ABSTRACT
Affirmative action is one instrument by which African Americans, as a ‘class’, have sought to secure citizenship rights and to erase the stamp of inferiority with which they were branded historically. Finding racial inequality to be embedded in the political, economic and social institutions of the nation, affirmative action advocates insist that it cannot be extirpated by laws and policies that simply promise fair and equal treatment from a given time forward. They argue that some redistribution of political power, social standing, and/or economic resources is necessary to attain what the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, identified as the ultimate goal: ‘not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result’. The specific means by which these ends are sought include a wide range of race conscious initiatives and reforms, in both the public and the private sectors, and in such areas as school admissions, industrial apprenticeship and training programs, and hiring and promotion practices in the areas of business and manufacturing. It has also been argued that affirmative action should take the form of ‘a kind of open-ended reparations’.1
