Apartheid. USA 1988

July 14, 1987:

After decades of fighting ‘apartheid’ in the United States, none of the 500 top American companies as identified by Fortune magazine is headed by a black American. The number of blacks holding policy-making and managerial positions in the Federal Government has also dropped dramatically since before President Ronald Reagan took of-

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fice, from 44 in 1980 to 20 in 1986, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The number of racial discrimination complaints filed by Federal workers is also on the rise. ‘We are getting more calls for help,’ said Rubye Fields, President of Blacks In Government, an organization representing 5 000 Federal, state and local government employees. Black employees frequently say that there is ‘a glass ceiling’ - invisible but very real - that keeps them from the top. Those interviewed said they faced obstacles peculiar to black people in predominantly white institutions. Besides plain prejudice, which often manifests itself in the implication that blacks ‘are not intelligent enough’, according to those interviewed, there are factors even more subtle. These include, black executives said, the predilection of some managers to promote people similar to themselves, and the social and professional estrangement that many blacks say they feel among white colleagues, especially in the absence of a black mentor. ‘You always feel like you are being watched and judged,’ said a black investment banker with a big Wall Street firm, who asked not to be identified.

A black who does break through finds himself at times being one of only few blacks among hundreds of people at his job level, and thus faced with severe pressure to prove himself. Derrick Bell, who in 1971, at the age of 38, became the first tenured black professor at the Harvard Law School, recalled that at the time there were no other minority members on the faculty. Six years later he threatened to resign if the school did not hire more black faculty members. ‘Now, out of a faculty of 70 or 80, we have two tenured black professors, two blacks who are in line for tenure and two visiting professors who are black,’ Professor Bell said. ‘It's nothing to boast about, but it is better.’

A black associate at a New York law firm, who like most other blacks interviewed did not want to be identified, asked a Times reporter to take notes in his office on a legal pad of the office rather than in a reporter's notebook. ‘That way,’ he said,’ they will think you are a client. I

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have too much at stake here. I am one year removed from being considered as a partner. I don't want to say or do anything that could jeopardize my standing.’ The associate went on to say that he felt blacks were held to higher standards than their white counterparts and that the slightest irregularity in their work or personality would be used to exclude them from the reward of partnership.^131.

131. The New York Times, from a report by Lena Williams