 a.m.

hen the great Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that "the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightening, sheer, no-man-fathomed," he probably was not thinking about the need for guardrails on highways in the Rockies. Still, his advice seems pertinent: "Hold them cheap/May who ne'er hung there."

Adarand Constructors, Inc. based in Colorado Springs, clearly does not hold itself cheap. The company prides itself as "Colorado's premier guardrail and fence contractor." Twelve years ago when the U.S. Department of Transportation called for bids on a guardrail project, Adarand responded with the lowest bid, but lost the contract. The DOT awarded it instead to Gonzales Construction Co., a firm certified as a small business "owned and operated by economically disadvantaged individuals."

The heads of many companies, large and small, hang their heads at the petty injustices of our national system of racial bid-rigging. But occasionally, someone puts up a fight. Adarand sued and, in 1992, prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly a decade of further litigation and efforts by the Clinton administration to salvage the affirmative action program by amending some of the rules, however, has brought the Adarand no justice. Its case is back before the Supreme Court.

President Bush's decision last week to ask the Court to uphold the constitutionality of the DOT program has disturbed many of us who doubt the wisdom of racial quotas and set-asides and who had hoped for something better from this administration. The president calls us to fight "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in our schools, but the great billowy bigotry of racial stereotyping in affirmative-action programs appears to bother him less.

Let's think about our cultural guardrails, those inconspicuous barriers that may save us when we seem destined to plunge into the abyss. While other societies have skidded off the cliff into the abyss of group rights, we have been saved so far by our respect for the dignity of the individual. And while other societies plunge headlong into the chasm of ethnic nationalism, we have merely careered near the edge, held back by our belief in human equality.

Lyndon Johnson famously justified affirmative action by calling for a "level playing field." The metaphor itself is a bit lumpy but we got the idea: Johnson meant that ending discrimination against African-Americans would not, by itself, propel large numbers of disadvantaged people into the economic mainstream. Some additional steps would be needed. But what steps? Subsidies? Tax-breaks? Two-tier contracting systems?

Sometimes extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions. I do not fault President Johnson for his proposal to attack the racial hierarchy in the United States with tough-minded forms of intervention. But I do fault him for not thinking about the guardrails. He did nothing to ensure that his temporary measures would not become a system of permanent privilege, and he ignored the need for elementary fairness to those who would be on the losing end of quotas.

The image of leveling the playing fields, of course, has now become quaint. As affirmative action switched from being an extraordinary, short-term intervention to a permanent bureaucratic fixture, its ideological apologists had to offer a different reason for setting aside ordinary standards of fairness. American society, they now say, is so saturated with invidious and self-perpetuating racial stereotypes and so rife with institutional disadvantages visited on minorities that it will take generation upon generation of vigorous affirmative action to achieve genuine racial equity.

To a large majority of Americans, of course, that image is simply strange. It corresponds to very little in our personal experience. We do indeed see racial stereotypes and occasional institutional disadvantages — but they are, with one major exception, the throwaway stuff and yard-sale clutter of our past. We don't buy the racism-is-endemic theory, and we increasingly see no good reason for policies such as the one that gave the guardrail contract to Gonzales instead of Adarand.

In one very important realm, however, it is clear that our society is burdened with systematic disadvantage. Educational achievement differs dramatically among racial and ethnic categories. Disproportionate numbers of black and Latino students are at the bottom in American grade schools and high schools, and disadvantage in school reverberates into a lifetime of economic disadvantage.

Is there a conservative answer to this inequity? Are these students the victims, as George Bush suggested in his convention speech last year, of the "soft bigotry of low expectations?" It is a powerful phrase and true to a point. But it leaves the question, "Whose expectations?" Teachers and their unions, school principals, and state legislators own part of the responsibility. But the deeper and more uncomfortable answer is that poor performance in schools reflects families and communities in whom the ambition of self-improvement through learning either never took root or has withered away.

The problem, in short, is cultural. Some cultural traditions emphasize the importance of learning; others do not. Or, if that statement seems too bald, try this: Some cultural traditions emphasize that children must strive to excel in the kinds of learning that our society organizes into grade school and high school curricula. Other traditions emphasize…other stuff. Traditions are what they are because they are self-perpetuating. Contempt for school in one generation is usually passed to the next; ignorance flourishes among the ignorant and scatters little seeds of ignorance that will one day be harvested in still more kids hanging out, doing drugs, and ignoring their one real opportunity.

Traditions are not, however, unbreachable prisons. Individuals do sometimes find their way free, and traditions themselves can be reshaped or sent on new paths of self-development. Moreover, most traditions contain within themselves dissenting opinions that, under the right conditions, transform the whole. Even in a culture that generally derides formal learning, some read books. Even in a tradition where academic success connotes sell-out, some aspire to college. The best way to help children in such communities is to recognize and reinforce the work of the dissenters who, against the odds, uphold the ideals of intellectual achievement.

The real alternative to affirmative action is to challenge the validity of those cultural traditions that excuse, foster, and perpetuate an ethic of hostility to formal learning. Difficult? Yes, but not impossible. The place to begin is in the mountains of our own minds. The "soft bigotry of low expectations," Mr. President, is right there in front of you in the Transportation Department's procedure for awarding contracts. A clean and fair method of deciding who gets to install guardrails on Rocky Mountain highways will not please everyone, but it would blow up one of the pylons that supports the Culture of Ignorance.

DOT set-asides for minority contractors are perks for individuals who have already reached the middle class. They do nothing for the child whose family doesn't care whether he can read. They are meaningless to the teenager who has dropped out of school. And they are just as irrelevant for when that child, that teenager, becomes an adult. Affirmative action programs appease a certain political class, but children languishing in the backsweep of educational indifference are beyond its help. They will not reach college, or if a few do, fewer still will graduate. They will not found small businesses. They will not bid on DOT contracts.

Racial politics is America's cliffs of fall/Frightening. We twist and turn through these mountains looking for the high pass and the safe descent, but there is no easy way. We can, however, learn from our mistakes, and affirmative action was one of them. Let's take a different road.