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The Battalion
OPINION
Friday, June 16,1989
Friday, Ju
Civil Rights Act
b-day gets bashed
It’s the 25th anniversary of the 1964
Civil Rights Act, and the Supreme
Court is celebrating.
They’ve begun by slicing up Title
VII, the part of the act designed to keep
racism and sexism from invading the
workplace, and handing it out to groups
of conservative white males to gobble up
like pieces of birthday cake.
Monday’s actions in the Court dem
onstrated a lack of concern by the Court
for minority group members and
women trying to fight back against dis
crimination, which, although on the de
cline, is still prevalent in the United
States.
The two decisions made by the Court
Monday deal with discrimination in em
ployment. Both decisions make clear the
Court’s increasingly conservative stand
on the issue.
The Court decided that whites em
ployed by the Birmingham, Ala., fire
department had the right to step in and
challenge an affirmative action plan that
had been set up through negotiations
between the city and blacks who were
fighting alleged discrimination in the
fire department.
The court also threw out a lawsuit by
a woman who was challenging an alleg
edly discriminatory seniority system at a
private company in Illinois, because
they believed the woman should have
filed the suit when the plan was
adopted, not when the discriminatory
effects began.
The Birmingham decision is espe
cially interesting in light of the the Illi
nois decision. The white firefighters
waited to file suit against the city until
they thought they were being denied
promotions, while the woman was told
she should have filed before discrimina
tion actually began. Though there may
be legal reasoning behind these deci
sions, the decisions aren’t necessarily
fair.
The Birmingham decision totally un
dermines the pprpose of affirmative ac
tion. It not only removes the promise of
less discrimination in the workplace, it
hampers the ability of employers and
their employees to get together and ne
gotiate complaints of discrimination.
Those against affirmative action pro
grams argue reverse discrimination.
They say that the programs take jobs
away from white men and hand them
over to less qualified minority group
members and women. This may actually
happen once in a while. But not usually.
For example, let’s take a look at the
Birmingham Fire Department.
The consent agreement made by the
black firemen and the city was drawn in
1981. Since the minority hiring and pro
motion program has been in place,
there has been no significant increase in
property or lives lost in fires. The qual
ity of the fire department has not de
creased since the new black firemen
were hired.
And blacks aren’t exactly ‘taking over
the department,’ either. It’s not all that
suprising or unreasonable to hear that,
in a city with as high a black population
as Birmingham, there are 160 black
firemen in a department with 650 mem
bers.
What about women? Well, we may
have come a long way, baby, but we still
have some distance to cover. Even in
this modern era, women make only
about 69# to every dollar a man makes,
and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get
any better soon. The Equal Rights
Amendment received no support from
the Reagan administration, and the
Bush administration has made no move
to support it, either.
This country is full of people who call
themselves ‘self-made men.’ These indi
viduals claim that anyone can make it
big in America if they just pull them
selves up by their bootstraps. But lets
face up to some facts: Horatio Alger
does not come around much anymore.
We’re not going to live up to our claim
of being a free country until equal job
opportunities are available to everyone,
equal money is given for equal work and
equal promotions are given for equal
qualifications.
That’s what Title VII of the 1964
Civil Rights Act stands for. It is an at
tempt to help people get used to the
idea of placing qualified minorities and
women in positions traditionally held by
white males.
Maybe someday no businessman will
blink an eye at putting a qualified black
woman in an executive position. Then
affirmative action will have outlived its
usefulness.
We are a racist, sexist country. We
can’t afford to get rid of Title VII just
yet.
Ellen Hobbs is a junior journalism
major and editor of The Battalion.
Court decision dumb
The Supreme Court just keeps whit
tling away at the legal remedies for dis
crimination.
None of the Court’s recent decisions
has been particularly dramatic — just
the shift of the burden of proof here,
the insufficiency of statistical proof
there. And I suppose most of us who
aren’t black can’t imagine that such deci
sions will ever make any difference in
our lives.
To the 50 percent of you who are
women, these decisions damn well will
matter. And if you’re one of those con
servatives who thinks all the problems of
poor minority citizens in this country
would be solved if they’d just get a job,
try explaining the new court decisions to
blacks who are out looking for jobs.
On Monday, the Court effectively
ruled that the fire department in Bir
mingham, Ala., a city that is majority
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Art Director
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Ivins
Syndicated Columnist
black, could go back to the status quo as
of 1974, when it had 453 firefighters, 42
of them black, none in a supervisory po
sition.
By ruling that an affirmative action
plan agreed to by public officials and
approved in court may be attacked even
years later in a new suit by workers who
took no part in the original agreement,
the Court makes consent plans like the
one reached in Birmingham vulnerable
to challenge by any white supremacist
who can find a lawyer.
