[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The question of affirmative action, discrimination - societal versus government, is apparently complex, for reasons I have never really grasped. Affirmative action arose as a response to "something."
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That is to say affirmative action policy did not arise as the result of the struggle of "minorities" or a greater insight into the meaning of "morality" but from the economic factors and environment describing the social life of the Negro in America.
If we do not know the genesis of affirmative action how can we make sense?"Affirmative action" in the modern sense arose from a policy (the "Philadelphia Plan") of Nixon's, announced in 1969, to give blacks some preference in federal hiring. (It's sort of fuinny that Bush's interventyion into the U-M case is described in the media as a couraggeaous stand fo "traditional Repubican values" in opposing a policy created by Nixon and formulated for higher ed by Justice Powell.) The term was coined by Kennedy, and Johnson formulated the concept (nothing that it's not a fairrace to unshackle one participant and set him to run on equal terms with another whp has been running for 400 years), but it was Nixon who made the plan into policy. Melvin is right that the demand did not arise from popular struggle, and was in fact intended to defuse the (at that time greater) demands for black power and the like.
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