This represents the greatest and highly significant societal uplifting pertaining to race and gender in America, where Affirmative Action today is merely an afterthought in hiring practices and education for black people in America. Affirmative Action was “The Great Apology” because it meant that white America was willing to seek remedy for its long-suffering hatefully imposed on people with black skin. Nonetheless, American courts are routinely interpreting Affirmative Action as a bias process on the grounds that it imposes a favoritism on the selection of candidates, fully dismissing that Affirmative Action sought to breed civility to the past centuries of murder, torture, rape, humiliation, lynching, unfair labor practices, and blatant disregard for human life of all black people in America. The Great Apology mobilized through Affirmative Action practices was given a makeshift lifespan of 35 years, from 1961 to 1996, where the California Proposition 209 passed by state voters, upended the progress of civility by officially unraveling all public and private practices of Affirmative Action.
The Civil Rights Movement prompted national strategies of socioeconomic development that escalated practices of equal opportunity for members of all disenfranchised groups and white women in education and employment. A federally lit political fire was lit when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1961 first used the term “Affirmative Action” in an Executive Order 10925 that directed government contractors to affirm active steps to ensure that particularly black applicants were equally considered for employment opportunities, and that employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. This presidential order also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Without taking the temperature of race inclusion in America, the Great Apology is defunct and now fifty years from the time of President Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill into Law parity is apparently complete. Affirmative Action helped to apologize to blacks similar to how the government apologized to the Native American by providing sovereign nations of long-term land rights, except the glaring difference was Affirmative Action was given a sunset clause. In stark contrast to the treatment of Native Americans, white leadership did not fully embrace the apology to black Americans thereby explaining its abbreviated sovereignty. The Great Apology focused on improving opportunities for blacks, where it was just a mere decade prior to enacting the Civil Rights Bill where the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 outlawed school racial segregation.
Reducing and eliminating Affirmative Action devalues the accomplishments of racial parity to bridge social groups. Which is why America needs to push the capacity of what affirmative action accomplishes. Especially when within a week of this writing, the first thing stated by the free press is that institutionalized racism still exists exemplified by a New York white officer who in broad daylight choked an unarmed black male citizen to death. Similarly, within two weeks of this writing a white male California Highway Patrol officer choose to beat a fully cooperative black women repeatedly in her face and head with hundreds of motorists witnesses the unexplainable brutality.
Currently, black children in public schools are generally subjected to harsher, more frequent disciplinary measures than are white students, according to the report, “School Discipline, Restraint, & Seclusion,” released by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in June 2014. By the same token, equal public education and access to job opportunities has never been fully realized, even though the federal government has never wavered in its theory of equal opportunity. Since poverty was a core element of black populous when the Civil Rights Act passed, the large migration of blacks moving up from poverty was vast and the totality of low-income communities continue to receive less than their fair share of funding, especially based on a black students’ need to surpass multiple inbuilt societal challenges.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 served not just to help improve life prospects for bl