What remedies are now legal if any
white man can claim reverse discrimina
tion because a company or a depart
ment store starts hiring blacks or
women?
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By Holly Be*
STAFF WRIT!
Texas A&P
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By Alan Serr
.SENIOR STAI
Mail Call
Batt follows Bill of Rights
EDITOR:
This letter is in response to Troyce Wilson and Alan
Wakim’s opinions on why The Battalion staff placed an ad
(which was considered to be in poor taste) for a memorial
service for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
I’ll be the first to admit, I thought the ad was kind of
funny or rather way out of place; but, hey, you have to
remember that there are people here who worship and
praise the man and are indubitably entitled to do so even if
it deviates from the norm or relates to a tragic past. You
might want to refer to the First Amendment which is in
this thing we call the Bill of Rights.
wearing my “Hard Rock Cafe — Matamoros, Mexico 1
shirt which 1 bought there during Spring Break 1
would not doubt that many are quick to associate mere
the “Cult Ring Leader.” Personally, I think it’s hilarious
So guys, next time you can’t understand why The
Battalion staff places an ad for the memorial serviceof
Khomeini, Salman Rushdie, Ted Bundy or Matamora
Ring Leader — take a deep breath and count ten
(Amendments). If not, you better watch out. I justmigk
be wearing my Matamoros T-shirt that day.
Michael Custaneda ’89
preven
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crime.
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month ago, v
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“Our goal
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I was so prompt in writing this letter because I felt I,
too, was the subject of poor taste as seen by others. I
receive sneers from fellow Ags whenever I walk on campus
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words in length. The editomlS
serves the right to edit letters for style and length, hut will 'nake ever) tfl(
maintain the author's intent. Each letter must be signed and must indudttii
sification, address and telephone number of the writer.
Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words.
Nuclear power not solutior
Editor’s note: This guest column was
submitted to The Battalion as a letter to
the editor in response to Matt McBur-
nett’s column that ran Wednesday.
Matt McBurnett’s column on nuclear
power concluded with the statement, “...
an informed person is usually a sup
portive one.” I question Matt’s lack of
factual support in his argument for the
public support of America’s nuclear en
ergy program.
The major problems of nuclear facili
ties lie not in large-scale accidents, but in
disposal of wastes and small, continuous
leaks. Between 1980 and 1985, 6,928 ac
cidents involving radioactive and chemi
cal wastes were logged in plants and
dumps. The Congressional Research
Team has concluded that nearly one-
half of the 1,246 hazardous waste
dumps are currently polluting our
groundwater. The Office of Technol
ogy Assessment estimates that almost
10,000 hazardous waste sites pose se
rious health problems to the public.
and fuel rods by 1998. What kind of a
solution is that? In order to be effective,
they’ll have to maintain these dumps for
centuries. The Department of Energy
estimates it takes 1,500 years for high-
level wastes to reduce their radioactivity
to minimal levels (those they held before
being contaminated), spent fuel rods
take 10,000 years, and plutonium 239
will take anywhere from 250,000 to
500,000 years to detoxify. In addition,
deep-mine sites being built for such
wastes are impractical because of the
high salinity of groundwater in these
mines, which would eventually corrode
through the drums.
Consequently, it is easily seen tlizi
clear power is not the energy pro!
solution. The real solution lies ins
us. We must, as a responsible sp«
limit this runaway energy consum
trend. The greenhouse effect con
greatly reduced by all of us ifwert
support mass transit, energy const'
tion and reforestation (which
convert carbon dioxide back to
Fifty-four percent of carbon monos
pollutants come from cars. Wee;
ride together. Eighty percent of
waste ends up in landfills; 87 percer
these will be filled by 1993. Wei
easily recycle all this trash. Each
Americans throw away enough al<
num to rebuild the commercial air
every three months. When are we
to stop this outrage?
The Unive
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High-level wastes include fuel rods
and contaminated materials. The Fed
eral Nuclear Waste Policy Act will have
deep-mine disposal of high-level waste
Nuclear facilities will indeed limit car
bon dioxide emissions, but to such a
small scale that they would not justify
the waste problem they create. Carbon
dioxide emissions by non-nuclear power
plants make up only 14 percent of U.S.
greenhouse-gas emissions, and only 4
percent of global greenhouse-gas emis
sions worldwide.
There are no easy solutions, wet
stop taking the Earth for
Enough concerned people can dost;
thing to stop this.
As with all columns, opiniof
pressed by Guest Columnists art
necessarily those of The Battalion
sons interested in submittinggueS
umns should contact the Opinion'
Editor at 845-3314.