Fundamentally, affirmative action is a global term applied to any one of a number of strategies whose purpose is to promote and ultimately achieve equality of opportunity. Thus, it is applicable to employment, education, housing, voting -- in sum, to every facet of life.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order in 1941 ordering defense plants to open up jobs to black workers, he was acting more out of necessity than altruism. The pool of available white male workers was limited because of the war effort and although women -- white and black -- assumed some of the available positions, it wasn't enough. Therefore, black men who previously had been excluded, or in the best of cases severely limited in getting these jobs, were able to enter the labor force and contribute in a major way to America's wartime production. Roosevelt's order also created an oversight and enforcement entity, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which continued into the 1960s when Congress gave it expanded authority and renamed it the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Once World War II ended, however, so did many of the job opportunities it had opened up for minorities. In addition, the intense pro-democracy and pro-equality campaign which had been waged by the U.S. government to encourage support for the war effort served to heighten post-war public awareness of the contradictions between professed ideals and actual practices regarding minorities. Pressure grew to improve the rate of inclusion of blacks and other minorities in every aspect of the life of the nation.

Andrew Hacker, in Two Nations, points out that the actual phrase affirmative action was coined by the Kennedy Administration (1961-1963), which directed U.S. Government contractors to take positive steps to have a racially representative workforce. Later, under a Republican administration, the U.S. Office of Education's Office for Civil Rights took same approach with regard to language standards for minority students by requiring school districts receiving federal funds to take "affirmative steps" to rectify "language deficiencies" in order to open up their instructional programs to all children.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was approved by a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress, prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. Title VII of the act specifically banned discrimination in employment. Evidence of the need for this legislation, which was not endorsed by a significant sector of the American public, was based on a long and documented history of exclusion of blacks (and others) from occupations of prestige and power. Proponents of the legislation argued that native ability and talent are spread relatively equally among all groups, so that the absence (or very low numbers) of blacks in certain professions, along with certain other indicators (low educational attainment, high poverty levels) was sufficient proof that they had been discriminated against. Race, which for nearly a century after President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation had been used to discriminate against blacks and other minorities, was finally banned as a criterion to be used in judging the qualifications of an individual for employment.

However, the prohibition against the use of race as a criterion to exclude blacks did not lead in the years that followed to their inclusion in greater numbers in jobs, professions or housing. Let us recall, to use just one example, the various strategies devised by state legislatures and boards of education in the late 1960s to avoid the dismantling of a dual system of education that had been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The resistance of whites to desegregation, initially in the South but later in the West and in the North in the 1970s, led to the federal courts becoming involved in enforcing the constitutional mandate through "affirmative" strategies such as busing (moving students of one race by bus to schools where the population was from a different race). In the field of employment where the numbers of blacks hired had not increased significantly in the years following the Civil Rights Act, numerical goals first appeared as part of the Nixon Administration's (1969-1974) "Philadelphia Plan." In 1972, Title VII was amended to enable the Federal government (the EEOC and the courts) to require specific measures as a way of compensating for past discriminatory practices. Race, banned earlier as a criterion for exclusion, now became the basis for determining the extent to which inclusion had been accomplished.

This results-based strategy created an apparent contradiction: Race, which could not be used to exclude anyone, became the yardstick to assess how well blacks and other under represented groups (Latinos, Asians) were being integrated into American life. Some employers began to protest the "quotas" of specific groups included in compliance plans negotiated with the EEOC or imposed by court order. Resistance against busing led Congress in 1974 to enact the Equal Educational Opportunity Act, which in truth was an effort to resist desegregation . The enforcement of affirmative action continued through the Carter Administration (1977-1981), but with the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1981, a clear message went out that this affirmative initiative had run its course. Enforcement of civil rights laws and regulations was de-emphasized throughout the 1980s and critics of affirmative action efforts began to question the wisdom of a policy which they considered to be a form of "reverse discrimination."

The term "reverse discrimination" suggests that minorities have enjoyed such advantages over whites that now they are better off than whites or, at least, have achieved parity proportionate to their numbers in society. The facts do not support this suggestion. Affirmative steps to include minorities in the workforce appear to have produced minimal or quite modest gains. For example, a carefully controlled study of the impact of affirmative action on 68,000 firms that had contracts with the U.S. Ggovernment revealed that between 1974 and 1980, the employment of black men in these firms went up 6.5 percent while that of black women rose by 11 percent. In higher education, the Tomas Rivera Center reports that between 1981 and 1993, the number of Latino faculty in the University of California System went up 1.4 percent and black faculty increased 0.6 percent, from 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent. Arguably, without these affirmative measures, there would have been little or no progress in black and Latino hiring, and possibly even some erosion of earlier gains.

