Agreeing — and disagreeing — about affirmative action | RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.

Radio host Tavis Smiley and I agree on nine out of 10 issues. After we’ve spent nearly 30 years in each other’s lives, who could have guessed the 10th issue would be affirmative action?

Not the two young men who, in 1994, were hired by ABC News Radio in Los Angeles to host a nightly talk show. The 20-somethings in baseball caps got the gig because they were overachievers, superb communicators and hard workers.

There was also the fact that, as George Green, then-general manager of KABC, crassly told the Los Angeles Times: “We thought it would be an interesting, novel thing to have a Black and a Hispanic discussing all the issues — not just generational issues, but what’s going on in the community.”

At the time, one of the hot issues was affirmative action. Today, that subject is still driving a national argument, even though many people don’t have the foggiest idea what the term means.

I asked Tavis for his definition.

“It’s a corrective program for past and enduring, injustices,” he said. “It’s an attempt to right a wrong. It allows people of color — in my case, African Americans — to be ushered into the room. You have to be qualified. But affirmative action gets you into that space.”

For me and many other Latinos, the value of affirmative action isn’t wrapped up in the past. It’s about the future. It is estimated that, by 2042, whites will be a statistical minority in the United States. So it’s not a bad thing that your kid goes to college with people of color.

Yet, there are other ways to achieve diversity. Affirmative action — created by an executive order from President John F. Kennedy in 1961 — has overstayed its welcome by about three decades.

Tavis disagrees.

“Black people lag far behind in every single leading-economic-indicator category,” he said. “So I get bothered by people, respectfully, who want to look at the clock but not the data. The data suggests that the clock has not run out on the need for affirmative action.”

Recently, the six conservative Supreme Court justices — several of whom had, over the years, expressed contempt for taking race into account in college admissions — disregarded the facts and the law and instead let politics be their guide in striking down the practice.

A conservative activist group, Students for Fair Admissions, had sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, alleging discrimination against Asian Americans.

The plaintiffs failed to show discriminatory intent or disparate impact. There is no conspiracy to keep Asians out of college because they’re seen as inferior. Besides, many beat the odds; at Harvard, Asian Americans account for nearly 30 percent of the Class of 2027.

The affirmative-action debate is surreal for African Americans and Latinos, many of whom still fight for opportunities.

That includes those two guys in the baseball caps. In the 1990s, the cohort of talk radio hosts was almost entirely white males. Today, it’s pretty much the same.

Smiley is now a co-owner of KBLA-radio, 1580 AM, a progressive Black radio station in Los Angeles, where he hosts a daily talk show. I’m a regular contributor to that show.

Neither of us believes we’ve benefited from affirmative action in our careers. Many media companies didn’t get the diversity memo. They do what they want to do when they want to do it, and they’re immune to pressure.

“Affirmative action has not helped me in my climb,” Smiley said. “Yet I’ve been a strong proponent of it because I know it helps the least among us.”

I don’t think so. A school such as Harvard admits Black valedictorians, Native American student body presidents and Latino star athletes — all of them raised in the suburbs by parents with graduate degrees — and it calls that practice affirmative action. It’s not. It is just a Harvard tradition: recognizing excellence.

Smiley’s own pursuit of excellence has been a bumpy road.

“I had to fight to buy a radio station,” he said. “Given the tiny number of Black folks in talk radio, I would have loved an affirmative-action program for owners of radio stations. I wish there had been a program to make white folks do right by me. There is no such thing.”

And what about the Supreme Court decision?

“It will have an impact,” Smiley said. “But, at the same time, the story of Black folks in this country, and Latinos in this country, is that we never let misery have the last word. We’ll just work harder and continue to fight. And when we fight, we win.”

On that point, my old friend and I agree.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.