// essays //
Fall 2005
It's Not Diversity, Stupid: The Case For Affirmative Action
Dena Roth
Any student in 2005 knows that when she fills out an application for college or graduate school, a single question may make or break prospects for admission. The question asks the applicant to choose which race most accurately describes her. Of course, a disclaimer in fine print accompanies the question, stating that it is optional and, if answered, confidential. Regardless, every white student today dreads this question. Why? Because in their nightmares, white students envision an admissions office sifting through thousands of documents, separating out the favored applications labeled "African American," "Latin American," and "Asian"–any application without the word "Caucasian".
When a white applicant approaches the college admissions process and wonders why it considers ethnicity a credential, she does not think about the ramifications of slavery or the trauma of Jim Crow. Instead, the principle most closely and commonly linked with affirmative action by its proponents is the "D Word": Diversity.
Today's universities convey a specific and clear message: affirmative action is a virtuous undertaking because diversity is the sacred goal. Without diversity, our universities would suffer immeasurably. And, ultimately, the argument goes, this is why we should take positive note of the shaded bubble next to the race question.
Take a look at the following statement by the president and administration of the UC University system:
Cultivating a campus community of diverse ethnicities, ideas, cultures, talents, races, interests and values must remain at the center of the University's obligation to the state and the nation. The University must remain committed to a diverse1 and rigorous intellectual environment. A rich variety of ideas and values is essential to this goal.2
The statement groups racial and ethnic diversity together with diversity of ideas, talents and values, implying that all are equally important components in the composition of the academy. Likewise, consider a message from John DeGioia, president of Georgetown:
As President of Georgetown University, I am personally counting on all administrators, faculty, staff and students to provide enlightened leadership and cooperation in support of diversity, equity, and affirmative action, so that we can all be enriched by the experience of working and studying in an integrated environment.3
Again, diversity features as the stated ideal that underlies the University's affirmative action policies.
In 2003, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision upholding the affirmative action policy at University of Michigan Law School, University President Mary Sue Coleman responded by invoking the diversity principle:
This is a tremendous victory for the University of Michigan, for all of higher education, and for the hundreds of groups and individuals who supported us. A majority of the court has firmly endorsed the principle of diversity articulated by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision. This is a resounding affirmation that will be heard across the land—from our college classrooms to our corporate boardrooms.4
Today, diversity is the Ginger Rogers to affirmative action's Fred Astaire—the second looks only as good as its partner. But is diversity a sustainable argument to justify this major controversial policy?
As far as sound arguments go, the argument against affirmative action is on solid ground. Opponents of affirmative action believe that the entire notion of "corrective justice" is philosophically and legally unjustifiable.5 It is philosophically untenable because introduces a new form of discrimination in its attempt to correct historical discrimination. In other words, creating an unjust policy as a corrective for past injustice is in itself wrong. It is legally prohibited, because the Civil Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination,6 whether in favor or against a person or group. The argument against affirmative action is simple, clear, and internally consistent.
Today the argument in favor of affirmative action is much more ambiguous. It relies on its packaging (diversity) and not its reasoning. Diversity has become a way of making affirmative action palatable and politically correct. This packaging ignores the origins and intentions of affirmative action altogether, and relies on ideas and notions of an entirely different nature. The notion of diversity has transformed affirmative action so drastically that it might as well be called something else, and has opened a Pandora's Box of new questions. I believe that in order to make the strongest possible argument in favor of affirmative action, proponents need to revisit the fundamentals of their position. Ultimately, this phenomenon needs to be addressed, and if possible, repaired, if affirmative action is to remain a legitimate, justifiable, and sound policy in American society.
Ira Katznelson's new book, When Affirmative Action Was White, serves as the groundwork for appropriately revisiting the affirmative action debate in its historical framework. His argument relies on the linkage between the historical origins of racism and of affirmative action. The history of racism and systemic, governmentally institutionalized discrimination is both wide and deep; affirmative action, the corresponding corrective, has an equally multidimensional past. Katznelson explores the historical cases of affirmative action: not policies that favored blacks over whites, but policies that favored or targeted a specific group. Katznelson holds that in order to understand why this corrective remains necessary and justifiable in today's society, it must be seen in a historical context that predates the commonly accepted origins of affirmative action. Instead of placing affirmative action's true roots in the 1970s, Katznelson places them in the period during Reconstruction. Such an informed position is crucial in order to develop an affirmative action policy that is true to its history and effective in its aims.