In the current debate, the principle of equal opportunity does not seem to be in question. Even the most ardent opponents of affirmative action support the notion that no one should be discriminated against because of race. What then is the real problem?

Undoubtedly, more than a few politicians have seized upon affirmative action as an opportunity to create problems for which they can propose easy and cheap solutions and thus win the hearts and votes of the uninformed. They rail against unqualified or less qualified minority persons being handed jobs for which qualified non-minority applicants are rejected. They complain about the injustice of admitting minorities to universities when majority applicants with better grades and higher scores are left on the outside.

The real problem vexing voters, that of increased competition for a shrinking pool of largely low-skill jobs, is not so easily addressed. Nor is the fact that our public education system needs to be brought into the 21st century in terms of facilities, curriculum and teacher preparation if we are to turn out educated citizens with the ability to address the problems that will confront us in the future.

One reason universities sometimes admit certain students with marginal grades and achievement test scores is that they recognize the potential of many who have been poorly prepared but nonetheless have the ability and motivation to do well in higher education. Once admitted, those students compete on an equal basis with everyone else. Our political leadership is going to have to face the reality of inadequate educational preparation with more than simplistic slogans.

While the continuation of affirmative action policies will not, by itself, lead to improvement in public schools, the abolition of those policies will serve only to distract attention from the most important problems facing us. Politicians are not the only ones to find it expedient to avoid responsibility for improving our public educational system (especially in large urban areas) and to resist facing our economic problems. Among the critics of affirmative action are also those who believe minorities create their own problems, thus relieving the majority of the necessity of finding a way to include minorities in the economic life of the nation.

Dinesh D'Souza, in The End of Racism, attributes the problems faced by minorities, particularly blacks, to destructive and pathological cultural patterns of behavior and a resistance to academic achievement. At least his theory implies the recognition that these blacks are not out snatching all the good jobs at the expense of deserving whites. However, he misses the point. Although some individuals can be found with the traits D'Souza describes, the conclusions he draws ignore the obvious. Whether their students would be found socially or culturally worthy by D'Souza, the fact is that many elementary and secondary schools serving minority populations are not only inadequate, they are counter-productive, serving as little else than gathering grounds for disaffected students, mandated by law to endure the sham which purports to be their education. Graduates of these schools, by and large, are not prepared for jobs other than the most menial and most are not even minimally prepared for higher education. Yet critics of affirmative action would deny even the few students who manage to maintain close-to-competitive grades, in spite of their schools, the chance to fulfill their potential. It is not rational to pretend that all can compete on an equal basis for college admission when we know that many are at a disadvantage from the beginning, not by any lack of ability, but by reason of unequal school preparation.

The future of affirmative action is now being debated in legal and political arenas. In 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Adarand v. Pe¤a that any governmental action based on race awarding U.S. Governemnt contracts must be subjected to strict scrutiny. Although this decision changed little regarding the lawfulness of affirmative action, it was an indication of things to come. Later that same year the Regents of the University of California voted to end the use of affirmative action in the admissions process to the UC System. President Clinton's response to the Regents action was to advocate the modification of affirmative action procedures, not their outright elimination, when he proclaimed: Mend it; don't end it! This was followed by the approval (in California) of Proposition 209, which ended preferential treatment of women and minorities by government agencies, including colleges and universities. Earlier in 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Texas v Hopwood that the University of Texas Law School could not apply significantly different criteria when judging minority and non-minority applicants, thus appearing to reject the rationale used in the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. The immediate result of these actions has been a precipitous drop in the number of minority applicants and enrollees in both the UC System and at the University of Texas Law School. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the principles and practices of affirmative action in Taxman v Board of Education of the Township of Piscataway. Its opinion is due in mid-1998.

But even if affirmative action loses popular favor, we must not fail to stress the need for the implementation of some other positive strategies to increase the participation of all groups into our national life. It is in the self-interest of all Americans to ensure that inequality is reduced and economic and social benefits are distributed more fairly among the groups that make up our society. Not to do so will lead to increased conflict between the well-to-do and the have-nots, with the attendant social and economic costs to the nation. The United States cannot afford a large population of unprepared, under prepared and excluded workers and expect its economy to prosper in direct competition with other countries.

This is a national problem, not just a problem for minorities. Whatever faults may be attributed to its implementation, affirmative action has moved us closer to the American ideal of a truly inclusive society.

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Ricardo Fernandez is the President of Lehman College in the Bronx, New York, a part of the City University of New York. A version of this article appeared in the Latino Review of Books, Volume 2, Spring 1996.