Affirmative action is the desegregation program for higher education. Before the implementation of affirmative action programs, i.e. race-conscious integration measures that were won through the civil rights struggles of the 1950’s, 60’s and early 70’s, higher education was overwhelmingly the reserve of wealthy, white men.
Affirmative action was and is significant not only because it opened the doors of the middle class to thousands of black, Latino/a and Native American students who were previously barred from obtaining education and job opportunities that would afford them some measure of social mobility. Affirmative action’s fundamental significance is as a demand for recognition of racism’s continuing existence and impact on all aspects of life in American society, and a demand on the nation to institute positive measures to address not only legal, old “Jim Crow” style inequality, but also the de facto inequality that continues to this day.
Michigan Civil Rights Initiative