When affirmative action is correctly associated with its historical origins and examined through the lens of its architects, it quickly becomes clear that today's affirmative action looks nothing like it ought to. One of the most prominent and vocal designers of affirmative action was President Lyndon Johnson. In a notable speech at Howard University on June 4th, 1965, Johnson admitted to the nearly all-black audience that "equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just a product of birth…It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man."7 Johnson proposed an all-encompassing system of affirmative action that extended beyond equal opportunity in the workplace and higher education and struck at the root of the social and economic disparities between the races.
According to Katznelson, the most apt example of affirmative action seen in American history was the legislation of the New Deal—legislation that was geared towards reviving and assisting a segment of the population that suffered most during the Depression, and later on, after the Second World War. In effect, however, the affirmative action of the New Deal became a policy in favor of whites and one that discriminated against blacks. Katznelson paints a compelling picture of the disparities in income and wealth between whites and blacks during the mid-twentieth century in light of the huge social opportunities offered to veterans in the G.I. Bill—an anchor piece of New Deal legislation, and one most solely responsible for the American social revolution of the mid twentieth century.
The G.I. Bill prompted a social revolution in America by opening the doors of higher education, homeownership, and employment to a huge, capable veteran demographic. The G.I. Bill accomplished this by covering nearly all of veterans' educational costs, offering significant government loans to be used on mortgages, and establishing a service to place veterans in appropriate jobs. While its intentions were honorable, its implementation was faulty because it relied on state and local governments to supply services to the veterans. In the South, that certainly meant that its implementation was tainted by racism. The facts and figures relating to this implementation illustrate an incredible historical irony: that the failures of one of the first practical examples of affirmative action as a federal policy necessitated another policy of affirmative action later on in the century.
There is a powerful connection between the G.I. Bill's effects on higher education and today's affirmative action in higher education. In 1939, 160,000 Americans were graduating from college each year; in 1949 that number tripled to 500,000. Black enrollment never exceeded 5,000 in the North and West (where life was more friendly to the average black family) because of quotas. The "separate but equal" principle established in Plessy v. Ferguson was no refuge for black communities because Southern state governments did not fund black educational institutions equally. In 1947, white colleges in the South outnumbered black school by more than five to one, even though blacks constituted 25% of the population.
As a result of racist practices in Southern states such as these, 55% of black veterans who wanted to take advantage of the G.I. Bill's educational opportunities were turned away from black institutions due to lack of space. White and black veterans applied to universities and vocational schools in comparable numbers. Yet, white veterans constituted 51% of higher education students in white institutions while black veterans only constituted 30% in black colleges. Job placement was no more equitable. Of the 28,000 veterans who received on-the-farm training in the South thanks to the G.I. Bill, only 11% were black veterans–representing only 1% of the black veterans who were drafted from farms to go to war. The United States Employment Service (USES), mandated by the G.I. Bill to place veterans in jobs that matched their level of skill, placed 6,500 black veterans who had once worked on farms in non-farm jobs. 86% of skilled and semi-skilled positions were filled by white veterans while 92% of the unskilled positions were filled by black veterans.
In short, these systemic acts of discrimination prevented blacks, especially in the South, from taking advantage of the American social revolution in the postwar period and only made their chances for economic, social, and professional advances more impossible. As whites from low income backgrounds entered higher education, secured respectable jobs, and made significant gains in income and wealth, their black counterparts stood still. These conditions, sanctioned by the federal government, made it impossible for the American black population to bounce back and its effects remain impossible to ignore.
Now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the gap between whites and blacks is shockingly wide. Consider these figures: the net worth of the typical white family is about $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families.8 Looking back at the statements made by major university admissions and affirmative action offices and administrations, one can not help but wonder: why is affirmative action suddenly about diversity? What happened to righting federally sponsored historical wrongs?
