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10 Facing Facts and Responsibilities: The White Man's Burden and the Burden of Proof Karen Hanson The three lead essays in this volume display an admirable commitment to uncovering common ground between opposing sides of the affirmative action debate. Each essay is attentive to the theoretical and practical issues of individual and social justice generally at stake in the controversy and to the particular inflections of those issues when the institution whose policies are in question is one with reasonable claims, or aspirations, to being meritocratic. I share the authors' sense that the broad outlines, and many of the details, of the arguments for and against various forms of affirmative action are by now fairly familiar and that the most appropriate approaches to continued discussion are those that recognize the strength of each side's case. My own judgment is that the balance of considerations weighs in favor of some forms of affirmative action-including, in some circumstances , specific efforts to achieve targeted employment goals and including the allocation of admittedly limited resources for special employment programs of the sort described by Lawrence Becker. I cannot, in this short comment, examine each point at which I agree or disagree with the arguments and proposals detailed by Leslie Francis, Robert Simon, and Becker. Instead, I hope to support the push for practical compromise by raising a few questions about our conceptions of academia and higher education. As the lead essays note, one of the continuing intellectual problems in the debates about affirmative action is determining where the burden of proof should lie. If women and minority group men are not employed in academia in numbers and at levels proportional to their numbers in qualified applicant pools, are we entitled to assume the Facing Facts and Responsibilities 175 likelihood of unfair hiring and promotion practices and to insist that opponents of affirmative action prove opportunities really are equal for all? Or should we suppose that all racial and gender biases must be identifiable, so that, absent any specification of a problematic practice, we are entitled to rely on the fairness of sex-blind and race-blind employment procedures? If we admit that there has been racial and sexual injustice in the past, and we want to give some special treatment to those who have been disadvantaged, is it reasonable to extend this special treatment to all members of a racial group and to all women? Or should we proceed to attend immediately to disadvantage, formulating race- and sex-neutral policies that respond more directly to the specific disadvantages that are the ground of our concern? Although I grant that no general formula can be given concerning where, in discussion of actual circumstances and proposed policies, the burden of proof must lie, it seems to me that we should be inclined to doubt equality of opportunity and inclined to think race and sex are relevant categories to attempted amelioration. This inclination may be more widely shared if we begin our discussion of affirmative action only after open reflection on a couple of very basic, very general, very simple questions: Do we think our society, as a whole, has eliminated all traces of racism and sexism? And do we take the academyand ourselves, as members of the academy-to be isolated from, or insulated against, the practices and institutions of the larger society? I do not think we can responsibly deny that racism and sexism are still very much a part of American life; aI\d, once we admit that, it becomes difficult to insist that we must always begin in a race-neutral and sex-neutral fashion as we try to attend to the "disadvantages" of some members of our society. An important part of the evidence of continuing racism and sexism is economic, but we must not reduce these problems to their economic markers and associated deprivations . An African American boy whose parents can afford to send him to a fine private prep school will still be exposed, throughout his life, to vicious racial epithets. As a yOUJrlg man, even after he has completed college and graduate school and has begun a promising professional career, he may not be able to jog in old clothes through an affluent white neighborhood without attracting undue attention and unpleasant suspicion. A young girl's interest in science may be encouraged and supported by her family, and they may, when the time comes, pay her tuition to, say, MIT. 13ut she will grow up in...

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