OLIVIA DANGLA
Nearly sixty years ago, the President of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson summed up in a historic speech delivered in 1965 at black Howard University (Washington, DC) the spirit of what was beginning to be called affirmative action (“positive discrimination”, in French) : a set of measures, including quotas, aimed at ensuring the access of African-Americans, freed the previous year from segregation laws, to employment and higher education. “You can’t take a person who for years has been bound in chains, set them free, take them to the starting line of a race and say, ‘You’re free to compete with everyone else. ”, while continuing to believe that we have been completely fair”, then explained the Democratic president. Since then, policies of racial preferences in universities have been practiced, in various ways. However, on June 29, the American Supreme Court put an end to these practices of positive discrimination. By a majority of six votes to three, the judges considered that theaffirmative action violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection to all under the law.
To take stock of theaffirmative action, it would still be necessary to agree on what its objective was. Because, after having been conceived as a form of reparation due to the descendants of slaves, theaffirmative action was reformulated in 1978 – after a Supreme Court ruling that put an end to quotas – as the guarantee of a ” diversity “ which would benefit the student body as a whole. But what diversity are we talking about? The answer has become more complex over time. American society has changed dramatically. The minorities that make up the American population today have nothing to do with what they were in the 1960s. Half a century after its establishment, the blacks who benefit from affirmative action measures no longer are no longer, in large part, descendants of slaves, but children of voluntary immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, who arrived after 1965. They are no longer, in the majority, from the working classes. Asians, under-represented in elite universities in terms of their academic performance, have further complicated the moral question posed by positive discrimination. On several occasions, some have lodged complaints – as have white students – against universities which had refused them admission, on the grounds that they favored at their expense black or Hispanic candidates with lower results. Positive discrimination would have, in a way, turned against them. This time they prevailed.
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2023-07-07 05:30:21
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