Chapter 5: Affirmative Action and Empowerment

Used to promote actions by organisations and institutions that achieve non-discrimination, the term ‘affirmative action’ was first used in the United States in 1961 in Executive Order 10925, which placed a duty on government contractors and subcontractors to ‘take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, colour or national origin’ (Dupper, 2006, p. 140). The intention of the legislation was to protect groups of people who were targets of current or past discrimination, to which religion and gender were subsequently added as protected groups. According to Kleiner (2004), if it had not been for the affirmative action movement of the 1970s in the United States, and the legal challenges posed to corporations like AT&T, Exxon, and Sears (especially by the Federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission), many people of colour and women would not have been in the professional jobs which they occupied since then. Similarly, Nancy Ramsey, the co-author of the McCorduck and Ramsey (1996) book on The Futures of Women, claimed that many of the women she spoke to claimed that they would not have had their jobs if it was not for diversity policies. In fact, in 2003, the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell (himself a benificiary of affirmative action policies while rising through the ranks of the military, and calling himself a strong proponent of affirmative action) and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, both people of colour, respectively, called for race to play a role in university and school admissions in the United States. Affirmative action has sought to achieve goals such as bridging inequalities in employment and salary, increasing access to education, promoting diversity, and redressing past wrongs, harms, and hindrances. Sadly, such calls on educational institutions and workplaces across the United States persist today, from the Black Lives Matter and Asian Lives Matter movements, and publications such as the Race and Social Justice Law Review, among others.