An affirmative action program (see entry AAP refers to Affirmative Action Program".
An AAP is a management tool designed to ensure equal opportunity in recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, and compensating individuals so that we all can live the American dream. A good affirmative action program is a diagnostic tool that evaluates the composition of the workforce and compares it with the composition of the relevant labor pool and then includes practical steps addressing under utilization of specific groups.
The federal Kerner Commission report on racial disorders, prompted by the riots of the 1960s, provided ample documentation of American institutional discrimination against blacks. The commission presented its findings in 1968, concluding that urban violence reflected the profound frustration of inner-city blacks and that racism was deeply embedded in American society. The report's most famous passage warned that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."
This happened just three years after the US Constitution was amended in January 1964, by the leadership of Republicans and Democrats, to prevent any local authority from using poll tax registration as a means of preventing any person from registering as a voter. Finally in 1965, a comprehensive Civil Rights Act, more correctly called the Voting Rights Act, was signed into law by President Johnson: this gave legislative enforcement to the constitutional amendment.
The law also suspended (and amendments later banned) the use of literacy tests for voters. The final abolition of the last literacy tests allowed high numbers of African Americans, who where previously denied the right to vote, to gain access to the vote. Remember this was just 40 years ago.
Now a federal commision reported that unless conditions were remedied, the country faced a “system of ’apartheid’” in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of “white society” for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums—primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing.
Excerpted passages from the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) -
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result. At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.
Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.
The police are not merely a "spark" factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a "double standard" of justice and protection - one for Negroes and one for whites.
President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
By the election of 1968, Richard M. Nixon had gained the presidency through a conservative white backlash that insured that the Kerner Report's recommendations.
Also Roger Wilkins in his Racism Has Its Privileges: The Case For Affirmative Action provides the rationale for affirmative action. In general affirmative action requires institutions to search for qualified candidates in places beyond their ordinary searches or businesses.
An AAP is a management tool designed to ensure equal opportunity in recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, and compensating individuals so that we all can live the American dream. A good affirmative action program is a diagnostic tool that evaluates the composition of the workforce and compares it with the composition of the relevant labor pool and then includes practical steps addressing under utilization of specific groups.
The federal Kerner Commission report on racial disorders, prompted by the riots of the 1960s, provided ample documentation of American institutional discrimination against blacks. The commission presented its findings in 1968, concluding that urban violence reflected the profound frustration of inner-city blacks and that racism was deeply embedded in American society. The report's most famous passage warned that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pronounced the report a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life."
This happened just three years after the US Constitution was amended in January 1964, by the leadership of Republicans and Democrats, to prevent any local authority from using poll tax registration as a means of preventing any person from registering as a voter. Finally in 1965, a comprehensive Civil Rights Act, more correctly called the Voting Rights Act, was signed into law by President Johnson: this gave legislative enforcement to the constitutional amendment.
The law also suspended (and amendments later banned) the use of literacy tests for voters. The final abolition of the last literacy tests allowed high numbers of African Americans, who where previously denied the right to vote, to gain access to the vote. Remember this was just 40 years ago.
Now a federal commision reported that unless conditions were remedied, the country faced a “system of ’apartheid’” in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of “white society” for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums—primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing.
Excerpted passages from the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) -
Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood - but what the Negro can never forget - is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result. At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.
Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.
The police are not merely a "spark" factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a "double standard" of justice and protection - one for Negroes and one for whites.
President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
By the election of 1968, Richard M. Nixon had gained the presidency through a conservative white backlash that insured that the Kerner Report's recommendations.
Also Roger Wilkins in his Racism Has Its Privileges: The Case For Affirmative Action provides the rationale for affirmative action. In general affirmative action requires institutions to search for qualified candidates in places beyond their ordinary searches or businesses.
Cincinnati Change believes that in Cincinnati we must address these issues, while we still have the time and resouces, or we will be revisiting the Kerner report on a local basis.
