Statistics keep equality an issue

There's a reason for everything. Nothing happens in a vacuum. No matter which side of the current affirmative action debate you may find yourself, there were certain social and socio-economic realities which spurred its inception. Some of them still apply today.

It is one of the charges of a newspaper to provide information on current issues. This, we hope, fills that obligation:

Women earn 55-75 percent of men's salaries.

Many Latino and Asian workers face bias because they look or sound "foreign," according to a report published by the federal General Accounting Office.

Stricter immigration laws have triggered discrimination by employers, who, presuming that Latinos or Asian Americans are illegal aliens, often refuse to hire them.

The face of poverty is disproportionately female and non-white. For example, 70 percent of black women hold "typically female," low-wage jobs.

The federal Commission on the Cities, convened in 1988, found that today's poor are poorer, and have less chance of escaping poverty, than 20 years ago.

One third of all African American, and one-fourth of all Latino, families live in poverty, compared to one-tenth of white families.

Native Americans remain the most impoverished minority in North America. Their communities are plagued with disproportionately high rates of unemployment, infant mortality, alcoholism and suicide.

The unemployment rate for racial minorities is double that of whites. One in four African American males is in prison, on parole or on probation -- more than are in college.

No one can make a decision without having all the information possible. You can hear both sweeping accolades and wholesale condemnations of affirmative action anywhere. But when it really comes down to it, affirmative action programs -- at least at one time --served a purpose. The programs existed for a reason. Whether affirmative action remains intact, whether it's gutted or whether it's deleted altogether remains to be seen. The question that each needs to be answered, though, is whether dumping affirmative action programs will solve any of this society's problems?

[ Golden Gater Online November 21, 1995 ]

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