Browsing Topic Best Affirmative Action Quotes

Affirmative action is the most important modern anti-discrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination. No one who knows anything about the subject would say it hasn’t worked. It has certainly done something, or else it wouldn’t have provoked so much opposition.

Affirmative action is not going to be the long-term solution to the problems of race in America, because, frankly, if you’ve got 50 percent of African-American or Latino kids dropping out of high school, it doesn’t really matter what you do in terms of affirmative action. Those kids aren’t going to college.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children, who are advantaged, aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who struggled more.

In those days [1955], affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys.

You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

It is important to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence.

And when you tell me that somebody’s skin color or gender is going to determine their prospects in this world, that is turning the clock back hundreds of years. Back to a time before this nation declared that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator; not by their ancestry, not by their skin color, not by their gender, not by Congress, not by the Constitution, and not by the laws

Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents.

[On affirmative action:] Universities give a boost in admissions for other factors besides race, factors that bring no social benefit, such as athletic ability, celebrity of parents, and alumni connections. It is remarkable how little agitation there is against those practices.

…Started by missionaries in 1841, Punahou Academy had grown into a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites…It hadn’t been easy to get me in, my grandparents told her (my mother); there was a long waiting list, and I was considered only because of the intervention of Gramps’ boss, who was an alumnus (my first experience with affirmative action, it seems, had little to do with race).

That is one of the reasons I oppose this whole Affirmative Action business. We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve.

Didn’t we settle contraception & affirmative action? If the GOP keep going backwards they’ll soon be debating slavery.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

I was critical of race-based affirmative action early on in my career and I’ve changed my mind. And I’ve publicly acknowledged that I was wrong.

One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can`t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can`t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race.

The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.

This is what it is for Asians to be part of – support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it’s a matter of justice.

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

If you look at the record and the enviable record which Sandra Day O’Connor has written, you find she was the fifth and decisive vote to safeguard Americans’ right to privacy, to require our courtrooms to grant access to the disabled, to allow the federal government to pass laws to protect the environment, to preserve the right of universities to use affirmative action, to ban the execution of children in America.

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest

I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.

I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.

I regard affirmative action as pernicious – a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.

If we are prepared to invest the necessary time and effort, affirmative action can contribute to Harvard’s quality and not detract from it.

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn’t even apply to them.

Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.

The problem is that affirmative action could never really get at the issue of corporate power in the workplace, and so you ended up with the downsizing; you ended up with de-industrializing. You ended up with the marginalizing of working people and working poor people even while affirmative action was taking place, and a new black middle class was expanding.

I am an affirmative action hire.

Your actions are living affirmations of what you say you believe and feel. ‘Affirmative action’ is when your actions are in congruence with your beliefs & feelings. You’re doing it to make YOU welcome.

If affirmative action means what I just described, what I’m for, then I’m for it.

Affirmative action works but we’re going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective ‘men’s’ before events and the ‘affirmative action’ women’s titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms.