Disabled Veterans

In U.S. history, the term affirmative action is of relatively recent origin, and first came into use under the Kennedy administration in 1961, when it ordered federal contractors to speed up the employment of minorities and banned discrimination on the basis of color, religion of national origin. Lyndon Johnson expanded the use of affirmative action in federal hiring and contracts in 1965-66, although the Civil Rights Act simply forbids employment discrimination based on gender, race, religion or ethnicity. Even Richard Nixon supported affirmative action despite his own racism, as revealed on the White House tapes (Cahn 1995). To be sure, his motives were more nefarious in that he hoped to use it as a wedge issue to play working class whites and minorities off against each other as part of his Southern Strategy. Republican politicians have been using it in exactly the same way ever since, and with...
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