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CNN Live Sunday
Interview With Julianne Malveaux, Armstrong Williams
Aired January 19, 2003 - 18:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: We're at a point in the show now where we're going to tackle a subject many people don't even feel comfortable talking about in public. It's race.
Do you realize it's been nearly 35 years since civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated, and in those crucial three decades the dream he so passionately spoke of has in part come to fruition or has it?
CNN's Whitney Casey takes a closer look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WHITNEY CASEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A dream that wasn't realized by Patricia Due but instead in some respects years later by her three daughters.
TANARARIVE DUE: We never went to segregated schools. In fact, we lived in a mostly White neighborhood so I was bussed with the White children into a Black neighborhood when I was in the fifth grade because that was how integration was achieved.
CASEY: An achievement and a dream that according to a recent Harvard study has begun to unravel. The integration of Black students like the Dues increased continuously from the 1950s to the last 1980s.
But now the study shows the trend has reversed. Segregation is on the rise and a new group of minorities are at the center of what the author dubs re-segregation.
GARY ORFIELD, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Latino students are our biggest minority group now and very rapidly growing. They're the most segregated by race and poverty and interestingly by language and they're having the greatest educational problems.
CASEY: Problems New York City educator Martha Olson sees mounting every day. Two years ago, Ms. Olson left her job as a successful attorney to teach social studies at a high school in the South Bronx. Her students are roughly 60 percent Latino, 36 percent Black, and less than two percent White. She celebrates this racial diversity.
What do they learn from each other in that kind of diverse climate?
MARTHA OLSON, NYC TEACHER: Well, it's fun. You go to a school dance and the music flips between Marengue and rap, and just like that you know and the kids are all out on the dance floor and it goes back and forth and you see, you know, there's a wonderful blending of cultures there.
CASEY: But Ms. Olson also points out that although racially diverse, 85 percent of her students are poor enough to be eligible for free lunch.
OLSON: They don't have role models, you know, and none of them really have that many role models from their community because they're all from the same lower socioeconomic class.
CASEY: So they don't see what is possible?
OLSON: Exactly.
CASEY: Ms. Olson's school, according to the Harvard study, is considered a minority school meaning minorities are in the majority, a type of re-segregated school the study says is on the increase. Currently across the U.S. one in six Black children attend a minority school. For Latinos it's one in nine. But for Whites it's less than one in 1,000.
As we remember Martin Luther King's birthday, the question remains is the dream of desegregation still alive?
CHESTER FINK, FORDHAM FOUNDATION: My impression is that most parents are a lot more interested in whether their kids are learning than in the color of the skin of the kid at the next desk.
CASEY: The Dues say the child at the next desk does matter. It's sometimes the only glimpse of the possibilities that could lie ahead.
Whitney Casey CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LIN: Well, interestingly enough President Bush brought affirmative action into the glare of the 21st Century spotlight this week by singling out the University of Michigan's admission policy.
Now he wants the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. In the aftermath, the president's two top African-American advisers are weighing in. They are divided.
CNN's Patty Davis picks up the story from here.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Secretary of State Colin Powell says he strongly backs affirmative action for university admissions.
COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I believe race should be a factor among many other factors in determining the makeup of a student body at a university.
DAVIS: Powell's statement goes beyond what President Bush said last week that he believes in racial diversity in higher education but not the way the University of Michigan goes about it.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The quota systems that use race to include or exclude people from higher education and the opportunities it offers are divisive, unfair, and impossible to square with the Constitution.
DAVIS: The Bush administration filed a brief in support of three White students who say they were unfairly denied admission to the university. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sunday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice repeated that she thinks race should be considered if other methods don't bring diversity to campuses. Rice, who is a former provost at Stanford University, says she benefited from Stanford's policies on hiring minorities.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I went to Stanford as a young fellow, fresh out of graduate school. I never had a job doing anything. I think they saw a person that they thought had potential and yes, I think they were looking to diversify the faculty.
DAVIS: But Rice made it clear she supports the president's handling of the University of Michigan case. Democrats say the president's stance is divisive.
SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: That is not the act of a compassionate conservative. It's the act of a cold-hearted conservative. It's wrong.
