The effects of affirmative action on male-female relationships among African Americans

Abstract

This article focuses on the little-discussed issue of the impact of affirmative action on black male-female dynamics and interpersonal relationships. Three decades of civil rights campaigns, including often-controversial affirmative action policies, have produced several unanticipated consequences, one of the most crucial being the great disparity between African American males and females in social and economic advancement. While black women have achieved, black men have fallen behind, in part due to the subtle racism of affirmative action implementation. Using fantasy to search for new truths and better directions, the article presents a fictionalized account of the devastating effect of this disparity on African American women. Black women's reactions to the allegorical symbolism of the “Twenty-Seventh Year Syndrome” are dealt with in the article, and become the basis for reconsidering the message of the “Chronicle” and enlarging upon its meaning for black male-female relationships, and for the future of affirmative action and other programs of “racial uplift.”