Legally, we want the system to be color-blind we want everyone to have the same rights.
And many people are happy, or will say they are, with affirmative action in the second sense so far as the outcome is concerned. You can use terms like “targets” and “goals,” both of which are constitutionally legit, but if you have an idea of the point at which you would attain a critical mass then you have a quota.Īpart from stone-cold racists, everyone is happy, or claims to be happy, with affirmative action in the first sense. But that is essentially what affirmative action in this second sense entails. This form of affirmative action is usually branded by those who disapprove of it with the dreaded Q-word, “quota.” After 1978, when the Supreme Court declared racial quotas unconstitutional, affirmative-action programs avoided any suggestion of the Q-word. Since the late nineteen-sixties, however, affirmative action has also had a more proactive meaning, as the name of an effort to attain a certain number, or, as it’s called today, “critical mass,” of underrepresented groups in a business or an educational institution by, if necessary, giving applicants from those groups preference over similarly or better qualified whites. You do not have to give them preferential treatment. In this context, “affirmative” means: demonstrate that you did your best to find and promote members of underrepresented groups. Their job is to insure not only that hiring and promotion are handled in a color-blind manner but that good-faith efforts are made to include racial minorities (and sometimes individuals in other categories, such as women or veterans or disabled persons) in the hiring pool, and, if they are qualified, to attempt to recruit them. Many firms and educational institutions have affirmative-action or diversity officers. “Do something” is still one of the meanings of “affirmative action” today. Do something.” What they were supposed to do, aside from not discriminating, was unspecified. The committee had no real enforcement mechanism, though, so “affirmative action” was intended to communicate to firms that needed to integrate their workforce something like “Don’t just stand there. Its purview, like the purview of committees dating back to the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, was the awarding of federal contracts, and its mandate was to see that companies the federal government did business with did not discriminate on the basis of race. Taylor needed a flexible phrase because Kennedy’s committee was a bureaucratic entity with a vague mandate meant to signal the Administration’s commitment to fairness in employment. And that is when Taylor inserted the words “affirmative action.” He liked the phrase, he later said, because of the alliteration (or the assonance). Taylor read the draft and said he thought it could use a little work Johnson asked him to do a rewrite. When Taylor showed up, Johnson handed him a draft of what would become Executive Order 10925, setting up the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson was to chair. They chatted, and Johnson asked him to come by his office. Kennedy was sworn in, in 1961, he dropped in on the inaugural ball for Texans in order to shake hands with the new Vice-President, Lyndon B. According to Nicholas Lemann’s history of meritocracy, “ The Big Test,” the man who suggested it was an African-American lawyer named Hobart Taylor, Jr. The term was introduced to the Kennedy Administration almost sixty years ago, and its arrival was somewhat haphazard. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action.
We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted not just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat people of color differently in ways that might be beneficial. The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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