What is Affirmative Action? Five Decades of Rhetorical Discussion By Christopher Fischer The Pointe Staff October 31st, 2007 Affirmative action is an official term about which there has been much confusion over the last 45 years. It first became part of the public discourse after John F. Kennedy used it when signing Executive Order 10965 in 1961. The order called for federal contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Disagreements continue to this day over the term. Words like quota, preferential treatment, equal opportunity and reverse discrimination are still used in support of and against the policies. It is evident how the term affirmative action began to take on a slightly new meaning as early as 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into effect the Civil Rights Act. In the midst of national strife and rioting over civil rights, Johnson gave a speech the next year to the graduating class at Howard University which outlined what he felt to be the true purpose of affirmative action. “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 justly believe that you have been completely fair,” Johnson said. “Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Minnesota Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey assured the Senate in 1964 that “nothing in Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] tells any employer whom he may hire. What the bill does…is simply to make an illegal practice to use race as a factor in denying employment.” He said at the time that nothing in the bill requires racial quotas. Fifteen years later the issue was still a contentious one when Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina charged during a Senate debate that “proponents of discriminatory quotas and goals have been partially successful in blurring the distinction between nondiscrimination and affirmative action.” “This confusion…has promoted a system in which discrimination is being institutionalized under the guise of a nondiscrimination program,” Helms added. After a Supreme Court case upheld affirmative action in 1995, President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the National Archives, saying that affirmative action programs needed to be reformed, but that they were still necessary. In a White House memorandum that day, he called for the elimination of any program that “(a.) creates a quota; (b) creates preferences for unqualified individuals; (c) creates reverse discrimination or; (d) continues even after its equal opportunity purposes have been achieved.” In his speech, Clinton had this to say: “The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop a systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced longstanding and persistent discrimination.” Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell had this to say about affirmative action: “Equal rights and equal opportunity mean just that,” Powell said. “They do not mean preferential treatment…I benefited from equal opportunity and affirmative action in the Army, but I was not shown preference. The Army made sure that performance would be the only measure of advancement. When equal performance does not result in equal advancement, something is wrong with the system, and our leaders have an obligation to fix it. If a history of discrimination has made it difficult for certain Americans to meet standards, it is only fair to provide temporary means to help them catch up and compete on equal terms.” Powell went on to say that “Affirmative Action in the best sense promotes equal consideration and not reverse discrimination.” Back to home page...