effects of racial discrimination. In President Johnson's famous words: "You do not take a person hobbled with chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." Once systematically disfavored in law and practice, minorities had to be systematically favored to gain redress and attain the equality guaranteed by the Constitution. As race-conscious remedies like busing and minority infusion into the schools were developed in the late 1960s to enforce school desegregation and the violations of minority voting rights, businesses, universities, and government turned towards racial preference programs. These have varied in form from minority quotas, hiring targets and timetables, and set-aside to treating race as a "plus" factor among others or designing voting districts so that minority votes had greater weight. All were designed to redress past and ongoing inequities, to afford minorities opportunities previously denied them and which would be generally unavailable under color-blind policies and individualized enforcement of anti-discrimination law, and in some cases, such as university admissions policies, to foster non-correctional goals such as diversity. From the perspective of minorities and government, the alternatives to color-conscious policies were impracticable. Individual civil rights lawsuits are expensive and involve long delays. Claims of discrimination are difficult to prove even when justified. Federal enforcement in individual cases, given the level of resources committed by Congress, has been extremely slow. From the perspective of business, racial preferences have been a way to pacify widespread minority discontent and avoid the threat of lawsuits. From the perspective of universities, affirmative action allowed the enhancement of racial diversity. Color-consciousness thus combined econom...
