Why Affirmative Action
Why does the United States need to continue to support Affirmative Action policies?
By: Rene Childress
We need to look at why the policy was first adopted. The U.S. Congress saw the wisdom of attempting to addressed over 300 years of slavery, segregation, torture, bestiality, and mayhem perpetrated on black Americans. One of the first times that the now coined phrase Affirmative Action was used appeared in a speech given by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2,1965 at
Howard University. He was giving a defense of why he signed the 1965 Civil Rights Bill.
During his speech, he used this analogy “Imagine a hundred-yard dash in which one of the runners had his legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards, while the unshackled runner has gone fifty. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation?
Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity “now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be 40 yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap, or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action toward equality.”
The question is how America addresses the horrific past and present practices that continue to push black Americans further down in all the categories of misery. No matter what category we refer to African- Americans lag grotesquely behind their white counterparts. Black women suffer 2.6 times the maternal death rate of white women. Black infants suffer an infant mortality rate of 2.5 times the rate of white infants. Black men 18 years or older are incarcerated at a rate of 1 in 15 while White men in the same age group are incarcerated 1 in 106. Home ownership of Blacks hovers around 43 percent while White home ownership consistently tops 75 percent.
White Americans are more likely to have health insurance than Black Americans. Seventy three percent of Whites have private insurance compared to fifty-three percent for Black Americans. The educational gap between Black and White students that has risen significantly since the 1970 is still dismal. The resources and opportunities aimed at White students outstrip Black Students three to four times in terms of monies spent and opportunities realized.
Getting back to President Johnson’s analogy these are the shackles that the Black runners still need to overcome to be equal. Affirmative action has been used to unshackle and promote a new understanding of how we can attempt to address these age-old wrongs of our society both de jure and de facto. Racism is the root of the current state of affairs in American society.
Racism against African Americans is not tangential to the American culture and psyche it is and has been an essential factor in how Americans relate to one another. Racism was intertwined in the founding documents of this country and in the spirit of the White men who settled on the continued property of owning humans. They justified slavery by dehumanizing black slaves as chattel.
The regime they brought to life was one of the most brutal and oppressive of its time. The country we live in still has that cancer in our souls and our psyche. It has metastasized into every nook and cranny of how we educate, heal, love, and especially govern ourselves.
