Is affirmative action racist?

Affirmative action compensates for privilege

Question: Is affirmative action racist?
Position‹2 of 2: No, affirmative action is not racist
Argument‹2 of 2: Affirmative action compensates for privilege

Affirmative action is a kind of compensatory justice, by making up for America’s history of racial discrimination and giving minorities additional aid.

The argument

Affirmative action policies help give minorities the necessary boost to bring them to the starting line where privileged people already stand. In 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, allowing African Americans to exercise their right to vote. As he stated: “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…’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” This case of affirmative action gave a leadway for African-Americans to vote because their race made it impossible until the act.

Premises

[P1]Affirmative action gives minorities the boost needed to reach the starting line where privileged people already stand. [P2] As Johnson argued signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, you cannot free someone long hobbled by chains, bring them to a starting line, and call the race fair. [C] Therefore, because affirmative action compensates for past and present privilege, affirmative action is not racist.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that compensating for disadvantage is a moral rationale for a remedy, not specifically a defence of using race as the criterion — which is exactly what the charge of racism targets. Johnson's chains metaphor justifies the goal of correcting historical injustice; it does not show that a race-conscious mechanism is not itself a race-based distinction. They add that the same compensatory aim could be pursued through class- or need-based measures that track disadvantage without sorting people by race. If the goal can be met without racial classification, then defending the goal does not answer the objection that the particular means discriminate by race.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That minorities need a "boost to the starting line" argues for remedying disadvantage, not specifically for using race as the criterion, which is what the charge of racism targets. [Rejecting P2] Johnson's metaphor supports compensating for historical injustice; that goal could be met by class- or need-based measures, so it does not show race-conscious policy is not itself racial classification.