For several decades, America has been engaged in “Affirmative Action.” That concept had its origin during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The term first materialized in 1961, when then President John F. Kennedy created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. His Special Legal Counsel and Executive Vice Chairman to that Committee, a Black lawyer Hobart Taylor Jr., penned the term “affirmative action” in the margins of a draft executive order Kennedy would sign. That order of March 6, 1961, required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Interestingly, Taylor, born in 1920, was the son of Hobart T. Taylor Sr., was a self-made millionaire who made his fortune in the insurance industry, taxicab business, and real estate. The younger Taylor earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Prairie View Normal and Industrial College in Prairie View, Texas and then enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he received his master’s degree in economics in 1941. Afterwards he enrolled at the University of Michigan Law School, where he received his J.D. and LLB degrees in 1943. He would go on to be the first Black person to edit the the Michigan Law Review as a law student. And the irony is that all his accomplishments occurred before government-mandated affirmative action.
Taylor would then go on to be a close ally of Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democratic Party activist, and civil rights activist who financed the lawsuit in Grovey v. Townsend, which held that all-white primaries in Texas were unconstitutional.
At its outset, affirmative action encouraged employers to hire people who had been subjected to racial discrimination. Both Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson and Republican President Richard Nixon signed executive orders ending race discrimination in hiring. Key to both, however, was that such action was accomplished “without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
As a concept, affirmative action was therefore consistent with Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution implemented after slavery was abolished.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Notably the clause “nor deny to any person…the equal protection of the laws” now serves as a basis for reining in wrongly applied contemporary affirmative action. Indeed, the modern application has become no less than an unmerited reverse discrimination against other Americans whom far-left radicals do not deem as “underserved” of “marginalized” or “oppressed.” Everyone else who demurs is labeled a White supremacist.
Fortunately, the wrongful application of Affirmative Action in college admissions was struck down by the Supreme Court in two cases this year, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina. Those decisions were justified because they abolished the sole use of race in deciding who is accepted to college. Both decisions relied purely on the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment. They were correct decisions firmly rooted in law.
Yet there is a role for affirmative action in American society, but not the false one that has been mandated by the government for the past 62 years. So then, what is genuine affirmative action?
Authentic affirmative action is found in the application of traditional family values, education, individual responsibility, a proper work ethic, and a life informed by self-restraint. These virtues undergird a life that leads to success by any person, regardless of race, creed, or sex. Such a person does not depend on race-based affirmative action but rather a reliance on individual affirming actions leading to success in a society committed to equal opportunity, not equal results. Those outcomes should depend on each person’s commitment to the right undergirding traits that produce individual success.
Race-based decisions, as identified by the Supreme Court, are a perversion of justice and the 14th Amendment. You cannot make a bucket of dirty water reliably clean by simply pouring clean water into it. You must empty the wastewater of reverse discrimination and replace it with the clean water of constitutional equal protection.
It’s time to end all race-based reverse discrimination and focus on merit. We do not attain justice through injustice. And real—not faux—affirmative action comes from an individual’s affirming action to embody characteristics of a productive life.
0 Comments