Elder Statesman

He was a promising young lawyer when he quit to stat a business. It thrived. So he sold it, moved across the country, and became Los Angeles's most controversial talk radio host. When Larry Elder talks about opportunity, people listen.

Nick Gillespie & Steve Kurtz from the April 1996 issue

(Page 5 of 6)

Reason: How do you think you would have done without affirmative action?

Elder: I graduated number seven in a high school class of 250. Not number one or two, but it ain't bad. I certainly would've gotten into a competitive school regardless of my race. I am prepared to admit that I benefited from affirmative action. I am not prepared to admit that I would have been jobless, homeless, and illiterate had affirmative action not been in effect.

One of the problems with affirmative action is that it has primarily benefited people who are already prepared. What it did for me was to kick me from one level into another level. Without it, I wouldn't have gone to Brown--I probably would've gone to a Big Ten school. But it ended up creating higher failure rates, too. When I was in Brown, a disproportionate percentage of blacks failed. Many of them came from schools that were not as good as mine. I could tell by how little most of the other black kids read, how little math they knew, that they weren't going to be able to make it--and they didn't.

So what happened? You grab a bunch of people who would've been successful at a certain school and put them into a sort of blue-chip track, a great percentage of them fails, and they get very angry. The kids at Brown were falling behind and all were pissed off. They were confused. Their attitude was, "If you weren't going to let me make it, why'd you put me here?" It wasn't said that way but that was roughly the general feeling. And I saw the same attitude when I was at Michigan Law School. The statement that the door was open had to be made, but I wonder whether it was worth it.

Reason: You're against affirmative action quotas but you do support anti-discrimination legislation.

Elder: Morally, quotas cannot be defended. Even Hubert Humphrey--who did a lot of the heavy lifting for civil rights legislation--did not perceive a need for race-based affirmative action. I am really quite torn. As I said earlier, a statement had to be made. But why should some 18-year-old white kid who did very well on his SATs and whose father came from a blue-collar background be penalized because we now think UCLA should have a particular statistical population of blacks and Latinos? Why should the 18-year-old be screwed because of that? I find it very difficult to defend that.

In terms of employment, I favor the current laws that we have, which say that if there is evidence of discrimination based on disparate impact, the burden of proof should shift to the employer. The employer could disprove if he or she had discriminated. I am willing to accept that intrusion because I think it is so important to say to people that we, the government, will not tolerate discrimination.

Should there be some sort of mandatory affirmative action program, even in the public sector? Absolutely not. That's one of the things I find curious about this whole argument. The California Civil Rights Initiative would not affect the private businesses at all. Almost all of the Fortune 500 companies have affirmative action policies. They have them for two reasons. First, most of them do business with the government. The government compels you to have some sort of affirmative action plan. The office of federal contract compliance comes through from time to time and asks how many blacks you actually have here. So they have to do it anyway. They shouldn't have to, it's wrong, but it's there. The other reason most private companies have affirmative action policies, though, is because it is just good business. When you are buying pantyhose and the consumer reads an article by the president of the National Organization for Women that this manufacturer of pantyhose discriminates against female executives, that manufacturer is in trouble. That, to me, should be the role of organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, etc.--the service of the watchdog.

Reason: But you do reject the idea that the free market will eliminate racism. And you think that the government should police marketplace discrimination?

Elder: Yes. I was in the headhunting business for 15 years. I have a friend who is in a similar business. She has clients that have told her not to send over black people: "Don't send me somebody black no matter how qualified. I don't want them in my house." She has told me this. I know it goes on. 60 Minutes did a piece on a headhunting firm in New York. Black applicants were asked to fill out the application in black ink and white applicants were asked to fill out the application in blue ink so that counselors could identify the race of the applicant.

Reason: And they shouldn't be allowed to do that?

Elder: No.

Reason: Now you're contradicting what you said earlier. Aren't you saying that government is needed to stop racism?

Elder: Why do we have laws to tell people not to do certain things? I mean, the fact is that most people are not going to murder, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't have a law that says don't murder. Most people aren't going to discriminate but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a law saying you can't do it. There is some discrimination. Is it anywhere close to where Jesse Jackson thinks? Of course not. Is it anywhere close to what Maxine Waters is saying? No. Should we have a law that says that UCLA must admit people based on race or based on sex? No. But does that mean we should remove all laws in the books that would prevent ABC Corp. from summarily refusing to accept applications from a qualified black applicant? No, we should have a law that prevents people from doing that. Just like we should have a law that stops Joe's Eatery from preventing black people from coming in and sitting at the lunch counter. I recognize that's an intrusion to Joe's business, and that's the price that we pay in our society for having had historic discrimination, for being a sort of sick society where people are going to be skeptical about the rules. I should add that I think the threat of lost profits from discriminating is one of the reasons why I'm so adamant about the relative lack of racism in the marketplace.

Reason: Once upon a time you were a successful young lawyer in Cleveland. How did you get into radio?

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 9:54PM|#

hzhtg

قبلة الوداع|8.16.11 @ 10:44PM|#

ThaNk U