Affirmative Action Quotes

The problem is that affirmative action could never really get at the issue of corporate power in the workplace, and so you ended up with the downsizing; you ended up with de-industrializing. You ended up with the marginalizing of working people and working poor people even while affirmative action was taking place, and a new black middle class was expanding. ~ Cornel West

The median GPA and LSAT percentile for students of the country's elite law schools were 3.8 and 98 respectively. At the time fewer than 20 black law students in the entire country met those standards. ~ Lino Graglia

The famous speech Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, included the sentence: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Today's left-wing, through identity politics, affirmative-action policies, and hiring quotas, has shattered that dream. ~ Tammy Bruce

A Confucian or Jewish love of learning would gain minorities far more than any affirmative action laws we might pass. ~ Richard Lamm

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status. ~ Ron Suskind

One thing has not changed: to doubt the worth of minority students' achievement when they succeed is really only to present another face of the prejudice that would deny them a chance to even try. It is the same prejudice that insists all those destined for success must be cast from the same mold as those who have succeeded before them, a view that experience has already proven a fallacy. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad. ~ Gloria Steinem

White men in Europe and the US are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world; it is called the history of the world. ~ Michael Kimmel

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place. ~ Harold Washington

Many people in Nixon's camp had genuine faith in affirmative action. It wasn't designed to fail, but it wasn't designed to succeed, either; the intent behind it was not rooted in a desire to help black people attain equal standing in society. It was riot insurance. It was a financial incentive for blacks to stay in their own communities and out of the suburbs. (183) ~ Tanner Colby

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred. ~ Theodore J. Kaczynski

Liberalism is the ideology at the center of conservative arguments against affirmative action and equal opportunity. By proposing that, all things being equal, everyone has the same opportunity to compete in the U.S. marketplace, success is determined by how hard someone works and not by their economic class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race. Ethnic and racial identities are to be assimilated, lost, and erased through the celebrated "melting pot" of U.S. culture. Liberalism thus devalues the importance of communitarian experiences and social identities as determinants or barriers to individual success. Instead, it proposes that all individuals are fundamentally equal and that, regardless of their social identity, everyone can control his or her fate through hard work, learned skills, and acquired education- the foundational myth of a U.S. meritocracy. ~ Isabel Molina-Guzman

When one demands equal rights for women, one needs to assess in which areas women can work better than men, in which they can work like men, and in which they need protection and affirmative action for when they cannot work like men. ~ Pervez Musharraf

If you look at the record and the enviable record which Sandra Day O'Connor has written, you find she was the fifth and decisive vote to safeguard Americans' right to privacy, to require our courtrooms to grant access to the disabled, to allow the federal government to pass laws to protect the environment, to preserve the right of universities to use affirmative action, to ban the execution of children in America. ~ Dick Durbin

Thanks to the Polgars the adjective 'men's' before events and the 'affirmative action' women's titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms. ~ Garry Kasparov

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team. ~ J. C. Watts

Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement ~ Michelle Alexander

I think that even someone who got into an institution through affirmative action could prove they were qualified by what they accomplished there. Page 188 ~ Sonia Sotomayor

I am an affirmative action hire. ~ Anna Quindlen

[A]ffirmative action in the United States has made blacks ... who have largely lifted themselves out of poverty, look like people who owe their rise to affirmative action and other government programs. ~ Thomas Sowell

Affirmative action was designed originally for "women and other minorities" but the phrase has become just another tortured euphemism. Female conscientiousness and eagerness to please have always made women good students and natural test takers. Jews have gloried in scholarship throughout the ages, and Asians of both sexes score so high on SATs and IQ tests that they regard affirmative action as an impediment. Affirmative action really means favoritism for blacks for the sake of racial peace, but the favor is pure chimera, and so, increasingly, is the peace. ~ Florence King

The history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.' ~ Allen West

It is important to understand that the system of advantage is perpetuated when we do not acknowledge its existence. ~ Beverly Daniel Tatum

The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender, or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment, and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced long-standing and persistent discrimination. ~ William J. Clinton

Blacks who have not succumbed to the victim culture have been, are, and will be doing quite well - all on their own, without handouts, affirmative action, and other patronizing measures. ~ Tammy Bruce

That is one of the reasons I oppose this whole Affirmative Action business. We are not supposed to be judged based on what our ancestors did or suffered. We are supposed to be judged as individuals, based on what we are able to achieve. ~ Alan Keyes

They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench - Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And ~ Tony Kushner

My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me - when my family was working-class, and we were struggling. ~ Richard Rodriguez

And while the arguments around affirmative action often come down to race, white women have been by far the biggest recipients of the benefits of affirmative action. ~ Ijeoma Oluo

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

You can't talk about the environment, you can't talk about political correctness, affirmative action and all the other innumerable things that freedom is about, unless you have a free society based upon the integrity of the individual. If you have a responsible society, these other issues will not come up in a responsible society, and that is what freedom is all about. ~ Russell Means

What is so remarkable about the success of affirmative action is that it has been accomplished despite the Justice Department and the policies of the federal government. ~ Harold Washington

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach. ~ Susan Estrich

Workers, black and white, need some kind of international affirmative action to protect them from unfair competition with unorganized or slave labor abroad and unfair competition with robots at home. ~ Jesse Jackson

Some would argue that the president himself benefited from a form of affirmative action because as a C student, he only got into Yale because his father was a wealthy alumnus. But the White House counters that Saddam is a menace and must be stopped. ~ Jon Stewart

Racial stereotyping. For Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders, the sin of white racism was stereotyping all black people as inferior. It was a prejudice to be sure, but it was predicated on the assumption that all blacks were the same. King objected to stereotyping because he wanted blacks to be treated as individuals and not reduced exclusively to their racial identity (hence the meaning of his famous statement about the content of one's character taking precedence over the color of one's skin).