DAVIS: President Bush's political advisers worry that tougher position backed by conservatives opposing racial preferences in all cases would hurt him at the polls in 2004. Mr. Bush got nine percent of the Black and 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2000 presidential race. Political analysts say it will be crucial for President Bush to win over more minority voters next time.
Patty Davis CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LIN: All right, we've now heard opinions about race. Let's find out what people who deal with the topic at the grassroots level what they're hearing and just as a gauge I want to quickly show you the results of a CNN/TIME magazine poll. We are poll crazy today but we want to hear from you, so here it is.
This was taken just a few days ago on college and law school admissions. It shows 39 percent favoring racial preferences and 54 percent opposed.
But I want to know is -- well, what I want to know is if there is any debate about it on the street, and for that we're going to turn to syndicated columnist and radio talk show host Armstrong Williams. He joins us along with syndicated columnist and author Julianne Malveaux, hi Armstrong, hi Julianne.
ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Hi, how you doing?
JULIANNE MALVEAUX, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Hi, how you doing?
LIN: Good, good. Just so we all know what we're talking about here, I want to show people a graphic. I hope we can put this up. This is actually the point system that the University of Michigan uses in its application process, the points that a student will get.
If a student has a 4.0 GPA, they get 80 points; diversity, 20 points; athlete, 20 points; and so forth. If you live in Michigan you get ten, et cetera. So that is the point scale and what we're talking about is the points that you get, 20 points for diversity.
Armstrong, is this unconstitutional?
WILLIAMS: It is unconstitutional. It is unconstitutional when of all the categories that you named all of them include people of all walks of life except the diversity. It's only limited to Blacks, Asian, and Hispanics, and to just give someone 20 points for walking in the door when no achievement in academics is involved is just totally unfair.
It's racist in its own way and it's unconstitutional. I think if you were to base this on socioeconomic background or income level, I think you could achieve your same goal without injecting race.
I think what has happened in America is that we have first, second, and third generation minorities in this country who are still benefiting from affirmative action. They use affirmative action to get in college. They use affirmative action to get their jobs. They use affirmative action to get contracts.
At some point, they've got to graduate from this program and rise and fall on their own merit. What has happened here is that the poor...
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, who needs to graduate is America? Who needs to graduate is America.
WILLIAMS: The poor really does not benefit.
MALVEAUX: The nation has not yet provided us with equal opportunity. The nation has not yet leveled the playing field. Armstrong is being extraordinarily disingenuous, and while I respect my colleague for his punditry, certainly not for his constitutional scholarship.
When you have a Senate, when you have economic institutions, financial institutions, and other institutions that are literally segregated, we still need affirmative action to level the playing field. LIN: Let's simplify this. Let's simply this, Julianne, let me -- I'm going to ask the director to throw a picture up. There we are. The three of us here, take a look at us America. I mean Julianne, do you think honestly would we all be where we are today if it weren't for affirmative action?
MALVEAUX: Well, that's my point exactly and that's why we need to continue affirmative action.
LIN: But would we?
MALVEAUX: Just a minute. Go back and look at those points you put up there in terms of what you got points for. There are 150 total points that exist. Twenty of those points are for diversity.
There's a point system that -- there's a point you didn't put up there which was provost preference. That's also 20 points. So anyone the provost decides he or she wants to favor can get 20 points.
The fact is 20 points out of 150 does not cripple a qualified applicant. The whiners in this race are the Whites who sued because they couldn't hang. They ought to sue the other White people who had lower scores and lower grades than they did.
But race is such a hot button in America that that's where we go. We can't prove that SAT scores are correlated with achievement and when we look at Armstrong's argument you're taking it out of the context of history.
Yes, there was a quota system in America and that quota system was no Black people until approximately 1970 in our elite universities, and so I think affirmative action is appropriate. It's remedial. It's necessary until the playing field is leveled.
LIN: All right, I want to end this point on some of the solutions that President Bush has been talking about. Armstrong is it really reasonable when the president talks about these race neutral options.
For example, just taking ten percent or you know the top ten percent or the top percentage of any class of students say even in a poor, minority neighborhood, the top ten percent still will qualify at a state university. That is the policy as I understand it in the University of Texas system that he supported.
