 | Affirmative action: Encyclopedia II - Affirmative action - History
Affirmative action - History
The terms "affirmative action" and "positive discrimination" originate in law, where it is common for lawyers to speak of "affirmative" or "positive" remedies that command the wrongdoer to do something. In contrast, "negative" remedies command the wrongdoer to not do something or to stop doing something.
Affirmative action - American history
The initial successes of the American Civil Rights Movement brought about negative remedies that attempted to prevent majority ethnic or racial groups from discriminating against minorities. However, by the mid-1960s, when such prohibitions failed to ameliorate existing structural inequities, many began to argue that governments should actively intervene, or take affirmative action, to compensate for the lingering effects of past harms.
Contrary to popular belief, and despite his call for a colorblind nation, Martin Luther King Jr. supported affirmative action. Some resolve this contradiction by arguing that he advocated socioeconomic based affirmative action. Others contend that despite his call, he favored race-based affirmative action. King conceded that the vast majority of the poor were black, implying that he could frame his proposals in terms of class and not race, while still achieving the end of compensatory treatment, albeit via a more agreeable position. While he advocates at different times socioeconomic- and race-based affirmative action, his comments seem to favor the latter. Among his comments:
""Whenever this issue [compensatory treatment] is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up."
""A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis. "
""... for two centuries the Negro was enslaved and robbed of any wages — potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America's wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro: it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races."
As one site puts it: "King actually suggested it might be necessary to have something akin to "discrimination in reverse" as a form of national "atonement" for the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation." [1][2][3][4]
In 1962, James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, held a meeting with then vice president Lyndon B. Johnson. Farmer proposed that a program that he called Compensatory Preferential Treatment should be put in place in order to advance the equality of the black race. In 1965, Johnson (then president) renamed Compensatory Preferential Treatment "affirmative action" in a famous speech at Howard University, which became the national justification for moving the country beyond nondiscrimination to a more vigorous effort to improve the status of black Americans:
"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others', and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."
It was a counter-argument to the previously prevailing notion of meritocracy. The skills that merit-based admission rewards are cultivated in children by parents with money. Affirmative action was to be a method by which minorities could eventually develop those skills in their own children.
During the Nixon administration, affirmative action was adopted as a federal mandate for companies with federal contracts and for labor unions whose workers were engaged in those projects. This "revised Philadelphia plan" was spearheaded by Labor Department official Arthur Fletcher.
In the 1960s and 1970s, affirmative action became overwhelmingly popular on campuses across America as mass student protests spurred schools to actively recruit minority applicants. National excitement died down in the late 1970s, and quickly turned to national controversy. Some theorize affirmative action has brought about vast improvement in the class stratification of minorities. From 1960 to 1995, according to data in The Shape of the River by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, the percentage of blacks aged 25–29 who had graduated from college rose from 5.4 to 15.4%, the percentage of blacks in law school grew from below 1 to 7.5%, and the percentage of blacks in medical school increased from 2.2 to 8.1%.
Others contend that affirmative action, per se, cannot be considered the primary agent of change for the growth of black employment in the majority of employment categories in the U.S., as official affirmative action employment programs applied only to government and government contractor hiring. Most Americans worked for small- and medium-sized businesses that did not employ affirmative action programs. Many of these companies, however, espoused the concept of Equal Opportunity Employment: a pledge to not discriminate negatively in hiring and promotion decisions on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, national origin, and in some venues, sexual orientation. Moreover, the growth of the black middle class was on an upward trajectory in the 1950s and 1960s prior to the implementation of the vast majority of affirmative action programs.
While the growth in many areas related to black people have been tremendous over the past three decades (the size of the black middle class, the rate of black homeownership, the number of black men and women in managerial and executive positions, black family wealth), there are those who feel that the lingering problems from a history of black oppression are far from gone for many black people, especially those in the underclass.
Other related archives"Model Minorites", 1960s, 1961, 1965, 1970s, 1972, 1998, 2000, 29 June, Adarand Constructors v. Peña, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Affirmative action bake sale, African Americans, African-Americans, American Civil Rights Movement, American Psychological Association, American civil rights movement, Anglicans, Arthur Fletcher, Ashkenazi Jews, Asian Americans, Asian-Americans, Belgium, Bill Cosby, Bill O'Reilly, British English, California, Cam'ron, Catholics, China, City College of New York, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Colin Powell, Congress of Racial Equality, Constitution of the United States, Constitutional Law, EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, European, European Union, Executive order, Flemish, Fourteenth Amendment, Free market, German constitution, Germany, Good Friday Agreement, Gratz v. Bollinger, Greece, Grutter v. Bollinger, Han Chinese, Harvard, Hispanic Americans, Howard University, India, Indonesia, Initiative 200, Institute for Justice, Japan, Jewish quota, Johnson, Labor Department, Legacy preferences, Ludacris, Lyndon B. Johnson, Malay, Malaysia, Malaysian Chinese, Malaysian Indian, Martin Luther King Jr., Model minority, Muslim, Māori, National Assembly, Native Americans, New Zealand, Nixon, Nobel, One-child policy, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Polynesian, Proposition 209, Proposition 209 in 1996, Protestants, Race and intelligence, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Rehabilitation Act of 1973, SAT, Slovakia, South Africa, Southeast Asia, Supreme Court, Texas, Thomas Sowell, Thurgood Marshall, U.S. English, U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. states, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, United Kingdom, Ward Connerly, Washington, Washington State Legislature, bumiputra, caste, consumerism, criticized, discriminated, economic materialism, education, egalitarian, electorate, employment, equal protection, ethnic minorities, ethnicity, ethnocentric, federal, gangsta rap, gender, gender-blindness, health care, hip hop culture, institutional racism, law schools, liberal, libertarians, meritocracy, meritocratic, misogynist, model minority, predictive validity, quotas, race, race-blind, race-blindness, racial discrimination, racial quotas, racialist, racism, rational, reverse discrimination, scholarships, schools, sex, sexism, social welfare, tuition, women, working-class
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
