Affirmative Action and the People
President Lyndon Johnson once said to a graduating class in 1965 at Howard University, that "you do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair . . . This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity-not just legal equity but human ability-not just equality as a right and in theory, but equality as a fact and as a result."
Johnson was a firm believer in the American dream of opportunity and the value of responsibility. He believed that with our 'Great Society," we held within us, the ability to bring our country together into one strong community, even amid our vast amounts of diversity.
It is highly ironic that it is Affirmative Action today that is so divisive, since its beginnings 35 years ago, under Republican President Richard Nixon; it purported the idea of equal opportunities for all Americans. And that's what Affirmative Action has come to represent, a never-ending search for the people's equal opportunity. If nothing else, our country is made of merely of a set of ideals to which we hold true and dear. We believe that all men are created equal and that they have been endowed with certain inalienable rights upon birth. Among these beliefs are some of our most precious: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The entirety of our nations history can almost be seen as an effort to preserve these beliefs, as well as an effort to make then real in all senses of the ideal, both in the laws for and the minds of the citizenry. As we all know, our nation's history is marred with an imbalance between racial groups, minorities and gender based issues. It is for this reason Thomas Jefferson stated that he trembled to think of God as just after slavery.
The grandson of a slave, Justice Thurgood Marshall said, "The government our founders devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights we hold as fundamental today." Nowhere does that ring more true then in the struggles and milestones we Americans have faced in the name of equality.
The civil rights revolution was fundamentally a struggle for liberty, not equality. It secured full rights of citizenship for African Americans, but it did little to address the deep-seated inequalities between blacks and whites that were the legacy of two centuries of slavery and another century of Jim Crow. (Goldberg and Solomos)
Throughout its history, affirmative action has been the cause of a tremendous amount of controversy, but nothing is more prevalent then the idea that it was never used, intended to or implemented to truly solve the equality issues of our nation. From the very start until this current date, Affirmative Action has been more of a political tool to polarize the constituency and separate liberal from conservative views.
"In the current American racial culture, Affirmative Action is more important to participants in the policy debate as a weapon with which to attack enemies in order to win some other battle than as an issue in and of itself." (Hochschild)
Long before Affirmative Action, black leaders were demanding "compensatory treatment" for blacks in jobs and education. This caused a spilt in the liberal camp, as some prominent liberals declared their opposition to the "radical" direction the civil rights movement was taking. This was a sign that the nation would not go much beyond the grudging passage of civil rights legislation, so instead, Affirmative Action evolved through a series of executive orders, court decisions, and administrative policies, not directly from legislation.
"It is a policy that grew out of many years of trying to navigate between two unacceptable pasts. One was to say simply that we declared discrimination illegal and that's enough. We saw that that way still relegated blacks with college degrees to jobs as railroad porters, and kept women with degrees under a glass ceiling with a lower paycheck," said President Bill Clinton in an Address about Affirmative Action.
One of the great ironies of racial politics in the post-civil rights era is that the Philadelphia Plan -- originally developed in President Lyndon Johnson's Department of Labor -- was implemented by republicans over opposition of the famed "liberal coalition" and without notable support of the civil rights establishment. (Skyretny)
President Nixon actively fought off a congressional attempt to pass an anti-affirmative action rider that had the support of many democrats. Subsequently the department of labor issued a new set of rules that extended the Philadelphia Plan to all federal contractors, including colleges and universities. Thus, the scope of affirmative action policy expanded beyond anything contemplated when the Philadelphia Plan had been disinterred in 1969. (Graham)
The Plan embodied none of the "liberal" elements that were ideologically anathema to Republicans. It envisioned no new government programs, no make-work schemes, and no major public expenditures.
Affirmative Action was unquestionably the most important policy initiative of the post-civil rights era. It drove a wedge into the structure of occupational segregation that had existed since slavery. And Affirmative Action achieved its principal policy objective, which was the rapid integration of blacks into occupational sectors where they had been excluded historically.
There is a racial division of labor, a system of occupational segregation that relegates most blacks in to work in the least desirable job sectors or that excludes them from job markets altogether.
