People who promote affirmative action have a noble objective, which they each discovered in their own way over the first half of the twentieth century. It has become an excuse for patronage and corruption, but still it was a noble objective.
The objective, born during the Enlightenment in the Declaration of Independence, declares that all men shall have pursuit of happiness. Or born during the Bronze Age in the Torah, a judge shall not fear a rich man nor pity a poor man.
Thurgood Marshall, a man who would later become a Supreme Court Justice, came to believe in the objective when a friend asked him to bring legal action for the NAACP. Marshall didn?t want to work with the NAACP, but he agreed to take a trip to see why his friend thought he could help with the objective.
During the trip, they arrived at a railroad station. Marshall had an orange in his hand as they left the train, and he gave the orange to a black boy who happened to be at the station. The boy tried to eat the orange as if it were an apple; and he threw it away, probably because orange peels don?t taste good. Marshall could not understand the boy?s reaction until the friend speculated that the boy had never seen an orange, so he did not know to remove the orange peel.
Marshall came to understand that some people in American society, especially some black people, could not ?pursue happiness? because they lived outside society.
Marshall?s career with the NAACP focused on ways to bring everyone, as the Greeks would say, ?to the Agora,? or as the Dutch might say, ?to the exchange.? The argument being that if some buyers and sellers are excluded, then no one gets a fair price.
Marshall argued Brown v Board of Education before the Supreme Court when Earl Warren had recently become Chief Justice. By coincidence, Warren was beginning to understand the objective.
Warren?s biographers think that his understanding of the objective began with his relationship with his chauffeur. Warren had lived in California where Mexicans and Japanese might have been lower on the social order than even black people, but he was shocked to learn how black people were excluded from society in Maryland and Virginia.
For example, not long after Warren became Chief Justice, he stayed at a resort, and one morning he found his chauffeur sleeping in the limo because the resort did not allow black people to stay at the resort. For Warren, this is supposed to have been an orange peel moment, which led him to find ways to bring everyone into the Agora.