Recalling President Coleman's reference to the Bakke decision, we see the historical moment where diversity and affirmative action crossed paths. Justice Powell first linked diversity to quotas in higher education in his 1978 opinion for Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The Court had heard arguments regarding whether the University of California Medical School could reserve sixteen of its one hundred places for minorities. Justice Powell, the swing vote in the case, agreed with the majority that the university's quota system was in violation of the constitution's equal protection clause. But, in his decision, Justice Powell wrote that
[T]he attainment of a diverse student body... is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education. . . . The freedom of a university to make its own judgments as to education includes the selection of its student body. . . . [R]ace or ethnic background may be deemed a "plus" in a particular applicant's file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats. The file of a particular black applicant may be examined for his potential contribution to diversity without the factor of race being decisive when compared, for example, with that of an applicant identified as an Italian-American if the latter is thought to exhibit qualities more likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism.9
By saying this, Powell unknowingly wrote a blank check for admissions councils to prioritize diversity over quality. But Powell's decision to uphold a university's right to determine its student body was exclusive from, and tangential to, his feelings toward racism in the America of 1978. This decision was targeting the legality of the quota policy, not the philosophical or moral justification of affirmative action. Universities have since made the mistake of justifying their affirmative action policies on the basis of diversity, when instead they could just comply with the law and advocate for affirmative action in broader terms. As Katznelson writes, "the Bakke decision...focused on higher education. In that context, Powell argued that affirmative action to achieve educational diversity was permissible because it addressed the specific situation created by the historical pattern of nearly all-white higher education."10 Of course, that says nothing about the greater context: racism that permeated every part of America from the Civil War until today.
The conflation of diversity with affirmative action for minorities has presented its supporters with at least two major problems. First, by emphasizing diversity and not historical wrongs they have implied that this form of affirmative action as it was designed is divorced from the affirmative action that we see today. To understand this new version of affirmative action, we need to ask a different set of questions—questions about the meaning of higher education, the role of its institutions, the value of diversity, and the implications of preferential treatment in those regards. In turn, these questions distract us from a set of questions that are equally, if not more, valuable—a set of questions about the roots of American racism, its perpetuation by government, and the inequality that is still very tangible today. Any distraction from this latter set of questions impedes the reparation of a major, perhaps the greatest, domestic problem in America.
Second, the question of the meaning of higher education is far from a simple one. The ultimate aims of the American university are on one hand, anchored by the elusive goal to educate and enlighten and, on the other hand, are as fluctuating as our society is fluid. The notion of racial diversity as a corollary to intellectual diversity only arrived on the scene after America progressed toward real racial tolerance based on more flexible ethnic categories. One could argue that such a society is still in the process of its development, and, therefore, the ideas associated with it are too fresh. Considering its recent emergence, the claim that racial diversity fosters intellectual diversity is too often assumed and too rarely investigated.
Finally, the diversity argument presupposes that to make a strong case in favor of today's affirmative action, diversity must be privileged over the historical wrongs that it was designed to correct. The emphasis on diversity and not those historical wrongs suggests to me that, at best, those wrongs are no longer taken seriously, or at worst, no longer deemed legitimate.
At Howard University, President Johnson struck a cord with the audience not simply because he unveiled a plan for affirmative action but because he candidly admitted what were obvious but unstated truths:
For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.11
If President Johnson was not afraid to admit this in 1965, we surely should not be today. Perhaps we do not because we are ashamed of the racial injustices that we have allowed to linger for far too long. Perhaps it is guilt that pushes affirmative action advocates to embrace diversity rather than the truth: affirmative action was designed decades ago to right a historical wrong that should no longer exist in any form. While we hope that racism weakens every day, we must continue to use all available tools to erase it forever. Affirmative action is one such tool, but it is only as effective as the sincerity, totality, and seriousness with which we embrace its original intent.
1 Emphasis added.
2 http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Diversity/Response/Action/policy
3 http://www.georgetown.edu/admin/aa/
4 http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2003/Jun03/supremecourt.html
5 A term that Ira Katznelson dates back to Aristotle in his book When Affirmative Action was White (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.) 2005, p. 149.
6 Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts (see Katznelson p. 151)
7 Katznelson, p.175.
8 Ibid, p. 164.
9 http://www.landmarkcases.org/bakke/opinion.html
10 Katznelson, p. 160.
11 Ibid, p. 177-178.
Dena Roth is a BC/JTS senior. She majors in European History and Talmud. She currently serves as the Academic Affairs Representative on the SGA Representative Council and is the Executive Editor of The Current.
