Stages of Equality

Historically, our nation's efforts to achieve equality of rights and opportunities—the sine qua non of a democratic state—have evolved in four stages. In stage one, all Americans were made equal under the law; some could not be the property of others. Our Constitution, written by and principally for white males, was gradually amended to include first, black men, and then women of all races in most of the rights and privileges of citizenship. Later, laws restricting individuals' rights and opportunities because of race or gender were removed. The goal was a color- and gender-blind society. In the third stage, remedial laws and policies advanced from passive neutrality to active involvement. Those measures were designed to create equality of opportunity by identifying race and gender for purposes of inclusion, rather than exclusion. Fourth, since laws and policies aimed only at individuals could not deal effectively with the legacy of massive group discrimination, remedial efforts eventually went beyond case-by-case redress and focused on group remedies.

Some view affirmative action as an unfair preference for protected classes of people. In some instances, even traditional advocates of civil rights have opposed affirmative action, especially where numerical measures of progress are involved in correcting discriminatory patterns and practices. Some members of some ethnic communities, themselves past victims of exclusionary quota systems, oppose all numerical measures, even when employed for benign, inclusionary purposes.

These concerns are not to be taken lightly. They can jeopardize the broad coalition from which so much of America's antidiscrimination progress stems. But to me, the group remedies embodied in contemporary affirmative action policy are an inescapable, though one hopes transitory, phase of the long march toward equality. As President Lyndon Johnson said: "You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, `You are free to compete with all others,' and still believe [that you are] being fair. [I]t is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All of our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights...."