Of course, you people are all responsible for it! How in the world do you think that 280,000,000 Americans could be complelled to put up with this if not from the force of that noted majority group, the blacks, with 35,500,000 people including a disproportionate number of the nation’s poorest among those people.
Horowitz makes his living by making outrageous statements. The publicity sells his books and guarantees speaking fees.
The first use of the phrase Affirmative Action was in President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, creating the EEOC. It instructed the commission to use “affirmative action” to ensure fairness in hiring practices.
In 1965, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 in conjunction with Congressionally enacted laws on fairness in hiring that directed Government agencies to take “affirmative action” to seek out qualified minority-owned or operated businesses in order to provide them the opportunity to bid on government contracts from which they would previously been excluded. This was (as far as I know) the earliest use of the phrase Affirmative Action in its current sense. Two or three years later, the Order was expanded to include sex discrimination as a target for Affirmative Action redress.
At the same time that Johnson was issuing his order, several private corporations voluntarily introduced internal measures to promote the seeking out of qualified minority candidates to fill new positions.
In the early 1970s, several courts responded to specific lawsuits (usually against unions or municipal services departments such as firefighters and police) in which a pattern of discrimination was alleged by ordering the defendents to hire specific numbers of minority applicants in order to offset previous discrimination. Since there were not always sufficient minority applicants available to fill those quotas, there were several cases of standards being lowered to find enough people to fill the quotas. At this time, the phrase Affirmative Action got attached to the system of quotas that were applied to those “remedies” and the intertwining association of “quotas” with “Affirmative Action” has continued to this day.
At about the same time, various universities, having tried “open admission” policies and seen them fail, began setting their own quotas on applicants in order to preserve “diversity.” By 1978 (fewer than 10 years after the first “quota” case) the Supreme Court severely limited the use of quotas in deciding for Bakke. While barring “quotas,” the Court did not strike down the concept of Affirmative Action, itself. leaving that concept (however ill-defined) alone.
A couple of years ago, California passed a referendum outlawing any quotas in hiring or student enrollment.
Horowitz’s charge that blacks are “responsible” for AA is absurd, but it gets more publicity than simply blaming Liberals.
We fight the battle of the fairness, utility, workability, and purpose of AA on this Forum on a regular basis.
A search on the “word” AA will turn up several dozen threads you can peruse.
For an AA timeline, check out the one at Infoplease.com .