But it has shown not to necessarily dramatically increase the number of minority students even though the population of minorities has dramatically increased in the state of Texas.
WILLIAMS: You know but it is a start and at least it's based on achievement. It's based on excellence. It's based on academics. You don't tell someone by giving them 20 points I don't think you can achieve like everyone else so therefore we're going to handicap the race in your favor.
You can not use the same morally bankrupt policies that we fought to get the civil rights legislation and reverse ourselves and use those same policies to reverse discrimination against someone else. It's not there. It's not right.
And, to answer your question that you asked whether or not the three of us have benefited from affirmative action, let me just tell you. I have not. My parents paid for my education through college out of their pockets, out of their hard-earned capital from their farm.
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, with all due respect...
WILLIAMS: I can only answer for myself but now -- may I say this?
MALVEAUX: ...yes, you have. You have benefited.
WILLIAMS: Let me finish my point. Could you not be rude and just let me finish my point?
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, you have benefited from affirmative action. You benefited from affirmative action as all people of color have.
LIN: We are running out of time.
MALVEAUX: And the fact is that the Texas system...
WILLIAMS: You can't speak for me.
MALVEAUX: The Texas system is a system that...
WILLIAMS: Just be rude here.
MALVEAUX: ...that simply has not shown to be fair. It has not shown to be fair.
WILLIAMS: Just because you're Black does not mean that you're where you are because of affirmative action.
WILLIAMS: I think we got a pretty good idea of where you both stand on this.
MALVEAUX: Armstrong what affirmative action means is that you broaden your applicant pool.
WILLIAMS: What about hard work?
MALVEAUX: Hard work matters.
WILLIAMS: What about discipline? (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
MALVEAUX: Anybody who achieves through hard work...
LIN: All right, hard work is great and I got a lot of work ahead of me in this program. I'm sorry, Armstrong, Julianne, we got to call it a day.
MALVEAUX: OK.
LIN: Thank you very much and I really do appreciate your opinions.
MALVEAUX: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired January 19, 2003 - 18:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: We're at a point in the show now where we're going to tackle a subject many people don't even feel comfortable talking about in public. It's race.
Do you realize it's been nearly 35 years since civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated, and in those crucial three decades the dream he so passionately spoke of has in part come to fruition or has it?
CNN's Whitney Casey takes a closer look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
WHITNEY CASEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A dream that wasn't realized by Patricia Due but instead in some respects years later by her three daughters.
TANARARIVE DUE: We never went to segregated schools. In fact, we lived in a mostly White neighborhood so I was bussed with the White children into a Black neighborhood when I was in the fifth grade because that was how integration was achieved.
CASEY: An achievement and a dream that according to a recent Harvard study has begun to unravel. The integration of Black students like the Dues increased continuously from the 1950s to the last 1980s.
But now the study shows the trend has reversed. Segregation is on the rise and a new group of minorities are at the center of what the author dubs re-segregation.
GARY ORFIELD, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Latino students are our biggest minority group now and very rapidly growing. They're the most segregated by race and poverty and interestingly by language and they're having the greatest educational problems.
CASEY: Problems New York City educator Martha Olson sees mounting every day. Two years ago, Ms. Olson left her job as a successful attorney to teach social studies at a high school in the South Bronx. Her students are roughly 60 percent Latino, 36 percent Black, and less than two percent White. She celebrates this racial diversity.
What do they learn from each other in that kind of diverse climate?
MARTHA OLSON, NYC TEACHER: Well, it's fun. You go to a school dance and the music flips between Marengue and rap, and just like that you know and the kids are all out on the dance floor and it goes back and forth and you see, you know, there's a wonderful blending of cultures there.
CASEY: But Ms. Olson also points out that although racially diverse, 85 percent of her students are poor enough to be eligible for free lunch.
OLSON: They don't have role models, you know, and none of them really have that many role models from their community because they're all from the same lower socioeconomic class.
CASEY: So they don't see what is possible?
OLSON: Exactly.
