In his 1964 book, Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King Jr made the classic argument for taking affirmative steps to address our nation's history. He wrote, "It is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up to his fellow man." But instead of proposing a plan of preferences for blacks, he proposed a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged." King said, "It is a simple matter of justice that America , in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor."
On ABC's "This Week" show, George Stephanopoulos asked Obama, "you and your wife went to Harvard Law School . Got plenty of money, you're running for president. Why should your daughters when they go to college get affirmative action?"
In his response, Obama didn't take the question to a higher level of abstraction and talk generally about the importance of racial diversity; he stuck with the concrete facts. "I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged..." Then, he went further, "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."
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