The postmodern left turns the civil rights model on its head. It embraces racial stereotyping -- racial identity by any other name -- and reverses it, transforming it into something positive, provided the pecking order of power is kept in place. In the new moral scheme of racial identities, black inferiority is replaced by white culpability, rendering the entire white race, with few exceptions, collectively guilty of racial oppression. The switch is justified through the logic of racial justice, but that does not change the fact that people are being defined by their racial characteristic. Racism is viewed as structural, so it is permissible to use overtly positive discrimination (i.e., affirmative action) to reorder society.

This end-justifies-the-means mentality of course predates the postmodern left. It can be found in the doctrine of affirmative action. But the racial theorists of identity politics have taken "positive" discrimination to a ~ Kim R. Holmes

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest ~ Clarence Thomas

The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence. ~ Randall Kennedy

Affirmative action benefits NO ONE. It discriminates against Asian American and White students, while promoting negative stereotypes about the competency of African American students -- that they only got in because of their race, not merit. ~ Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam

I am confident of God's faithfulness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race. ~ Clarence Thomas

Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country. ~ Alan Keyes

I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. ~ Camille Paglia

Affirmative action was always racial justice on the cheap. ~ Joe Klein

I read American sagas (of the west) and I do not see people who went in search of material things. I see people who wrote down that what they sought was an escape from an old world which dictated their conscience and established their merit based on who their parents. ~ Alan Keyes

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the Moon as to put a bone in your nose. ~ William A. Henry III

I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly. ~ Dick Gephardt

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds - any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together. ~ Anonymous

Contrary to what we hear, the great American divide is not a clash between conservatives who advocate liberty versus progressives who oppose liberty. Rather, the two sides each affirm a certain type of liberty. One side, for example, cherishes economic liberty while the other champions liberty in the sexual and social domain. Nor is it a clash between patriots and anti-patriots. Both sides love America, but they love a different type of America. One side loves the America of Columbus and the Fourth of July, of innovation and work and the "animal spirit" of capitalism, of the Boy Scouts and parochial schools, of traditional families and flag-saluting veterans. The other side loves the America of tolerance and social entitlements, of income and wealth redistribution, of affirmative action and abortion, of feminism and gay marriage. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

And when you tell me that somebody's skin color or gender is going to determine their prospects in this world, that is turning the clock back hundreds of years. Back to a time before this nation declared that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator; not by their ancestry, not by their skin color, not by their gender, not by Congress, not by the Constitution, and not by the laws ~ Alan Keyes

The fact is that in too many parts of our country, we still have discrimination. And affirmative action is not just something that applies to people of color. Some people have a mistaken view of it in America. It also is with respect to women, it's with respect to other efforts to try to reach out and be inclusive in our country. ~ John F. Kerry

W. Bush's life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. ~ Chris Hedges

Say a white boy takes a wrong turn and comes to my hood," he once said. "Now he's in the minority––nobody wants him there, unless it's to rob his ass––and more than anything he has to think about how to protect himself, how to get out. There's no weaker situation to be in than that, and this boy isn't getting anything productive done until he's out, back among his own people. But we take a wrong turn and end up at Yale, for the first time in our lives we don't have to worry about protecting ourselves. And we were all able to get enough shit done to be accepted here––so imagine what we can do when you take all the crazy hood shit out of the equation and we can just focus on the business at hand. So what if it's annoying as hell? Instead of sitting around here bitching about it, maybe we just accept that it is what it is, and know that we have the capacity to get way more from them than they'll ever get from us. ~ Jeff Hobbs

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started. ~ Sonia Sotomayor

White men in North America are the beneficiaries of the single biggest affirmative action program in world history. It's called world history. ~ Michael Kimmel

Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives ~ George Lakoff

I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday. ~ Dick Gephardt

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity? ~ Maynard Jackson

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it. ~ Quentin Bryce

The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do. ~ Edward Abbey

If we conservatives "of color" refuse to promote the welfare state, unfettered abortion, affirmative action, and massive immigration, we are guilty of "selling out. ~ Michelle Malkin

And affirmative action is a very nice term for racial discrimination against better-qualified white people in jobs, employment, promotions and scholarships, and college admittance. ~ David Duke

The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear. ~ Haile Gerima

I miss Cindy McCain - she seemed so life-like.
I'm a moderate lesbian - I only hold a grudge for six generations.
Step away from your e-vehicle.
Email is a depressant.
The patriarchy is so Dada.
We've got homomentum!
America was built by affirmative action - for white men.
If they want gay people to stop having sex, let them get married.
I'm on a single prayer health plan: please god, don't let me get sick.
Taser them with love.