When a white applicant approaches the college admissions process and wonders why it considers ethnicity a credential, she does not think about the ramifications of slavery or the trauma of Jim Crow. Instead, the principle most closely and commonly linked with affirmative action by its proponents is the "D Word": Diversity.
Today's universities convey a specific and clear message: affirmative action is a virtuous undertaking because diversity is the sacred goal. Without diversity, our universities would suffer immeasurably. And, ultimately, the argument goes, this is why we should take positive note of the shaded bubble next to the race question.
Take a look at the following statement by the president and administration of the UC University system:
Cultivating a campus community of diverse ethnicities, ideas, cultures, talents, races, interests and values must remain at the center of the University's obligation to the state and the nation. The University must remain committed to a diverse1 and rigorous intellectual environment. A rich variety of ideas and values is essential to this goal.2
The statement groups racial and ethnic diversity together with diversity of ideas, talents and values, implying that all are equally important components in the composition of the academy. Likewise, consider a message from John DeGioia, president of Georgetown:
As President of Georgetown University, I am personally counting on all administrators, faculty, staff and students to provide enlightened leadership and cooperation in support of diversity, equity, and affirmative action, so that we can all be enriched by the experience of working and studying in an integrated environment.3
Again, diversity features as the stated ideal that underlies the University's affirmative action policies.
In 2003, when the Supreme Court handed down a decision upholding the affirmative action policy at University of Michigan Law School, University President Mary Sue Coleman responded by invoking the diversity principle:
This is a tremendous victory for the University of Michigan, for all of higher education, and for the hundreds of groups and individuals who supported us. A majority of the court has firmly endorsed the principle of diversity articulated by Justice Powell in the Bakke decision. This is a resounding affirmation that will be heard across the land—from our college classrooms to our corporate boardrooms.4
Today, diversity is the Ginger Rogers to affirmative action's Fred Astaire—the second looks only as good as its partner. But is diversity a sustainable argument to justify this major controversial policy?
As far as sound arguments go, the argument against affirmative action is on solid ground. Opponents of affirmative action believe that the entire notion of "corrective justice" is philosophically and legally unjustifiable.5 It is philosophically untenable because introduces a new form of discrimination in its attempt to correct historical discrimination. In other words, creating an unjust policy as a corrective for past injustice is in itself wrong. It is legally prohibited, because the Civil Rights Act prohibits racial discrimination,6 whether in favor or against a person or group. The argument against affirmative action is simple, clear, and internally consistent.
Today the argument in favor of affirmative action is much more ambiguous. It relies on its packaging (diversity) and not its reasoning. Diversity has become a way of making affirmative action palatable and politically correct. This packaging ignores the origins and intentions of affirmative action altogether, and relies on ideas and notions of an entirely different nature. The notion of diversity has transformed affirmative action so drastically that it might as well be called something else, and has opened a Pandora's Box of new questions. I believe that in order to make the strongest possible argument in favor of affirmative action, proponents need to revisit the fundamentals of their position. Ultimately, this phenomenon needs to be addressed, and if possible, repaired, if affirmative action is to remain a legitimate, justifiable, and sound policy in American society.
Ira Katznelson's new book, When Affirmative Action Was White, serves as the groundwork for appropriately revisiting the affirmative action debate in its historical framework. His argument relies on the linkage between the historical origins of racism and of affirmative action. The history of racism and systemic, governmentally institutionalized discrimination is both wide and deep; affirmative action, the corresponding corrective, has an equally multidimensional past. Katznelson explores the historical cases of affirmative action: not policies that favored blacks over whites, but policies that favored or targeted a specific group. Katznelson holds that in order to understand why this corrective remains necessary and justifiable in today's society, it must be seen in a historical context that predates the commonly accepted origins of affirmative action. Instead of placing affirmative action's true roots in the 1970s, Katznelson places them in the period during Reconstruction. Such an informed position is crucial in order to develop an affirmative action policy that is true to its history and effective in its aims.
When affirmative action is correctly associated with its historical origins and examined through the lens of its architects, it quickly becomes clear that today's affirmative action looks nothing like it ought to. One of the most prominent and vocal designers of affirmative action was President Lyndon Johnson. In a notable speech at Howard University on June 4th, 1965, Johnson admitted to the nearly all-black audience that "equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just a product of birth…It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man."7 Johnson proposed an all-encompassing system of affirmative action that extended beyond equal opportunity in the workplace and higher education and struck at the root of the social and economic disparities between the races.
