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sins. Unfortunately, policymakers attempted to solve the
problem of historical racial disenfranchisement by shifting
the disenfranchisement to other groups.
Modern affirmative action in the United States has
innocuous roots in John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Executive
Order 10925, which required government employees not
to factor considerations of “race, creed, color, or national
origin” into hiring decisions. Had this policy continued
without revision, affirmative action would fall under the
heading of liberalism because it would remove any favoritism
for applicants because of their membership in a particular
group. The idea behind Kennedy’s policy was that
people should be judged as individuals, not as members
of groups. Four years later, however, Lyndon Johnson
reengineered affirmative action by requiring the federal
government to “promote the full realization of equal
employment opportunity through a positive, continuing
program in each executive department and agency”
through Executive Order 11246. With the stroke of a pen,
President Johnson changed affirmative action from the
negation of privilege to the promotion of its full realization.
Additionally, the adoption of affirmative action was
fundamentally at odds with Title VII of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating
against employees on the basis of race, color, religion,
and other protected statuses. Subsequent legislative modifications
and court decisions, notably Justice William
Brennan’s 1979 opinion issued in United Steelworkers
v. Weber, swept this legal inconsistency under the rug.
Justice Brennan’s opinion affirmed employers’ right to
consider race in hiring decisions when it is done to “break
down old patterns of segregation and hierarchy.” In this
SOCIAL JUSTICE 83