Toledo’s Office of Affirmative Action is proposing a new method of avoiding the controversy and divisiveness associated with “affirmative action”: change the name.
The concept of affirmative action has become controversial, and now a plan to call it something else also is attracting some controversy. The city’s Office of Affirmative Action is proposing that its name be changed to the Department of Workplace Equity.
The executive director says there’s a misunderstanding that affirmative action applies only to African-Americans. She says the office is concerned about fairness for all Toledo city employees.
A former president of the Toledo NAACP complains that the change appears to be aimed at watering down the agency’s mission. The city council has asked for a study of whether other cities or companies have stopped using the term “affirmative action.”
The executive director is of course correct. Properly understood, i.e., as laid out clearly in presidential executive orders by presidents Kennedy and Johnson, “affirmative action” is “concerned about about fairness for all….”
