Affirmative Action and Its Role in the United States

Affirmative Action and Its Role in the United States

"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 long-standing and persistent discrimination." President Clinton 1999.

The job of affirmative action was to promote fairness in hiring by the federal government and by defense contractors. It traces its origins in President Roosevelt's Executive Order in 1941. The President issued an executive that barred hiring discrimination by defense contractors and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee. President Roosevelt's action was in response to A. P. Randolph's threat of a March on Washington. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower inherited and preserved The Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 ordering federal contractors to take "affirmative action" measures to achieve fairness in the workplace. And in 1964, the Congress of the United States passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited various kinds of racial discrimination: in public accommodations, discrimination in federally assisted programs, discrimination in employment and discrimination in labor unions.

In 1973, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won a discrimination suit against AT&T, and, as a result, AT&T agreed to pay $15 million to back pay and to award $23 million to pay raises to Blacks, other racial minorities and women who experienced discrimination. In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case of DeFunis vs. Odegaard, in which the plaintiff alleged that the affirmative action program at the University of Washington was admitting less qualified minorities. In 1978, in the case of Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, the High Court ruled that a) race can be taken into account as one factor determining college admission policies b) but declared it unconstitutional for a state to set aside a specific number of positions for a designated group. In the same year, Congress passed the Civil Service Reform Act, which calls for immediate development of a minority recruitment program to raise minority representation in specific federal jobs. In Fullilove vs. Klutznick, 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was appropriate to use limited quotas or a small fraction of minority set-asides to correct past discrimination.

In 1995 four things that were relevant to Affirmative Action happened: 1) In California two white scholars and a state legislature lead a ballot effort to prohibit the use of gender, race, or national origin as criteria for granting preferential treatment in hiring for public sector jobs, education, and in awarding contracts. 2) In February 1995, each of the two Republican senators who are also presidential hopefuls threatens to abolish federal affirmative action programs if elected President of the U.S. 3) In March 1995, President Clinton orders a review of federal affirmative action programs and expresses intent to protect those AA that work and abolish those that don't. 4) On July 19, 1995 President Bill Clinton delivered a speech in which he endorsed affirmative action. The President's central message was: "Mend affirmative action but don't end it." In a Time/CNN poll taken after the speech, 65 percent of those questioned said AA should be mended and just 24 percent said AA should be ended.

On the same day, July 19 1995 President Bill Clinton sent a memorandum on affirmative action to all heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. In his memorandum on affirmative action President Bill Clinton (1995) asked all Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies to eliminate or reform any AA program that "creates quotas, creates preferences or unqualified individuals, creates reverse discrimination, or continues even after its equal opportunity purposes have been achieved. He also requested that they keep affirmative action programs that do not violate the policy principles he spelled out. In November 1996, the majority of California residents voted in favor of a proposition that prohibits the use of gender, race, or national origin for granting preference in hiring for public sector jobs, education and in awarding business contracts.

Lyndon Johnson made a statement that has been often quoted by others since he said it in 1965 at Howard University, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."

In his book entitled, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America, Ira Katznelson gives the opinion that President Johnson had it all wrong, and the phrase "hobbled by chains," implying as it did that without government intervention blacks would be simply incapable of making their way in the modern economy, was grievously misleading. To the contrary, he maintains, black America would long since have upgraded itself on its own had it not been for systematic betrayals by liberals themselves, and specifically by the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

With regard to welfare legislation, labor law, military segregation during World War II, and the postwar treatment of veterans, Katznelson demonstrates that the country's liberal Democratic leadership repeatedly deferred to the racists who controlled Southern politics and made possible the election of Democratic Presidents. Given their power in the party, the Southerners succeeded again and again in ensuring that even ostensibly color-blind programs would be administered at the local level; they thereby all but guaranteed preferential treatment of whites, especially but not exclusively in the South. A large case in point cited by Katznelson was the GI Bill of Rights, which, though celebrated for its educational benefits, low-cost mortgages, and business loans, substantially bypassed black veterans.

According to Katznelson, Southern Democrats in Congress also saw to it that some of FDR's New-Deal legislation would simply not apply to blacks. He returns repeatedly to the fact that in the 1930's and 40's, maids and farm workers accounted for the great bulk of black employees. Yet the Wagner Act and other labor laws failed to protect