The Barrister
| Publication year | 1993 |
| Pages | 36 |
Equity in Employment: The Affirmative Action Controversy
Glinda Ware Langston, YLS Treasurer, J.
Black males serve as both Secretary of Agriculture and Veteran Affairs in the President's cabinet, while a Black female serves as Secretary of Energy. A Black physicist heads the National Science Foundation, while a Black military officer presides as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs I of Staff. The Ford Foundation has had a Black president for over a dozen years. A Black man also heads the College Board, the nation's principal testing agency. Black women are the chief officers at Planned Parenthood and several colleges and universities.
The preceding, certainly, is the good news. At the same time, it is apparent that all the organizations just cited are governmental or in public service. However, the private sector has been less welcoming. During the last decade, only three Black names have been among the 791 on Forbes magazine's lists of the richest Americans. And Business Week's 1991 roster of the chief executives of America's 1, 000 largest corporations had only one Black chairman. Unfortunately, there are no serious signs that the other 999 firms are grooming Black executives for eventual top jobs.
Yet with employment, interests and emotions can cloud discussions of "affirmative action." Simply hearing it mentioned causes individuals to raise defensive bulwarks, as if the most vital of principles are at stake.
Most simply, affirmative action in employment proposes or requires changes in hiring or promotion policies. It aims at bringing more of certain categories of people into an organization, and then ensuring their representation at various levels. The intended beneficiaries may be women or persons with certain attributes or origins. However, the cases drawing the greatest attention have been those that focus on race.
Affirmative action is by no means new. It began in 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an Executive Order ordering defense plants to show that they were opening jobs to Black workers. The Kennedy administration coined the actual phrase "affirmative action." Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banned employment discrimination that might be based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after signing the law, illustrated the thinking that led to racial preferences. Speaking at Howard University in 1965, he said:
You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him up to the starting line, and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others."
Martin Luther King, Jr., stated the position...
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