"During the century after slavery, the nation had the perfect opportunity to integrate blacks into the North's growing industries. It was not southern racism, but its northern variant, that prevented this outcome. It was an invisible color line across northern industries that barred blacks categorically from employment in the vast manufacturing sector, except for the low-paying jobs that white workers spurned. The long term results are incalculable, because it closed off a major channel of escape from southern oppression." (Graham) This was made possible because the North had access to an inexhaustible supply of immigrant labor.
It was not the Civil War but the mechanization of agriculture a whole century later that finally liberated blacks from their historical role as agriculture laborers in the South's feudal economy. Agricultural technology ha defectively rendered black labor obsolete and with it the case system whose underlying function had been to regulate and exploit black labor. However, technological revolution in the agriculture lagged nearly half a century behind the technological revolution in industry, and it had fateful consequences, for blacks in both junctures. The labor markets in the north had been captured by immigrant groups that engaged in a combination of ethnic nepotism and unabashed racism. (Muller)
The lesson of history here is that blacks have gained access to manufacturing jobs only as a last resort -- when all the other sources of labor have dried up.
In 1978 Justice Lewis Powell in his opinion of the famous Bakke decision, ruled that racial preferences are permissible if their purpose is to improve racial diversity among students, and if they do not stipulate fixed minority quotas, but take race into account as one factor among many. Many lawyers fear that the Supreme Court will soon reconsider its Bakke ruling, however, and declare that any racial preference in an admissions process is, after all, unconstitutional. It will not be only ironic but sad if the court reverses it's own longstanding ruling now, but cause dramatic evidence of the value of affirmative action in elite higher education has just become available.
Critics of the policy have long argued, among other things, that it does more harm than good, because it exacerbates rather than reduces racial hostility, and because it damages the minority students who are selected for elite schools where they must compete with other students who test scores and other academic qualifications are much higher then their own. But a study "The Shape of the River" draws on huge database of information about student records and histories on sophisticated statistical techniques, not only to refute those claims but to demonstrate the contrary.
Affirmative action has achieved remarkable success: it has produced higher rates of graduation among black college students, more black leaders in the industry, the professions and community and neighborhood service, and more sustained interaction and friendship among different races than would otherwise have been possible.
If the Supreme Court declares affirmative action unconstitutional, the study declares, black enrollment in elite universities and colleges will be sharply reduce, and scarcely any black students will be admitted to the best law and medical schools. That would be a huge defeat for racial harmony and justice. The distribution of position and power that Affirmative action helps to achieve, that is, flows and changes naturally in accordance with millions of choices that people made for themselves. If the policy works to improve the overall position of any minority, it does so only because other people have chosen to exploit the results of that policy. (Freeman)
If the justices recognize the aspect of what our best justices aim to do as well as their academic need of educational diversity, then they will have served us particularly well. The will have acted not just as judges allowing crucial education initiative to continue, but as teachers helping to explain to the nation the true and continuing costs to everyone of our racist past and the distinct promise of an educational policy that can help us all to achieve, if we really want it, a more perfect union.
Johnson's executive order, ordered companies to use -- then a makeshift form of -- Affirmative Action to compensate for past discrimination -- called executive order 1126. Without the presence of minorities, it was not enough for companies to simply say they didn't discriminate against them, but they had to go out and recruit minorities and women. The test was whether or not, at the end, the firm had a good mix of employees. The mix had to reflect closely, the percentage of minorities and women in the larger labor force. The Equal Employment opportunities commission was empowered to make sure that these companies actually went through with these Affirmative Action programs. Even colleges needed to sometimes implement these programs.
Affirmative Action in the broad sense tends to mean that race or some other status -- gender -- for were necessary for compensatory action. Also favoring members of a disadvantaged group, who themselves may not have been victims of discrimination, for Affirmative Action. Are the minorities that are highbred, qualified? People often argue that qualifications are sacrificed.
Affirmative Action, however has given more then opportunity to individual Americans. Studies show that a more diverse work environment breeds greater productivity and lucrative practices. (Goldberg and Solomos)
Some say that even good affirmative action programs are no longer needed; that it is enough to resort to the courts or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) because no longer is there any discrimination in our society of a continuous, perpetual and systematic nature.
