Words for the President
The speech on affirmative action President Bush ought to give.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity.
June 7, 2001 9:35 a.m.

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.