Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

296 // JEROME A. CHANES
on the issue, "Affirmative action" lacks precise legal definition; in some ways the
best approach is to paraphrase former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's
comment about obscenity: "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
The term's very lack of concreteness, at least in popular usage, has given rise
to the numerous intergroup semantic and policy struggles that have accompanied
the history of these programs, and that gave heat to the battle. Affirmative action
covers a wide array of concepts: acting as a "gateway" for members of minority
groups to become part of a pool from which they can enter a workplace or educational
institution; the elimination of discriminatory practices; employing "goals
and timetables" to set and measure progress; using quotas. One "official," workmanlike
definition has it "broadly encompassing any measure, beyond simple termination
of discriminatory practice, adopted to correct or compensate for past or
present discrimination or to prevent discrimination from recurring in the
future." 3
The elusive term "goals and timetables" that often accompanies affirmativeaction
plans has meant: "quotas" to some, and legitimate, benign, targets to others.
In its strictest sense, the phrase refers to targets set for employing minorities
and women, along with time frames for achieving these goals. Under the original
Executive Order on Affirmative Action 11246, employers were encouraged to
make good-faith efforts, but there were no legal penalties if they were unable to
meet the goals. Executive Order 11246 provided for "goals and timetables," but
prohibited quotas.
Affirmative action was a product not of the 1960s, when it became a national
issue, but of an awareness from the early 1940s that eliminating employment discrimination
would not be sufficient to overcome the effects of decades of opportunities
denied to minority-group members, especially Blacks. The obstacles that
had accrued over the period of slavery and over a century of segregation—at best,
second-class citizenship—by the middle of the twentieth century inhered in
American society. Special polices and programs were required to surmount these
obstacles.
The question of using numerical formulae in the struggle for economic justice
was raised as early as the 1920s. The federal government adopted a numerical
racial hiring policy as part of the Public Works Administration (PWA), created
in 1933 by Title VII of the New Deal National Industrial Recovery Act. 4
Thirty years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legislated "color-blind" equal
employment opportunity via both voluntary compliance and judicial enforcement
(through litigation) of the right of individuals not to be discriminated against
because of race. But the Civil Rights Act, simply declaring in effect "racial neutrality,"
could not do the job. Racial (and gender) discrimination had become too
deeply entrenched.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, which
outlawed discrimination by federal contractors and mandated: "The contractor
shall take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed.. .without