Will Obama Kill Affirmative Action?
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This year's presidential race has been one of the most interesting in history in part because this is the first time since 1960 that neither major party has had a former president or vice president as a candidate and in part because never before has a woman or a visible minority been in a position to capture their party's nomination and perhaps even win the general election yet here we are just days away from Super Tuesday with a woman and an African-American man battling it out for the right to be the Democratic Party's nominee.
But what will happen if Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama win the nomination? I have to wonder if their win will help to further shatter any remaining glass ceilings wrongfully imposed on women and minorities for generations. With a woman in the White House, will women face the same type of discrimination they do now in the workplace? With an African-American as Commander in Chief, will the minority communities need or even want affirmative action programs? |
Some might be tempted to say that a liberal African-American like Barak Obama would never advocate the end of affirmative action programs, but I'm not so sure. Recent history suggests that programs which are dear to the hearts of a president's supporters are most easily gutted or even killed by that same president. Witness George W. Bush's huge increase in social welfare programs through the addition of prescription drug benefits to Medicare and Bill Clinton's welfare reforms.
Many Caucasians and more than a few members of the minority communities believe that affirmative action programs should end. Few want a return to the widespread discriminatory practices that existed just a few decades ago but there's a tremendous difference between prohibiting discrimination and implementing affirmative action programs. Whether you agree or not with the goals of affirmative action programs, there's little doubt that the way they were implemented by many organizations resulted in preferential treatment being applied to members of minority communities. Reasonable people can differ on whether that was justified by past wrongs but few would argue that the effect of preferential treatment programs is to discriminate against the majority in favor of the minority. That may be a good thing in the eyes of some and evil in the eyes of others, but are we as a nation in 2008 ready to abandon these practices? If we elect an African-American as President this fall, will we regard affirmative action as having no further purpose? Will the move towards eliminating affirmative action and the stigma that comes with it originate from the White House?
This continues to be a very, very interesting election cycle and should Hillary or Barack win the general election, this promises to be the start of four very interesting years.
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