Focus on Affirmative Action

LISTEN to the show accompanying this myth

Guests on this show:

Kevin Gaines: Director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at University of Michigan. A historian, Dr. Gaines is the author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century and most recently American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates in the Civil Rights Era.

Read Dr. Gaines' essay, "Whose Integration Was It: An Introduction" HERE

Read Dr Gaines' paper for "Historians Reflect on the War in Iraq: A Roundatable" HERE

Scot Brown : is Assistant Professor of History at UCLA. His writings on African American resistance, social movements, and cultural nationalism have appeared in the Black Scholar, American National Biography, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Negro History and Contributions in Black Studies. He is the author of Fighting for Us: Maulana Karenga, the Us Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism.

Myth: Affirmative Action was a Radical Social Policy out of Step with American Ideals.

Fact: Affirmative action does not represent a radical set of social policies. Nor was it the brainchild of radical civil rights activists. In fact,
affirmative action policies were developed by moderate American politicians who sought to promote modest programs designed to begin the
process of dismantling contemporary forms of institutional discrimination in the workplace, in higher education, and with respect to public contracting.

Affirmative action is the result of an initiative introduced by President Johnson, a Southern politician who once carried the banner of the segregated South, to create real opportunities for people of color in the waning days of the massive Civil Rights Movement. More interestingly, although the concept of affirmatively moving to dismantle the built-in obstacles to minority advancement was initially articulated by a Democratic administration, affirmative action was most aggressively advanced by the very Republican Nixon Administration.

Affirmative action was framed by the business-oriented Nixon administration as an incentive structure to encourage contractors to rethink the way that partnerships were developed and the way that exclusive social networking mechanisms denied meaningful opportunity to minorities and women. In short, contractors and employers were urged to rethink the entire way that business was done. Affirmative action reflected the Nixon Administration’s view that federal dollars should be spent in a manner that encouraged contractors and employers to assess their employment pool and ascertain the extent to which there were ongoing barriers that unfairly precluded the full participation of traditionally excluded groups.

President Nixon and others realized that in the aftermath of a broad societal upheaval to end patterns of segregation and unequal opportunity, a business-as-usual approach would simply not be enough to alter the every-day practices of exclusion that had become entrenched across multiple industries. But, despite the gradual emergence of a consensus that economic and social apartheid had been morally bankrupt, the notion that non-discrimination required businessmen and other decision-makers to change their long established practices to promote equal opportunity remained a controversial and ultimately unwelcome idea. Affirmative action was thus designed to meet that resistance and inertia, prompting instead new patterns of decision-making to dismantle the barriers to opportunity. Against the backdrop of entrenched exclusion, affirmative action is simply not a move from non-discrimination to “preferential treatment.” Instead, it represents a policy to make non-discrimination something more than a mere rhetorical promise.

Not surprisingly, affirmative action actually enjoyed broad bipartisan support across the Democratic and Republican parties and was promoted by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Of course, it was opposed by various political figures who had also opposed the major Civil Rights legislative efforts in the 1960s. But, it was not until President Reagan was elected to office in 1980 that the ideological and political assault on affirmative action rhetoric moved to center stage in American politics. Affirmative action thus was not widely regarded as a contradiction to the newly minted American commitment to non-discrimination. Rather, its architects understood it to be an essential governmental policy necessary to “incentivize” the changes in employment practices necessary to promote a new vision of equal opportunity that had recently emerged as part of the American creed.

So why has affirmative action been miscast as a concession to militants, as a radical move unsupported by most decision-makers?

When these important policies are misrepresented, it becomes easier to encourage Americans to fight back against this perceived outrage. When we imagine the "culprits" behind affirmative action to be Black radicals who held the country hostage, or weak-minded white liberals who discourage personal responsibility and hard work, the policies become easier to challenge. Opponents of equal opportunity claim that rather than pushing back the clock on progress, ending affirmative action is an imperative to correct the erroneous path our society has been walking for nearly four decades. If we challenge their fraudulent claims about affirmative action's origins, we can expose these claims for what they are: merely an attempt to stereotype vital policies aimed at inclusion as radical and divisive.

Founded in 1996 as a media-monitoring think-tank and information clearinghouse, the African American Policy Forum works to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public discourse related to inequality, discrimination and injustice. The AAPF seeks to build bridges between academic, activist and policy-making sectors in order to advance a more inclusive and robust public discourse on the challenge of achieving equity within and across diverse communities.

Please visit us at aapf.org