Randall Kennedy Quotes

We suspect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

The only way you get to the goal of color blindness is to be color conscious along the way.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.

What we hope to achieve is a society that doesn't value a white man because he's a white man, but also doesn't value a woman because she's a woman, or a black because he's a black.

I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

Affirmative action works but we're going to need to muster all our political resources if we are to keep it in place.

Judges cannot mandate Black or Hispanic excellence.

We seek not just freedom, but opportunity … not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

Affirmative action is the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability

The destiny of the colored American... is the destiny of America.

I don't think we can undo the past. … We have to do the best we can now...I don't think quotas are a good idea...I don't think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to begin to assign quotas on the basis of religion or race or color, or nationality. … We are too mixed, this society of ours, to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color.

I think it's worth putting energy into affirmative action in terms of having diversity in positions of power because the door was shut for so long.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.

Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.

There are still forces in America that want to divide us along racial lines, religious lines, sex, class. But we've come too far; we've made too much progress to stop or to pull back. We must go forward. And I believe we will get there.

If I only care about equality for transgender people, then I am leaving so many people behind - if I'm not at the same time seeking to end discrimination against people of color, seeking to end discrimination against women, seeking to ensure that people of every religious background have an equal opportunity.