According to Katznelson, the most apt example of affirmative action seen in American history was the legislation of the New Deal—legislation that was geared towards reviving and assisting a segment of the population that suffered most during the Depression, and later on, after the Second World War. In effect, however, the affirmative action of the New Deal became a policy in favor of whites and one that discriminated against blacks. Katznelson paints a compelling picture of the disparities in income and wealth between whites and blacks during the mid-twentieth century in light of the huge social opportunities offered to veterans in the G.I. Bill—an anchor piece of New Deal legislation, and one most solely responsible for the American social revolution of the mid twentieth century.
The G.I. Bill prompted a social revolution in America by opening the doors of higher education, homeownership, and employment to a huge, capable veteran demographic. The G.I. Bill accomplished this by covering nearly all of veterans' educational costs, offering significant government loans to be used on mortgages, and establishing a service to place veterans in appropriate jobs. While its intentions were honorable, its implementation was faulty because it relied on state and local governments to supply services to the veterans. In the South, that certainly meant that its implementation was tainted by racism. The facts and figures relating to this implementation illustrate an incredible historical irony: that the failures of one of the first practical examples of affirmative action as a federal policy necessitated another policy of affirmative action later on in the century.
There is a powerful connection between the G.I. Bill's effects on higher education and today's affirmative action in higher education. In 1939, 160,000 Americans were graduating from college each year; in 1949 that number tripled to 500,000. Black enrollment never exceeded 5,000 in the North and West (where life was more friendly to the average black family) because of quotas. The "separate but equal" principle established in Plessy v. Ferguson was no refuge for black communities because Southern state governments did not fund black educational institutions equally. In 1947, white colleges in the South outnumbered black school by more than five to one, even though blacks constituted 25% of the population.
As a result of racist practices in Southern states such as these, 55% of black veterans who wanted to take advantage of the G.I. Bill's educational opportunities were turned away from black institutions due to lack of space. White and black veterans applied to universities and vocational schools in comparable numbers. Yet, white veterans constituted 51% of higher education students in white institutions while black veterans only constituted 30% in black colleges. Job placement was no more equitable. Of the 28,000 veterans who received on-the-farm training in the South thanks to the G.I. Bill, only 11% were black veterans–representing only 1% of the black veterans who were drafted from farms to go to war. The United States Employment Service (USES), mandated by the G.I. Bill to place veterans in jobs that matched their level of skill, placed 6,500 black veterans who had once worked on farms in non-farm jobs. 86% of skilled and semi-skilled positions were filled by white veterans while 92% of the unskilled positions were filled by black veterans.
In short, these systemic acts of discrimination prevented blacks, especially in the South, from taking advantage of the American social revolution in the postwar period and only made their chances for economic, social, and professional advances more impossible. As whites from low income backgrounds entered higher education, secured respectable jobs, and made significant gains in income and wealth, their black counterparts stood still. These conditions, sanctioned by the federal government, made it impossible for the American black population to bounce back and its effects remain impossible to ignore.
Now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the gap between whites and blacks is shockingly wide. Consider these figures: the net worth of the typical white family is about $81,000 compared to $8,000 for black families.8 Looking back at the statements made by major university admissions and affirmative action offices and administrations, one can not help but wonder: why is affirmative action suddenly about diversity? What happened to righting federally sponsored historical wrongs?