~ Kate Clinton

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. ~ John Roberts

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race? ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I want to make one thing clear: I'm pro-choice, I'm pro-affirmative action, I'm pro- environment, pro-health care, and pro-labor. And if that ain't a Democrat, then I must be at the wrong meeting. ~ Wesley Clark

Your actions are living affirmations of what you say you believe and feel. 'Affirmative action' is when your actions are in congruence with your beliefs & feelings. You're doing it to make YOU welcome. ~ Derek Rydall

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Placing a time limit on affirmative action would in all likelihood blunt the orchestrated politics of controversy that now bedevils it. And thinking about phasing it into a class-based entitlement program may at long last bring Americans around to a consideration of the growing inequality that threatens the harmony of our democracy far more than the alarmist cry of 'racial division.' ~ Orlando Patterson

The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action. ~ Charles A. Murray

When I was a young filmmaker starting out, I was really snobby about all the affirmative action for women filmmakers because I felt it should be about your talent, and I made a film that won awards, and people wanted me. ~ Gillian Armstrong

The third fallacy is that affirmative action doesn't work. ~ Harold Washington

Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath. ~ Jim Webb

I'm always excited when I make it on anyone's list - even if it's for affirmative action. My attitude is, 'Am I the token woman on this list? Because I'll take it.' ~ Julie Klausner

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness - the black gangster, the black rioter - that strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract - The Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You never stop to think how the history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. You never stop to think that Babe Ruth never had to play the greatest players of his generation - just the greatest white players. You never stop to think that most of our presidents never rose to the top because they bested the competition - just the white competition. White privilege is a self-selecting tool that keeps you from having to compete with the best. The history of white folk gaining access to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale is the history of white folk deciding ahead of the game that you were superior. You argue that slots in school should be reserved for your kin, because, after all, they are smarter, more disciplined, better suited, and more deserving that inferior blacks. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

Here's the point - you're looking at affirmative action, and you're looking at marijuana. You legalize marijuana, no need for quotas, because really, who's gonna wanna work? ~ Jon Stewart

Affirmative action and equal opportunity was never and is not intended to let people with fewer skills and less experience triumph over those with more. It was intended to aid a decision between two people who have the same set of skills. ~ Tarah Wheeler

What makes the Southern Poverty Law Center particularly odious is its habit of taking legitimate conservatives and jumbling them with genuine hate groups (the Klan, Aryan Nation, skinheads, etc.), to make it appear that there's a logical relationship between say opposing affirmative action and lynching, or demands for an end to government services for illegal aliens and attacks on dark-skinned immigrants. The late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called this 'the broad-brush smear.' ~ Don Feder

Republicans can be a funny bunch. They're against affirmative action, but they always seem to be able to find people of color to fill a slot just when they're most needed. ~ John Ridley

Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action. ~ Ron Paul

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on. ~ Gloria Steinem

What is Kanye West's message? Like most rap, "I am the greatest person ever and you're not." I used to call it affirmative action for the ego. ~ Bill Maher

I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that's a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there's a culture of poverty. I know that I've seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they're systematically deprived, whether it's getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we're talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too. ~ Henry Louis Gates

I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race. ~ Peggy McIntosh

There is another, more sinister consequence of affirmative action: the carefully engineered appearance of great racial progress strengthens the "colorblind" public consensus that personal and cultural traits, not structural arrangements, are largely responsible for the fact that the majority of young black men in urban areas across the United States are currently under the control of the criminal justice system or branded as felons for life. In ~ Michelle Alexander

Due to affirmative action, about half of the black law students fall to the bottom 10% percent of the class and they are 2.5 times more likely than whites not to graduate college. Blacks are four times less likely to pass the bar exam on the first attempt. ~ Peter Kirsanow

If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me? ~ Jayson Blair

If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it. ~ George W. Bush

Though it's impossible for us to legislate one's thoughts and feelings, we still need things like affirmative action in place because without measures like it, people in charge would not have, sadly, enough impetus to do, as cliched as it sounds, the right thing. ~ Jonathan Coleman

This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice. ~ Cornel West

Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken. ~ Richard Rodriguez

Affirmative action has been generally cast in terms of race. I think women themselves are not as cognizant of the role affirmative action has played in opening the doors for women. ~ Faye Wattleton

I think there are some things ... that may even be distorted in the practice, such as some affirmative action programs becoming quota systems. And I'm old enough to remember when quotas existed in the United States for the purpose of discrimination, and I don't want to see that happen again. ~ Ronald Reagan

You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action. ~ J. C. Watts

For a long time, the Court has moved toward outlawing all forms of racial preference, including affirmative action, and Obama seems accepting, even supportive, of the change. ~ Jeffrey Toobin

Indicate which principles you support regarding affirmative action and discrimination. 1. The federal government should discontinue affirmative action programs. 2. The federal government should prosecute cases of discrimination in the public sector. 3. The federal government should prosecute cases of discrimination in the private sector. ~ Newt Gingrich