Last month the U.S. Supreme Court-or more specifically, the six White supremacists on the Court-abolished affirmative action. In addition to making America more racist again, they, in effect, ended the charade of equal opportunity masquerading as affirmative action.
Affirmative action has been a weak and ineffectual policy. For most of its existence, much of its effect has been “equal opportunity,” not affirmative action. Real affirmative action has been primarily operative in just two areas of American life. One was President Richard Nixon’s Ten Percent Set-Aside program. Under that program developed by African American Arthur Fletcher, Assistant Secretary of Labor, the federal government required large contractors doing business with the federal government to set aside ten percent of the contract to hire female and minority, business contractors. This program worked for 20 years or so until opponents of this kind of progress successfully eliminated it in a series of Supreme 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 with the Bakke decision in 1978; the assault on that part of affirmative action kept going, minimizing affirmative action in colleges and universities.
Please note that outside of the two instances mentioned above, the country never implemented affirmative action as defined by President Lyndon Johnson. In 1965, in a commencement speech at Howard University-which I attended-Johnson 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 then believe that you have been completely fair.” 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 implicitly denied the role of systemic racism in creating the conditions of African American life.
Another weak and problematic issue with affirmative action as defined—explicitly as well as implicitly—was diversity. For example, advocates pushed affirmative action in higher education because of the “educational value of diversity.” That is a long way from having state-sponsored efforts to make up for state-sponsored racism as specified by President Johnson.
Some people mentioned affirmative action as reparations; however, those of us pushing for reparations dismissed such claims as weak and inappropriate. On the other hand, consideration of reparations could have been helpful.
In the late 1960s, I was as interested in having a hot public debate over reparations as in receiving reparations. I figured that the question would be, “Just why should we give reparations to Blacks.” This question would have been answered forcefully by our many learned activists. Along with slavery, the rhetoric would have explained in much more detail the kinds of post-slavery state-sponsored racism that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson listed in her dissent in the affirmative action case. Then the country would have been a lot less ignorant about the racist history of America. Without that history-the history that Republicans are currently trying to block-we cannot have rational arguments.
In the late 1960s, I had doubts that we could get reparations as government policy; however, I was convinced that if we pressed hard enough, a compromise would be reached, a settlement that would be something like a more assertive affirmative action policy. This affirmative action would be based on an admission of state-sponsored racism requiring state-sponsored remedies.
