Advocating for affirmative action through the prism of diversity may be more politically palatable, but it will inevitably yield insufficient results.
In truth, the world is now a seamless web from which no nation, large or small, young or old, can disassociate itself. Every attitude and every action of every nation can affect the welfare and security of every other nation around the globe.
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
National Action Network, the group I founded, has affiliates or chapters in over 40 cities around the country.
I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.
I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
When I call myself an affirmative action baby, I'm talking about the essence of what affirmative action was when it started.
You can't be a minority in this society without having someone express disapproval about affirmative action.
There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.
I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.
There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.
Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.
There's a lot of Americans, black and white, who think that we've arrived where we need to be and nothing else needs to be done and affirmative action needs to be dismantled.
Affirmative action is not something that the World Bank believes in or promotes.
My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.
Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.
I regard affirmative action as pernicious - a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women.
To abandon affirmative action is to say there is nothing more to be done about discrimination.
Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.
