Abstract

Gertrude Ezorsky's very first sentence is wrong — “The affirmative action programs begun in the 1960s have been diminished in the 1980s in response to a different political climate” (1). Practices such as “race norming” of test scores on employment examinations — whereby the millions of Americans who took federal civil service examinations, most state civil service exams and many tests for the private sector, were graded according to race — were institutionalized only in 1981. According to this practice, if a white, a black, and an Hispanic all answered every question the same way, the white would receive one score, the Hispanic would be given an additional 15 points, and the black about 28 points above the white.