CASEY: Ms. Olson's school, according to the Harvard study, is considered a minority school meaning minorities are in the majority, a type of re-segregated school the study says is on the increase. Currently across the U.S. one in six Black children attend a minority school. For Latinos it's one in nine. But for Whites it's less than one in 1,000.
As we remember Martin Luther King's birthday, the question remains is the dream of desegregation still alive?
CHESTER FINK, FORDHAM FOUNDATION: My impression is that most parents are a lot more interested in whether their kids are learning than in the color of the skin of the kid at the next desk.
CASEY: The Dues say the child at the next desk does matter. It's sometimes the only glimpse of the possibilities that could lie ahead.
Whitney Casey CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LIN: Well, interestingly enough President Bush brought affirmative action into the glare of the 21st Century spotlight this week by singling out the University of Michigan's admission policy.
Now he wants the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. In the aftermath, the president's two top African-American advisers are weighing in. They are divided.
CNN's Patty Davis picks up the story from here.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
PATTY DAVIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Secretary of State Colin Powell says he strongly backs affirmative action for university admissions.
COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I believe race should be a factor among many other factors in determining the makeup of a student body at a university.
DAVIS: Powell's statement goes beyond what President Bush said last week that he believes in racial diversity in higher education but not the way the University of Michigan goes about it.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The quota systems that use race to include or exclude people from higher education and the opportunities it offers are divisive, unfair, and impossible to square with the Constitution.
DAVIS: The Bush administration filed a brief in support of three White students who say they were unfairly denied admission to the university. The case is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sunday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice repeated that she thinks race should be considered if other methods don't bring diversity to campuses. Rice, who is a former provost at Stanford University, says she benefited from Stanford's policies on hiring minorities.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I went to Stanford as a young fellow, fresh out of graduate school. I never had a job doing anything. I think they saw a person that they thought had potential and yes, I think they were looking to diversify the faculty.
DAVIS: But Rice made it clear she supports the president's handling of the University of Michigan case. Democrats say the president's stance is divisive.
SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D), CONNECTICUT: That is not the act of a compassionate conservative. It's the act of a cold-hearted conservative. It's wrong.
DAVIS: President Bush's political advisers worry that tougher position backed by conservatives opposing racial preferences in all cases would hurt him at the polls in 2004. Mr. Bush got nine percent of the Black and 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2000 presidential race. Political analysts say it will be crucial for President Bush to win over more minority voters next time.
Patty Davis CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
LIN: All right, we've now heard opinions about race. Let's find out what people who deal with the topic at the grassroots level what they're hearing and just as a gauge I want to quickly show you the results of a CNN/TIME magazine poll. We are poll crazy today but we want to hear from you, so here it is.
This was taken just a few days ago on college and law school admissions. It shows 39 percent favoring racial preferences and 54 percent opposed.
But I want to know is -- well, what I want to know is if there is any debate about it on the street, and for that we're going to turn to syndicated columnist and radio talk show host Armstrong Williams. He joins us along with syndicated columnist and author Julianne Malveaux, hi Armstrong, hi Julianne.
ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Hi, how you doing?
JULIANNE MALVEAUX, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Hi, how you doing?
LIN: Good, good. Just so we all know what we're talking about here, I want to show people a graphic. I hope we can put this up. This is actually the point system that the University of Michigan uses in its application process, the points that a student will get.
If a student has a 4.0 GPA, they get 80 points; diversity, 20 points; athlete, 20 points; and so forth. If you live in Michigan you get ten, et cetera. So that is the point scale and what we're talking about is the points that you get, 20 points for diversity.
Armstrong, is this unconstitutional?
WILLIAMS: It is unconstitutional. It is unconstitutional when of all the categories that you named all of them include people of all walks of life except the diversity. It's only limited to Blacks, Asian, and Hispanics, and to just give someone 20 points for walking in the door when no achievement in academics is involved is just totally unfair.
It's racist in its own way and it's unconstitutional. I think if you were to base this on socioeconomic background or income level, I think you could achieve your same goal without injecting race.
I think what has happened in America is that we have first, second, and third generation minorities in this country who are still benefiting from affirmative action. They use affirmative action to get in college. They use affirmative action to get their jobs. They use affirmative action to get contracts.
