No Magic Number

The ideal situation in race relations, toward which the Federal courts, government commissions, and private organizations are supposedly working, would be a world in which no attention whatever was paid to race. Most civil rights workers, however, must concentrate on the more practical goal of getting more Negroes into previously white schools, jobs, or residential areas.

The divergence between these two goals, the ideal and the practical, was demonstrated by the University's reluctance to report to the President's Commission on Equal Employment Opportunities the number of Negroes employed at Harvard, and by the Commission's insistence on the submission of such a report.

It is often difficult to prove, even after expensive and time-consuming investigation, whether an individual was refused employment because of his race or for other reasons. But it is too easy to shift the burden of proof by assuming that any organization that doesn't employ a certain number of Negroes must be discriminating.

The information supplied on the Equal Employment Opportunity questionnaires may be legitimately used to suggest possible areas for future investigation. It also may have a beneficial effect merely by giving government contractors concrete evidence that their employment practices are being scrutinized. For of course, many Negroes are refused employment for reasons of race, and statistics on the number of Negroes employed can be a useful guide to determine where it exists.

But the Commission should avoid implying that there is some magic number of Negroes that a firm must employ to keep the investigator from the door. It must not forget that any quota system, no matter how generous the quotas, denies the principle that an individual's opportunity for housing, employment, or education should be in no way dependent upon his race.