The unemployment rate for African Americans remains twice that of whites. The Hispanic rate is even higher. The earnings gap between women and men have narrowed, but many of them only make -- in comparable jobs -- 72% that of men. According to the Glass Ceiling Report of 1995 -- a report sponsored by Republican members of Congress -- only six-tenths of one percent of senior management positions are held by African Americans in the nation's largest companies; four-tenths by Hispanic Americans, three-tenths by Asian Americans. Three to five percent of the position are held by women. 43% of our work force is made up of white men, but they hold 95% of the jobs. (Goldberg and Solomos)
The federal government received more than 90,000 complaints based on race and gender, about employment discrimination. Less than 3.5% of these cases involved reverse discrimination. These are just small proof that say the, crimes and violence based on hate against Hispanics, Asians, African Americans and other minorities still play a roll in our society.
Since the mid-1960's the black middle class no longer has been relegated strictly to the lower ends of occupation and income hierarchies or restricted by geography. A new structure of inequality was created by a system of employment opportunities that channeled some blacks into racilized functions. This system of jobs afforded some blacks a chance to succeed economically and garner unprecedented, albeit temporary, status in white institutions. (Wilson)
Progress was limited because the incumbents of racialized jobs simply did not have the power to change institutional practices. Their jobs helped companies conform to federal regulations, and programmatic allocations -- such as technical assistance, corporate funding of community based projects and job training --- both quelled urban pressures and undermined claims of racism, creating a progressive, more socially conscious, corporate image. (Wilson) But these allocations were too small and were viewed by companies as a short-term atonement for past grievances, rather than as long-term commitment to justice. Racialized jobs, therefore, were instrumental in negotiating the needs of the black community and in distributing corporate resources, but they ultimately maintained inequality by temporarily abating black pressures and meanwhile marginalizing the incumbent. (Wilson)
The link between black class mobility and political pressure predicts the fragility of the middle-class position. (Cose) The status of the economy, the level of black activism, and the public policy agenda all assisted blacks to rise in their position of economic standing.
In the national debate, some social critics see African American dependence on government as a negative outcome of federal protections. But dependency is unavoidable part in blacks' progress, because the federal government did not truly make an effort to change the intrinsic nature of the economy or the employers. Equal employment and color-blind hiring are not institutionalized in the labor market, and fair employment practices would not continue in the government's absence. (Cose) We must think of affirmative action not only as reparations for past discrimination but also as an instrument necessary to prevent present acts of employment discrimination.
As a society we seem to disdain history; we tend to ignore the intransigence, the meaning, and the magnitude of racial inequality, making it easier for social critics to trivialize the need for affirmative action. Ahistorical assessments of the impact anti-bias employment legislation fail to recognize the potential for future racial conflict in the U.S. If affirmative-action and other race-specific legislation are dismantled, there will be no mechanisms in existence to replace them. Racial strife threatened the fabric of the country and because the mechanisms for racial separation in the core of the economy and our social culture, they have proven to be tough and enduring.
Some people question the fairness and effectiveness of particular affirmative action programs. Some people question even the fundamental purpose of the entire effort. There are people who honestly believe that simply by using affirmative action, group preferences will always take place over individual merit. They believe that that Affirmative Action always leads to some sort or brand of reverse discrimination. That ultimately, it inevitably means that it "demeans those who benefit from it and discriminates against those who are not helped by it," said President Bill Clinton.
I know that there are some people who are honestly concerned about the times when affirmative action doesn't work. When it's done wrongly, and produces bad results, and I also know there are times that employers don't use it correctly. They may give opportunities the unqualified, instead of the qualified. In so doing, this could almost allow a different kind of discrimination, a reverse discrimination. When this happens, it is wrong, and must be resisted; but that isn't Affirmative Action, and that is also not legal
The way we as a people through our continuous effort through perfection in society opened our hearts and minds is what lead Affirmative action to success. But most importantly it was the pressure of court decisions, the pressure of legislation, the pressure of executive actions that proved. Laws alone do not, can not, and will not change society. Thinking patterns and habits continue to persist in our culture, and the more they do so, the more is required in our effort and steadfastness of making efforts to open and create new opportunities. We're on a quest to more quickly discover ways of righting the wrongs of the past, and truly representing our ideals of equal opportunity.
"The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop a systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced longstanding and persistent discrimination," said President Bill Clinton. There is nothing more honorable the pursuit of equality, and it for this reason Affirmative Action should stand until we no longer face the discrimination problems that plague our country today.