by Natalie Delia

Created on: March 22, 2009

In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 election, many TV and radio pundits seemed to be asking the same question: "Does the election of the first African-American president mean that we are now, somehow, post-race?" If the answer is "yes," and as a bi-racial woman my experience has been that it may be, then affirmative action certainly has a lot to do with it.

One can simplify the history of race in America into three large eras: slavery, second class citizenship and full-citizenship. The end of slavery came with the civil war, certainly not a "fair" way to stop the buying and selling of human chattel. While giving African Americans their freedom, the Northern victors killed countless innocent Southerners, pushed the economy of every state south of the Mason-Dixon back about a century and generally trampled all over the rights of whites (some who had owned slaves and many who had not) in an extremely "unfair" manner. Thus began the period of Reconstruction and the creation of the Jim Crow South. The Civil Rights War, which brought with it the end of separate but equal legislation and the enfranchisement of the African American voting population throughout the nation wasn't "fair" either. Children who had been attending schools near to their homes were forced onto buses to attend institutions on the other sides of towns and counties that had been deemed inferior, just so these inferior schools would no longer be exclusively minority-attended. Voting districts were gerrymandered to ensure minority-representation, thus effectively disenfranchising white voters.

Over the last 150 years, the ends have been said to justify the means when it came to the equalization of citizenship rights for all Americans, irrespective of race, and affirmative action has been no different. Saying that whites have not been discriminated against by affirmative action is a blatant falsehood: admission to universities and availability of promotion in the workforce are both zero-sum. As we as a society have worked to bring full citizenship rights to minorities by making opportunity truly color-blind, we have moved to make these promotions and admissions available to minorities who may have fewer qualifications than their white counterparts. This is not fair to the white counterparts, but it has led to minorities being commonplace in the best schools and executive boardrooms.

Affirmative action has changed the middle class subdivision, making it multi-colored and multi-cultural. It has opened up worlds of opportunity to minority children and adults and has, I believe, contributed greatly to the idea that we could quickly be approaching a post-race America, if we are not there already. But it is not "fair" and never will be. The only thing affirmative action could do to be fairer to white people would be to end itself, which I think should happen over the next decade or so: just as schools stopped being forcibly integrated and former slaves stopped receiving 40 acres and a mule.

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