Affirmative Action In Florida

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Affirmative Action In Florida

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Recently Governor Jeb Bush has pushed for the passage of a plan he calls ONE
FLORIDA, an executive order to abolish affirmative action in the state of Florida. Through the
history of affirmative action in our country and its ensuing abolition, politicians and society at
large are ever debating the merits of a racially based admissions, hiring, and contracting
program. With anti-affirmative programs already in effect in both California and Texas, Florida
is following suit with a college admissions program designed to diversify college student bodies
without becoming racially discriminatory. Also incorporated into ONE FLORIDA are new
standards in both hiring and contracting. To better understand these changes we must look at
the history of affirmative action and later, whether or not it is constitutional.
The term affirmative action predates the civil rights movement. According to John
Skrentny, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the basic idea
comes from the centuries-old English legal concept of equity or the administration of justice
according to what was fair in a particular situation, as opposed to rigidly following legal rules,
which may have a harsh result (Skrentny 6). The phrase affirmative action was first used in
the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and it referred to employers discriminating against
union members. In 1961, with the enactment of President John F. Kennedy's Executive Order
10925, advising employers to take affirmative action to ensure nondiscrimination, the term
became synonymous with the civil rights movement (Bloch 70). President Lyndon B. Johnson's
Executive Order 11246 expanded on the civil rights issue by ordering contracting firms with the
federal government to take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that
employees are treated during employment without regards to race, creed, color or national
origin (qtd. in Skrentny 7). Eventually affirmative action was included in private hiring
practices and college admissions programs throughout the country.
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This ideal called affirmative action has now come to mean reverse discrimination when
one race or gender is shown preferential treatment in admissions or hiring. In state colleges
such as Florida State University and the University of Florida, some minority students are
admitted solely on the basis of color, excluding qualified white applicants, to diversify the
m...

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