Is Affirmative Action Defensible Under the Constitution?
Affirmative Action was created to obliterate the wrongs that white Americans had done to individuals because of color, race, religion, and gender, depriving them of the rights of equality guaranteed them under American constitutional law. The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, stated that all men are created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These tenets were embodied in the Constitution in 1787 and in the amendments that followed. But the equality was on paper only. At the time when the Declaration of Independence was written, there were 125,000 black slaves who were in no way considered equal to their white masters. Even after Lincoln's act of emancipation, the color of their skin denied them most of the rights enjoyed by many white Americans (Eastland & Bennett, 1979, p. 24). Thus, President John Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson sought the solution to bring equality to all and then brought about the remedyùAffirmative Action.
The plan, with its numerical quotas that forged a path into government offices, into business communities, and into
academic institutions, proposed to bring the minority victims of racial, religious, and gender prejudice into the state of equality promised by the Constitution. Therefore, Affirmative Action was defensible under Constitutional law. The specific steps Affirmative Action would take involved employment searches to be conducted everywhere to find the best qualified person regardless of race or gender. Training in special skills would be offered, and employment tests would be scrutinized to rid them of any bias against minorities. Transfer, layoff, and demotion practices would be cleansed of any racial discrimination.
At first, this came by government order, but, outside of government, private institutions began to reshape their polici...