To Fulfill These Rights

This week's topic in Legal Justice Seminar is Critical Race Theory, a fascinating field that I feel like I brushed up against during my work at Georgetown, but never quite got there.

Anyway, during my reflection and discussion of the readings, I thought of Lyndon Johnson's quote about affirmative action: 

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Then, I remembered that it was part of a larger speech about equal opportunity and racial equality given at the Howard University Class of 1965's commencement.  Check out Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge for a great treatment of the machinations that led to the speech, but definitely check out the full text of the LBJ speech, titled "To Fulfill These Rights," here.

Always an important topic to consider, but particularly timely, given the premature talk of "post-racialism" after Obama's election.  Just how far have we come since 1965? Looking at some of the statistics LBJ cites, it appears that progress has been uneven.

By no means is that meant to diminish Obama's accomplishments; rather, understanding the continued struggle for equal opportunity and equal access among people of color today gives it a much more meaningful context than the initial, utopian treatment many media outlets have tended toward.

The work continues.