Affirmative Action
Mills, Nicolaus
Thirty years ago in a 1965 speech delivered at Howard University's commencement, Lyndon Johnson set out the terms on which his administration intended to pursue affirmative action. More than...
...But in that danger lies opportunity...
...But even more important, we have allowed ourselves to lose a sense of the specialness of affirmative action...
...We now use it as a way of making a school or work force representative of the population as a whole, and we do not bother to ask if those benefiting from affirmative action have actually been victimized by past law or practices...
...More than civil rights legislation was needed in order to achieve racial equality, the president insisted...
...For liberals, the danger of such a redefinition of affirmative action is that it makes it seem as if they are sliding toward those who have no real interest in racial or gender equality in the first place...
...On top of all this, there were the momentous events of the summer...
...The first and most obvious answer is to make sure that in the 1990s affirmative action does not take on burdens it cannot bear...
...In the 1960s the standard metaphor for achieving fairness in civil rights had been that of a level playing field, and the example everyone pointed to was Jackie Robinson, baseball's first black major leaguer...
...By switching the fairness metaphor to a foot race and then declaring that some runners had been hobbled by chains, Johnson introduced two important refinements...
...If it is to be meaningful—and sacrificed for—affirmative action cannot be defined so broadly as to be nothing more than a permanent minority entitlement...
...Immigration is a prime example...
...The time has come to get back to a politics of fundamental change, aimed at achieving the kind of equality that doesn't require compensatory programs...
...In that masterful figure of speech he captured the danger of racism and the nation's need for rescue from it...
...The left needs to acknowledge all that affirmative action cannot do: not in order to retreat to the right, as the Clinton administration seems bent on doing, but in order to resume the unfinished business of building a truly genderblind and color-blind society...
...As a consequence, affirmative action hangs by a thread, an easy target for conservatives who never wanted it in the first place, and difficult to defend for liberal politicians, who find it alienating them from working-class voters...
...Robinson, liberals argued, showed how quickly society could be transformed by the removal of racial barriers...
...He factored into the equation the impact of slavery and Jim Crow, and he argued that more than a level playing field was required if the inequities of the past were not to be frozen in the present...
...What is to be done...
...472 • DISSENT Affirmative Action We have come a long way from Lyndon Johnson's definition of affirmative action...
...In 1820, Thomas Jefferson, himself a slave owner, described the slavery issue as a "fire-bell in the night...
...We are no longer content that affirmative action be retrospective...
...and the University of California Regents, under heavy prodding from the governor, voted to do away with all affirmative action programs based on race or sex...
...By allowing immigrants who have come to America in the last two decades to benefit from affirmative action, we have undermined the historic rationale for it...
...A recent immigrant of color is as eligible for affirmative action as an AfricanAmerican who can trace her ancestry and victimization back to the seventeenth century...
...In a series of sweeping decisions, the Supreme Court dramatically reduced the scope of affirmative action in voting rights, in business, in education...
...Johnson's point was that the transformation of society was not going to come so easily for most black men and women...
...Today, race and, by extension, gender and ethnicity have become proxies for affirmative action eligibility...
...But Johnson's hobbled runner analogy was more complex in the scenario it laid out and in its redefinition of racial justice...
...Over the last decade the problem with affirmative action is that it has distracted from this larger task, making liberals worry more about compensating for the past than undoing it altogether...
...With this in mind, he came to the heart of his speech, a short, one-sentence paragraph in which he declared, "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 others,' and still justly believe you have been completely fair:' In trying to sum up America's racial struggles in a metaphor that did them justice, Johnson was following a long presidential tradition...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
