Reflecting on our commitment to affirmative action.

The idea of taking concrete steps to remedy and to prevent discrimination - in employment, housing, education and access to programs - for all historically marginalized and oppressed racial and cultural groups and for women originated in the 1960s. It was modeled on the GI bill of rights and other programs to support veterans. In the 1970s affirmative action programs were instituted to include people with disabilities.

Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in the 1967: "This is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done done something special against the Negro for hundreds of year must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis." Unitarian Universalists have supported affirmative action to eliminate discrimination and advance equality for four decades. Beginning in the 1970s Unitarian Universalists extended affirmative action to overcome discrimination based on sexual orientation. The second and sixth principles are wishful thinking without a commitment to affirmative action.

Affirmative action programs have been among the most effective instruments in deconstructing institutional racism. But those who are privileged by racism have raised many counter arguments seeking to discredit affirmative action.

It was argued that affirmative action constituted some kind of reverse discrimination. Manning Marable effectively answers that argument: "Given the fact that the average white household's net worth is ten times that of a black families, and that the overwhelming majority of leaders in business, government, banking and the media are upper-class white males, the argument that whites suffer "reverse discrimination" is absurd. Justice demand affirmative action based on race and gender to address continuing patterns of inequality in America."Some of the anger generated against affirmative action stems from illusions stemming from the ideology of Whiteness as Kenneth B. Clark pointed out: "The illusion of classlessness among whites led them to believe that all whites had opportunities to succeed until blacks came along. every psychologists knows there are individual preferences in every group. Every white applicant for say, a policeman's job, believing he'd get a job or promotion were it not for affirmative action, is engaging in a fascinating sort of idiocy."

Another objection has been raised is that somehow affirmative action confers a stigma, that the woman or minority who has a job has it not because they are qualified, but because they benefit from affirmative action. Answering that objection is Andrew Hacker "How, it is asked, can people go through life, knowing that they have been hired not on their inherent talents, but to fill some quota or to satisfy appearances? Not surprisingly, white people seem to do most of the worrying about this apparent harm to black self-esteem. In fact, there is little evidence that those who have been aided by affirmative action feel many doubts or misgivings. For one thing, most of them believe that they are entitled to whatever opportunities they have received . . . . Nor should it be forgotten what feelings of unworthiness seldom plague white Americans who have profited from more traditional forms of preferment." [How many Veterans complain about Veterans preferences?]