Sharpton: Government has obligation to remedy discrimination

[Khephra]

By DEEPTI HAJELA
Associated Press Writer

September 16, 2003, 6:48 PM EDT


NEW YORK -- The government has an obligation to fix the ravages of discrimination because it was involved in creating it, Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton said Tuesday.

"The reason that the government must affirm this act of moving forward fairly is because government was involved in making it unequal," Sharpton said during a panel discussion of affirmative action at the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications conference. "We did not become victims of an unfair social arrangement because people just behaved wrong; this was a law. ... And had government not enforced discriminatory laws, government would not have to enforce the remedy to the laws that for generations we had to abide by in this country."

Sharpton also called for the defeat of Proposition 54 in California. The proposition is sponsored by Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action advocate who led the movement to ban the use of race and gender in public hiring, contracting and college admissions.

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