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 ooner rather than
later, President Bush is going to have to decide what position his
administration will take on affirmative action. The first round
of briefs in a Supreme Court case raising the issue are due this
month; similar cases are being litigated in the lower courts; Clinton-era
executive orders, rules, and regulations on affirmative action remain
in effect. President Bush's philosophical instincts are likely good
on this issue but, like most Republicans, he is afraid that if he
says what he believes he will alienate minority voters. I disagree
and, although I am not a speechwriter, here's my attempt at outlining
what he should say.
My fellow Americans, I want to speak with you tonight about what
sort of nation America is, and has been, and will become.
The American Dream has always been that any American can work toward
the life he or she wants, and will have the opportunity and the
freedom to achieve and accomplish what he or she wants in life.
There will be hurdles to overcome, but one barrier that should not
be there is the color of an American's skin or where an American's
ancestors came from.
We all know that for many years — for centuries — that
dream was not allowed to many Americans. Too often discrimination
because of race or ethnicity denied Americans the equality of opportunity
they should have had.
We have made enormous strides in the last generation, however, to
make that dream — the dream that Martin Luther King Jr., had
— a reality: to make real the words in the Declaration of Independence
that all men are created equal, and the freedom that thousands of
Americans fought and died for in our Civil War.
In the 1960s, one tool that was created for ending discrimination
was affirmative action. Its original meaning was to require positive
steps — affirmative action — to get rid of
the unfairness that had come to permeate many businesses, governments,
and other institutions. It had another early meaning, too: making
sure that everyone was reached out to, not just a few. Those kinds
of affirmative action were and are good, and should be continued.
But somehow another kind of affirmative action began, too —
one that twisted and distorted the original ideal of the civil rights
movement into its exact opposite. That kind of affirmative action
was not ending discrimination but requiring it, the
only difference being that there would be new set of new victims.
This kind of affirmative action was well intentioned and maybe even
necessary at the time. But the time has come to end it.
I think that all Americans would agree that our goal should be to
have a society where no one — white or black, Asian or Hispanic,
American Indian or Arab American — should be favored or penalized
because of race or ethnicity. The only question is, Do we follow
that principle now, or wait until some unknown, uncertain future
day?
I say the time is now. A 17-year-old applying to college today is
not a former slave, did not live during the Jim Crow era--he or
she has born in 1984, twenty years after the Civil Rights Act of
1964 was passed. An 18-year-old who joined the workforce when that
statute became law would be 55 years old today.
I know that discrimination still exists. But, unfortunately, there
will always be some discrimination. And I do not think that the
best way to fight bias is with more bias. We have laws on the books
that prohibit discrimination, and I pledge to you that I will aggressively
enforce them and, where necessary, strengthen them.
Nor do I deny that too many Americans have limited opportunities
because of the circumstances into which they are born. Some are
members of minority groups and some are not, just as some well-to-do
people are members of minority groups and some are not. Some disadvantaged
children may be able to trace their circumstances to discrimination,
others might not, but, really, what difference does it make whether
the unfairness is of one kind or another? No child deserves to be
denied an opportunity by any accident of birth, and no child should
be left behind.
We will not make race relations better by picking winners and losers
based on race. If the government creates double standards, or triple
or quadruple standards, by ranking blacks ahead of Hispanics ahead
of Asians ahead of whites, it will create only resentment and stigmatization.
And besides, the use of racial and ethnic preferences is just plain
unfair. It is unfair when a school or college asks a student who
wants to go there, What color are you? It is unfair when an employer
asks an applicant, Where did your ancestors come from? It is unfair
when the government asks a contractor, or a prime contractor asks
a subcontractor, Before I tell you whether you get the bid, first
I must know — what is your race?
It is unfair to those who are denied a spot in school, or a job,
or a contract. And it is insulting to those who are supposedly
benefited. African Americans have made enormous contributions to
our national life and culture for hundreds of years in the teeth
of slavery, Jim Crow — the worst discrimination you can imagine.
And now we are telling them: You cannot be expected to succeed unless
we lower the bar for you.
I don't buy it. I reject the soft bigotry of low expectations. No
child should be left behind, but every child and every American
will be held to the same standards as every other one of his countrymen.
There is another reason why racial and ethnic preferences are wrong.
It requires the government to pigeonhole people as if everyone were
either pure black or white, Hispanic or non-Hispanic, just one or
the other. The truth is, as we learned in the latest census, not
only is the American population increasingly multiracial
and multiethnic, but so are Americans as individuals.
This is true of my own family, it is true of Tiger Woods, and it
is true for millions of Americans. Few of us are just black, or
just Hispanic, or just Native American. And so how can it make sense
for the government to grant preferences as if we were? And how is
the government supposed to rank who is the most deserving when there
are an infinite number of racial and ethnic combinations, and that
variety keeps growing as America does?
Most Americans believe as I do that it was always wrong to penalize
people for their skin color or ancestry, and most Americans also
believe that it is wrong to do so now. We can end the newer discrimination
and still remain vigilant that discrimination of the old
kind is punished, too. Racial profiling is wrong whether it is police
stopping a black teenager or colleges telling an Asian teenager
that they have "too many" of them already.
We should continue to have the kind of affirmative action that means
taking special steps to root out prejudice and reaching out to everyone.
But we should end the affirmative action that gives preferences
to some over others because of race or ethnicity.
When Thurgood Marshall was the lead attorney in Brown v.
Board of Education, he wrote: "Distinctions by race are so
evil, so arbitrary and insidious that a state bound to defend the
equal protection of the laws must not allow them in any public sphere."
In that landmark case he insisted that "classifications and distinctions
based upon race or color have no moral or legal validity in our
society." He was right.
We are all Americans. God loves us all, and wants us to love one
another no matter what our outward appearance. There is no room
for bigotry in the heart of a patriotic American, and our government
should likewise be colorblind. From now on, I pledge to you that
it will be.
Thank you, and God bless America.
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