At some point, they've got to graduate from this program and rise and fall on their own merit. What has happened here is that the poor...
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, who needs to graduate is America? Who needs to graduate is America.
WILLIAMS: The poor really does not benefit.
MALVEAUX: The nation has not yet provided us with equal opportunity. The nation has not yet leveled the playing field. Armstrong is being extraordinarily disingenuous, and while I respect my colleague for his punditry, certainly not for his constitutional scholarship.
When you have a Senate, when you have economic institutions, financial institutions, and other institutions that are literally segregated, we still need affirmative action to level the playing field. LIN: Let's simplify this. Let's simply this, Julianne, let me -- I'm going to ask the director to throw a picture up. There we are. The three of us here, take a look at us America. I mean Julianne, do you think honestly would we all be where we are today if it weren't for affirmative action?
MALVEAUX: Well, that's my point exactly and that's why we need to continue affirmative action.
LIN: But would we?
MALVEAUX: Just a minute. Go back and look at those points you put up there in terms of what you got points for. There are 150 total points that exist. Twenty of those points are for diversity.
There's a point system that -- there's a point you didn't put up there which was provost preference. That's also 20 points. So anyone the provost decides he or she wants to favor can get 20 points.
The fact is 20 points out of 150 does not cripple a qualified applicant. The whiners in this race are the Whites who sued because they couldn't hang. They ought to sue the other White people who had lower scores and lower grades than they did.
But race is such a hot button in America that that's where we go. We can't prove that SAT scores are correlated with achievement and when we look at Armstrong's argument you're taking it out of the context of history.
Yes, there was a quota system in America and that quota system was no Black people until approximately 1970 in our elite universities, and so I think affirmative action is appropriate. It's remedial. It's necessary until the playing field is leveled.
LIN: All right, I want to end this point on some of the solutions that President Bush has been talking about. Armstrong is it really reasonable when the president talks about these race neutral options.
For example, just taking ten percent or you know the top ten percent or the top percentage of any class of students say even in a poor, minority neighborhood, the top ten percent still will qualify at a state university. That is the policy as I understand it in the University of Texas system that he supported.
But it has shown not to necessarily dramatically increase the number of minority students even though the population of minorities has dramatically increased in the state of Texas.
WILLIAMS: You know but it is a start and at least it's based on achievement. It's based on excellence. It's based on academics. You don't tell someone by giving them 20 points I don't think you can achieve like everyone else so therefore we're going to handicap the race in your favor.
You can not use the same morally bankrupt policies that we fought to get the civil rights legislation and reverse ourselves and use those same policies to reverse discrimination against someone else. It's not there. It's not right.
And, to answer your question that you asked whether or not the three of us have benefited from affirmative action, let me just tell you. I have not. My parents paid for my education through college out of their pockets, out of their hard-earned capital from their farm.
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, with all due respect...
WILLIAMS: I can only answer for myself but now -- may I say this?
MALVEAUX: ...yes, you have. You have benefited.
WILLIAMS: Let me finish my point. Could you not be rude and just let me finish my point?
MALVEAUX: Armstrong, you have benefited from affirmative action. You benefited from affirmative action as all people of color have.
LIN: We are running out of time.
MALVEAUX: And the fact is that the Texas system...
WILLIAMS: You can't speak for me.
MALVEAUX: The Texas system is a system that...
WILLIAMS: Just be rude here.
MALVEAUX: ...that simply has not shown to be fair. It has not shown to be fair.
WILLIAMS: Just because you're Black does not mean that you're where you are because of affirmative action.
WILLIAMS: I think we got a pretty good idea of where you both stand on this.
MALVEAUX: Armstrong what affirmative action means is that you broaden your applicant pool.
WILLIAMS: What about hard work?
MALVEAUX: Hard work matters.
WILLIAMS: What about discipline? (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
MALVEAUX: Anybody who achieves through hard work...
LIN: All right, hard work is great and I got a lot of work ahead of me in this program. I'm sorry, Armstrong, Julianne, we got to call it a day.
MALVEAUX: OK.
LIN: Thank you very much and I really do appreciate your opinions.
MALVEAUX: Thank you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
