All Things Being Equal

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Recommended: Affirmative action policies

All Things Being Equal

Most of us have heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, or part of it, at some point in our lives. In 1964, one year after the speech was given, Lyndon B. Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which signaled the birth of affirmative action. Affirmative action refers to efforts to increase educational and employment opportunities for minorities and women. In November, 1997, California voters did away with affirmative action [at the state level] by passing proposition 209. They were convinced that it was no longer needed, that it gave minorities and women special rights. Governor Pete Wilson wrote in 1996 as part of his campaign against affirmative action:

Let me be clear: we haven't yet fully achieved Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. Discrimination still occurs, and we must aggressively and conscientiously enforce our civil rights laws which prohibit discrimination. But we won't achieve that dream until we also end the system of preferential treatment that, in fact, judges people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. (Curry 169)

They even went so far as to call proposition 129 The Civil Rights Initiative. This is a misconcept fed to the California public. Affirmative Action is an attempt to fix the inequality in American society between races and gender. Although the goal of equality has not yet been reached, affirmative action has brought us closer. In "Black Women and Men: Partnership in the 1990s," bell hooks, a black female writer, and Cornel West, the director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton, discuss many of the issues facing the Black community. Bell hooks says, "Since capitalism is rooted in unequal distribution of resour...

... middle of paper ...

...ore then, we are setting ourselves back. We are limiting opportunities for people of color and women as we were before affirmative action was put into effect. We must stop fighting amongst each other for the "goodies" bell hooks talks about and work together to make this a more equal land for all.

Sources

Brunk, Terrance, Suzanne Diamond, Pricilla Perkins, and Ken Smith (Eds.). Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Interpretation. New York: WW Norton 1997.

Curry, George (Ed.) The Affirmative Action Debate. Reading, NY: Addison Wesley, 1996.

hooks, bell and Cornel West, "Black Women and Men: Partnership in the 1990s." In Brunk, et al., 325-337.

Johnson, Lyndon B. "To Fulfill These Rights." In Curry, 16-24.

West, Cornel. "Affirmative Action in Context." In Curry, 31-35.

Wilson, Pete. "The Minority-Majority Society." In Curry, 167-8.

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