Seminar
The Civil Rights Movement culminated in civil disorders and urban riots that precipitated “affirmative action” designed to support social justice in American institutions but also to “cool out” the long hot summers of rioting besetting American cities. This resulted in a process of racial incorporation that included a wide array of civil rights legislation that effectively made black people full citizens under the law while simultaneously placing blacks in positions of power, privilege, and prestige increasingly consistent with this reality. With the political and social success of this incorporation process, others were inclined to inspect their relationship with black people and with the American occupational structure. In this political context, a backlash occurred, and other underrepresented groups began to lobby for representation. Their political representatives responded, and “affirmative action” was increasingly extended to them, altering the policy’s original intent. Increasing numbers of white women, Native Americans, and others “got in on” a program that initially emerged to deal with the history of racial caste, including the peculiar prejudice and discrimination experienced by blacks. Threatened with extinction, affirmative action policies were required to expand. Increasingly, “diversity” became the political price that affirmative action was required to pay in order to exist at all. The result has been an increasing degree of diversity in American institutional life and culture.