Recalling President Coleman's reference to the Bakke decision, we see the historical moment where diversity and affirmative action crossed paths. Justice Powell first linked diversity to quotas in higher education in his 1978 opinion for Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. The Court had heard arguments regarding whether the University of California Medical School could reserve sixteen of its one hundred places for minorities. Justice Powell, the swing vote in the case, agreed with the majority that the university's quota system was in violation of the constitution's equal protection clause. But, in his decision, Justice Powell wrote that
[T]he attainment of a diverse student body... is a constitutionally permissible goal for an institution of higher education. . . . The freedom of a university to make its own judgments as to education includes the selection of its student body. . . . [R]ace or ethnic background may be deemed a "plus" in a particular applicant's file, yet it does not insulate the individual from comparison with all other candidates for the available seats. The file of a particular black applicant may be examined for his potential contribution to diversity without the factor of race being decisive when compared, for example, with that of an applicant identified as an Italian-American if the latter is thought to exhibit qualities more likely to promote beneficial educational pluralism.9
By saying this, Powell unknowingly wrote a blank check for admissions councils to prioritize diversity over quality. But Powell's decision to uphold a university's right to determine its student body was exclusive from, and tangential to, his feelings toward racism in the America of 1978. This decision was targeting the legality of the quota policy, not the philosophical or moral justification of affirmative action. Universities have since made the mistake of justifying their affirmative action policies on the basis of diversity, when instead they could just comply with the law and advocate for affirmative action in broader terms. As Katznelson writes, "the Bakke decision...focused on higher education. In that context, Powell argued that affirmative action to achieve educational diversity was permissible because it addressed the specific situation created by the historical pattern of nearly all-white higher education."10 Of course, that says nothing about the greater context: racism that permeated every part of America from the Civil War until today.
The conflation of diversity with affirmative action for minorities has presented its supporters with at least two major problems. First, by emphasizing diversity and not historical wrongs they have implied that this form of affirmative action as it was designed is divorced from the affirmative action that we see today. To understand this new version of affirmative action, we need to ask a different set of questions—questions about the meaning of higher education, the role of its institutions, the value of diversity, and the implications of preferential treatment in those regards. In turn, these questions distract us from a set of questions that are equally, if not more, valuable—a set of questions about the roots of American racism, its perpetuation by government, and the inequality that is still very tangible today. Any distraction from this latter set of questions impedes the reparation of a major, perhaps the greatest, domestic problem in America.
Second, the question of the meaning of higher education is far from a simple one. The ultimate aims of the American university are on one hand, anchored by the elusive goal to educate and enlighten and, on the other hand, are as fluctuating as our society is fluid. The notion of racial diversity as a corollary to intellectual diversity only arrived on the scene after America progressed toward real racial tolerance based on more flexible ethnic categories. One could argue that such a society is still in the process of its development, and, therefore, the ideas associated with it are too fresh. Considering its recent emergence, the claim that racial diversity fosters intellectual diversity is too often assumed and too rarely investigated.
Finally, the diversity argument presupposes that to make a strong case in favor of today's affirmative action, diversity must be privileged over the historical wrongs that it was designed to correct. The emphasis on diversity and not those historical wrongs suggests to me that, at best, those wrongs are no longer taken seriously, or at worst, no longer deemed legitimate.
At Howard University, President Johnson struck a cord with the audience not simply because he unveiled a plan for affirmative action but because he candidly admitted what were obvious but unstated truths:
For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community, and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.11
If President Johnson was not afraid to admit this in 1965, we surely should not be today. Perhaps we do not because we are ashamed of the racial injustices that we have allowed to linger for far too long. Perhaps it is guilt that pushes affirmative action advocates to embrace diversity rather than the truth: affirmative action was designed decades ago to right a historical wrong that should no longer exist in any form. While we hope that racism weakens every day, we must continue to use all available tools to erase it forever. Affirmative action is one such tool, but it is only as effective as the sincerity, totality, and seriousness with which we embrace its original intent.
1 Emphasis added.
2 http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Diversity/Response/Action/policy
3 http://www.georgetown.edu/admin/aa/
4 http://www.umich.edu/news/Releases/2003/Jun03/supremecourt.html
5 A term that Ira Katznelson dates back to Aristotle in his book When Affirmative Action was White (New York: W.W. Norton and Co.) 2005, p. 149.
6 Title VII of the Civil Rights Acts (see Katznelson p. 151)
7 Katznelson, p.175.
8 Ibid, p. 164.
9 http://www.landmarkcases.org/bakke/opinion.html
10 Katznelson, p. 160.
11 Ibid, p. 177-178.
Dena Roth is a BC/JTS senior. She majors in European History and Talmud. She currently serves as the Academic Affairs Representative on the SGA Representative Council and is the Executive Editor of The Current.
// DAVID PLOTZ (CC '06) is an editor for The Current, The Birch, and AdHoc. He is also a senior writer for The Blue and White and a former Spectator Columnist. He is majoring in Eastern European History.