Affirmative action

Affirmative action (U.S. English), or positive discrimination (British English), is a policy or a program providing access to systems for people of a minority group who have traditionally been discriminated against, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society. This consists of access to education, employment, health care, or social welfare.

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.

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The initial successes of the 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.

Related Topics:
Civil rights movement - 1960s

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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:

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""Whenever this issue 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."

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""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. "

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""... 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."

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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." http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featwise_mlk.shtmlhttp://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=687http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1292http://www.allanfavish.com/mlking.htm

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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 (now 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:

Related Topics:
Congress of Racial Equality - Lyndon B. Johnson - Howard University

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"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."

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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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Nixon - Labor Department - Arthur Fletcher

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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. This sometimes led to colleges recruiting truly disadvantaged students from the ghettos, assuming that they would fit in naturally; such children did not generally adjust well to the sudden change, however, and were often unable to perform well. National excitement died down in the late 1970s, and quickly turned to national controversy.

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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%. However, the lingering problems from a history of black oppression are far from gone.

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