AFFIRMATIVE ACTION LAWS

Are Affirmative Action laws fair?

Are Affirmative Action laws fair?

Affirmative action is probably fair, but in some circumstances is also ultimately detrimental to the people it is designed to assist. The rationale behind most affirmative action is sound. There exist socioeconomic differences that lead to gaps in the education and overall level of preparation of some groups of people as compared to others. At the college entry level, it makes sense to attempt to normalize for differences in the quality of preparation at the elementary and secondary levels, because typically youngsters are stuck with the public schools near their homes, and neither they nor their families have any significant control over the quality of the education provided. Notice that this is not broken down by race, but rather by quality of elementary and secondary education (which unfortunately in our country are highly correlated). The premise is that the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies have the capacity but not yet the preparation to succeed, and that they too deserve a chance.

Today, the once contentious colorblind standard of nondiscrimination is broadly accepted. So, too, are efforts at outreach and recruitment aimed at increasing the number of applicants for scarce positions in schools and firms. Where agreement stops, however, is where compensatory discrimination starts. "The controversy over affirmative action," Randall Kennedy rightly noted in mid-1980s, "constitutes the most salient current battlefront in the ongoing struggle over the status of the Negro in American life" (Kennedy, 1986: 1327). Nearly two decades later, as American troops were being dispatched to Iraq, Robert Bartley observed in his Wall Street Journal column that "second only to the pending war, 'affirmative action' is the issue of the day." (Bartley, 2003: A15) Four decades after Johnson first broached the possibility of affirmative action to rectify the racial gap, advocates of reparations and defenders of nondiscrimination and equal treatment who often seem blind to the organizing power of race in American life have not found common ground. Broad and often unfocused claims for restoration compete with fundamental antiracist principles that direct us to racial neutrality.

Chronicles of affirmative action ordinarily begin in the early 1960s. They focus on the critical moment between 1963 and 1969 when such policies became the federal government's most important vehicle for dealing with employment discrimination, and extend forward to encompass the four decades when affirmative action was directed primarily at improving the circumstances of African Americans. This chronology, however, obscures how a wide array of significant and far-reaching public policies shaped and administered during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were crafted and administered in a deeply discriminatory manner. As Congress regulated labor markets and enhanced the powers of employees, provided welfare and social insurance, built a powerful military, and reintegrated soldiers into postwar America, its southern members introduced features designed to fortify their region's social, economic, and political order. The exclusion of many black Americans from the bounty of public policy, and the manner in which these important, large-scale, ...