Background on Affirmative Action

Affirmative action has been both praised and denounced as an answer to racial inequality. The term "affirmative action" was first introduced by President Kennedy in 1961 as a way of fighting discrimination that had persisted in spite of civil rights laws and constitutional guarantees.

The concept was developed and enforced by President Johnson, who said, “This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek… not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result."

A Temporary Policy

Focusing on education and jobs, affirmative action policies required that active measures be taken to ensure that blacks and other minorities enjoyed the same opportunities for promotions, salary increases, career advancement, school admissions, scholarships, and financial aid that had been the nearly exclusive province of whites. From the outset, affirmative action was envisioned as a temporary remedy that would end once there was a "level playing field" for all Americans.

Reverse Discrimination

By the late '70s, reverse discrimination became an issue, the best example being the famous Supreme Court Case University of California Regents vs. Bakke. Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a row by a medical school that had accepted minority applicants with lower test and GPA scores. The school had a separate admissions policy for minorities and reserved 16 out of 100 places for minority students.

After being rejected for the second time, Bakke filed suit in the Superior Court of California claiming that the school had discriminated against him on the basis of his race, violating his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the California Constitution, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Bakke won, but affirmative action was still upheld, just restricted. The Supreme Court clarified that while affirmative action was a necessary policy, there shouldn't be a quota (set number) of minority applicants to fill.

The Backlash

Opposition against affirmative action soon began to mount. To political conservatives, the system was a zero-sum game that opened the door for jobs, promotions, or education to minorities while it shut the door on whites. "Preferential treatment" and "quotas" became expressions of contempt.

Even more controversial was the accusation that some minorities enjoyed playing the role of professional victim. Why could some minorities who had also experienced terrible adversity and racism - Jews and Asians, in particular - manage to make the American way work for them without government handouts?

The Liberal Argument

Liberals countered that "the land of opportunity" was a very different place for European immigrants than it was for those forced here in the chains of slavery. As historian Roger Wilkins pointed out, "blacks have a 375-year history on this continent: 245 involving slavery, 100 involving legalized discrimination, and only 30 involving anything else."

Liberals also pointed out that another popular conservative argument - minorities were threatening the jobs of whites with the help of affirmative action - contradicted the reality that white men held the most powerful roles in a company, determining salaries and hiring policies.

The Issue Turns Gray

The debate about affirmative action has also grown more murky in recent years. Many liberals, for example, can understand the injustice of affirmative action in a case like Wygant vs. Jackson Board of Education (1986) where black employees kept their jobs while white employees with seniority were laid off. And many conservatives would not be able to come up with a better alternative to affirmative action in United States v. Paradise (1987) in which the defiantly racist Alabama Department of Public Safety refused to promote any black above entry level even after a full 12 years of court orders demanded it.

Landmark Ruling Supports Affirmative Action

In a landmark decision in 2003, the Supreme Court supported the right of affirmative action in the college setting.

Two cases were involved: the University of Michigan's undergraduate program (Gratz v. Bollinger) and its law school (Grutter v. Bollinger). The Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan Law School's policy, ruling that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because there is a compelling interest to create diversity in an education setting, however they could not employ any quotas. Furthermore, affirmative action was no longer justified as a way of redressing past oppression and injustice, but promoted a "compelling state interest" in diversity at all levels of society.

In 2006, Michigan voters approved a state constitutional amendment that prohibited "all sex- and race-based preferences in public education, public employment, and public contracting." This prompted a reevaluation of the 2003 court-ruling, and in 2011, the decision was repealed. Once again, we see a pattern of indecision and division in the Supreme Court.

What It Means Today

Affirmative action programs acknowledge that hundreds of years of discrimination cannot be erased in a few decades and continue to hold back women and people of color. It is an important tool to provide qualified individuals with equal access to educational and professional opportunities they would otherwise have been denied despite their strong qualifications.

Discrimination continues to be a problem in America, and disparities in opportunities continue to persist. In fact, a study found that black job applicants without a criminal record were no more likely to receive a callback from employers than were white applicants with a felony conviction. In addition, residential segregation, which greatly impacts education and job opportunities, has been found to be as great if not greater than it was at the end of the Jim Crow era in the early 1960s. It is for these reasons that affirmative action policies exist.

Sources:

CivilRights.org


Welcome to the White House


CRS Report for Congress – Federal Affirmative Action Law: A brief history


Northwestern Observer


Salon.com