Practice of giving blacks preferential treatment

And that is when Taylor inserted the words вЂњaffirmative action.вЂќ He liked the phrase, he later said, because of the alliteration (or the assonance). Taylor read the draft and said he thought it could use a little work Johnson asked him to do a rewrite. When Taylor showed up, Johnson handed him a draft of what would become Executive OrderВ 10925, setting up the PresidentвЂ™s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which Johnson was to chair. They chatted, and Johnson asked him to come by his office. Kennedy was sworn in, in 1961, he dropped in on the inaugural ball for Texans in order to shake hands with the new Vice-President, Lyndon B. According to Nicholas LemannвЂ™s history of meritocracy, вЂњ The Big Test,вЂќ the man who suggested it was an African-American lawyer named Hobart Taylor, Jr. The term was introduced to the Kennedy Administration almost sixty years ago, and its arrival was somewhat haphazard. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action. We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted not just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat people of color differently in ways that might be beneficial. The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

Practice of giving blacks preferential treatment