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Affirmative action as a means of promoting equity and social justice in American society may be under assault across the country, but last week, at Indiana University Kokomo's nationally recognized conference on Enhancing Minority Attainment, it got a resounding "thumbs up."
 Bond |
In a keynote address to the conference, civil rights icon Julian Bond hailed affirmative action as the most effective tool in the past 30 years for advancing entry into the mainstream of American life.
Noting that opponents often argue that beneficiaries of race-centered affirmative action are "profiting" from it, Bond told conference participants: "There is never 'profit' in receiving right treatment. Receiving rights others already enjoy is no benefit or badge of privilege ..."
The man who worked with the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the '60s and who has just taken the reigns of leadership in America's oldest civil rights organization, said arguments against affirmative action have long been advanced by white racists who today "are joined...by black self haters and apologists too."
"Those who...argue for a return to a color-blind America that never was, who would have us believe that their opposition to affirmative action is rooted in a desire for fairness and equality, are engaged in justification, rationalization and downright prevarication," said Bond. "They are color blind, all right -- blind to the consequences of being the wrong color in America today."
| Speakers at IU Kokomo's EMA conference addressed affirmative action and "color blindness" in America. |
Affirmative action isn't about preferential treatment for minorities, Bond said, it is about removing preferential treatment whites have received through history and giving equal treatment to people who were denied equality in the past.
Neither is affirmative action a poverty program, he added, and it ought not be blamed for failing to solve problems it was not designed to solve.
Affirmative action, said Bond, "is a program designed to counter racial discrimination, not poverty. No one beat Rodney King because he was poor."
Opponents who maintain that affirmative action stigmatizes all blacks, making beneficiaries feel as if they've received some benefit they do not deserve are wrong, Bond said. "Do you ever hear that argument made about the millions of whites who got into college as a 'legacy' because Dad is an alumni? Or the whites who got good jobs because Dad was president of the company. You never see them walking around with heads held low, eyes hidden, moaning that they've lost their self esteem because everyone in the executive washroom is whispering about how they got their job."
Bond, who studied under King at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Poverty Law Center, served in the Georgia State Senate, and this year was named chairman of the board of the NAACP. He also is a professor at the University of Virginia and has taught at American University.
Calling on conference attendees and higher education leaders, to take a forthright stand for affirmative action and to speak out against discrimination, Bond quoted King: "We'll remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
 The Rev. Suzan D. Johnson Cook, author of Too Blessed to be Stressed: Words of Wisdom for Women on the Move (center), meets with Josie Oppan (left) and Dawnyetta McNeal (right), both students at Northern Illinois University, during IUK's Enhancing Minority Attainment conference last week. The nationally recognized gathering brought more than 250 participants from 25 states. Cook has been named one of the nation's top 15 women in the ministry by Ebony magazine. Photo by Kay Rogers |
Nelms, former chancellor of the University of Michigan-Flint and former chancellor of IU East, said he decided this year to make a change in career paths, returning to IU as special assistant to the president with major responsibilities for the promotion of diversity and minority attainment within the university.
"I have spent all but about two years of my career in predominantly white institutions," Nelms explained, "and it began to get depressing when I presented degrees year after year at commencement and I didn't see any people who looked like me."
Nelms said that while access to higher education is important, success is even more crucial.
"Access without success means nothing," he declared. "We have to see a difference at the end of the line."Nelms also challenged colleagues to become publicly pro-active. "Those of us who have benefitted from affirmative action have been too silent," he said.
Cole, a prominent educator, scholar, author and lecturer, said "There really is a very, very, very serious problem with affirmative action. We haven't had enough of it."
 "If we could wipe out the myth that affirmative action is for the dumb, unworthy and unqualified, we could remove the major argument that is a prop for affirmative action opponents."
-- Johnnetta Cole |
Cole said she has and continues to be the beneficiary of affirmative action. It was affirmative action, she declared, that helped her gain admission into Fisk University, to Oberlin College, where she earned an undergraduate degree, and to Northwestern University, where she earned master's and doctoral degrees.
Likewise, she added, without affirmative action she could not have become an anthropologist, would not have been selected to chair one the nation's earliest black studies programs, and would not have been named as the first African-American woman president in the history of a 107 year-old college for African-American females.
But the real benefit of affirmative action, said Cole, is not just to the individual. When people of color have access to higher education and are empowered to succeed, the "real gift" is to society.
The Kokomo conference, which included more than a dozen presentations by academicians and leaders of community-based programs across the country, has established a reputation for sustained attention over seven years to issues of diversity, cultural difference, and minority attainment. This year's conference theme was "For the Children: Clearing a Path to the 21st Century."
Joining Bond and Cole as major speakers were renowned Yale University child psychiatrist Dr. James Comer, an Indiana native who earned his undergraduate degree at IU; and the Rev. Suzan D. Johnson Cook, pastor of the Bronx Christian Fellowship in New York City and a member of the President Clinton's national Initiative on Race and Reconciliation.
Comer told conference participants of his experiences growing up in East Chicago, Ind., as one of five children whose father labored in a steel mill and mother worked as a domestic.
Despite modest circumstances and the fact that their parents had little education, all five siblings graduated from college, between them earning a total of 13 degrees. Their success, said Comer, was the result of a loving and nurturing home environment and his mother's fierce determination that all of her children would be educated.
Comer's observation that three of his friends, just as bright and from similar circumstances, failed to gain an education, were unsuccessful and unhappy in life, led him to the field of child development and to the work for which he is internationally known - the creation of innovative and supportive learning environments for children.
Intellect and opportunity are not the only factors necessary for academic success, Comer declared. If children are to succeed, they also must have developmental programs, supportive environments, and innovative curricula. The disappearance of small, close-knit neighborhoods and the breakdown of family structures, he said, make it imperative that communities, schools, and churches provide those support systems so that children can grow up to become educated, successful members of society.
Comer's message, also reflected in his book, "Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can't Solve Our Problems - and How We Can," was reinforced by Cook. The Bronx minister, a chaplain for the New York City Police Department, spoke of the pain, hopelessness and "broken-ness" of children growing up in poverty. "It isn't enough to clear the path to the 21st century," Cook declared. "We must create a path for our children. Our children are our future."
She related a story told by a minister friend who returned to his inner city community after studying at Harvard University. The minister, she recounted, met up with the drug dealer who used to sell him drugs on the street. Said the drug dealer to the minister: "Every day when Johnny goes to school and after school when he is walking home, I'm there, but the church is not there."
If children are to survive and grow up healthy and whole in our society, said Cook, "We have to be there. . . We must be pathmakers."
A former White House fellow who holds an undergraduate degree from Emerson College, a master's degree from Columbia University, and master's and doctoral degrees in divinity from United Theological Seminary, Cook spoke of how she made a conscious decision to return the inner-city Bronx area to build a ministry of service.
A dynamic motivational speaker who has taken her inspirational messages across the country and to regions as far flung as South Africa, West Africa, Bermuda, Switzerland and the Bahamas, Cook was named by Ebony magazine as one of the nation's top 15 women in the ministry in the United States. She is the author of four books including her most recent, Too Blessed To Be Stressed: Words of Wisdom for Women on the Move.
The 1998 EMA conference was hailed by IUK Chancellor Hill as one of the most successful in the history of the event. It drew approximately 250 participants from more than 25 states. Arrangements for the conference are coordinated by IUK's Division of Continuing Studies under the leadership of Donald Lane, director, and Lesa Nalley, assistant director.
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