ble owing to their status as recipients of federal funds. Such terms as "affirmative action," "minority set-asides," and "equal-opportunity employment," together with bureaucratic oversight and enforcement mechanisms on one hand and politically charged discourse on the other, entered the American public-administration culture decisively and permanently as a consequence of the changes.
The de jure assertion of equal opportunity with respect to federally funded or supervised institutional activity did not end controversy over either its concept or its implementation. Indeed, controversy lay in the background of the entire civil-rights period, before, during, and after relevant issues had been settled as a matter of law. High-profile challenges to a whole range of de jure concepts, from affirmative action to equal opportunity, introduced such concepts as reverse discrimination into the discourse and practice of public administration. That is because affirmative action, reverse discrimination, and equal-opportunity ethos each in its way contains the seeds of controversy and more, overt controversial discourse.
Hostility to institutionally sanctioned contracting opportunities for members of historically marginalized social and demographic groups appears to have increased in recent years. For example, in the state of California in 1996, a voter initiative called Proposition 209 was passed that banned government-sponsored affirmative action programs of all kinds, principally in regard to education and government contracting. Educational and employment activities were also included in the bill. In typical fashion, the losing side in the election went to court to have Proposition 209 overturned; however, in November 1997, the Supreme Court threw out those challenges, opening the way for "clone bills" of 209 in Washington, Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Ohio and Iowa.
The concurrence of the Supreme Court in banning affirmative action reg...