What roles do “equal opportunity” and “affirmative action” play as we try to address systemic racism? I was asked this question recently.
I answer that neither of these ideas/practices is relevant to the struggle against racism.
Neither should get in the way of addressing systemic or structural racism because neither blocks nor contests it. Each supports the status quo, thereby supporting white supremacy, which is the status quo in America.
Equal opportunity only means providing African Americans with an equal chance to goods and services as whites. In other words, it means “stop discriminating based on race and provide equal opportunities for everyone.” Nowadays, that means stop violating laws we have on the books. Anyone opposed to that should not be taken seriously—ever.
Affirmative action has also been a weak and ineffectual policy. Basically, for most of its existence, it has amounted to no more than equal opportunity. I contend that real affirmative action has been operative in only two limited areas of American life. The first one was Richard Nixon’s 10% set-aside program. Under his program developed by African American Arthur Fletcher, who was Assistant Secretary of Labor, the federal government required large contractors doing business with the federal government to include a 10% set-aside to hire women contractors and minority business contractors. This program worked for 15-20 years until opponents of this kind of progress successfully eliminated it in several court cases in the 1990s.
The other instance of real affirmative action occurred in colleges and universities. Leaders of some of these institutions tried with some success to provide appropriate admission preferences to minorities. But, of course, the attack on that practice began to take place with the Bakke decision in 1978; and the assault on that part of affirmative action kept going, so that today affirmative action has minimal, if any, existence in colleges and universities.
Please note that the country never implemented affirmative action as defined by President Lyndon Johnson outside of those two instances. Johnson, in 1965, in a commencement speech at Howard University—that I attended—laid out his ideas about affirmative action. At the time, we did not have such a term as affirmative action in our discourse. Johnson said in the speech, “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 the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair.” That is what has masqueraded as equal opportunity for 60 years. Johnson also said, “To this end, equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. . . We seek not just freedom. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a result.”
But affirmative action did not begin on the firm footing articulated by Johnson. Instead, it started and remained a “program for black folks because they need it,” a complete mischaracterization of the issue, which of course denied the role of systemic racism in creating the conditions of African American life.
