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The central question this 1995 episode posed was whether government-mandated affirmative action remained a legitimate and effective remedy for historical discrimination in an era of growing political opposition to the policy. Jackie Young, director of the State Office of Affirmative Action, argued that affirmative action had opened opportunities previously closed by institutional bias and that Hawaii's diverse demographics showed how the policy could work without rigid racial quotas. Jared Jossem, a labor lawyer who had drafted more than 150 affirmative action plans, acknowledged the reality of past discrimination but contended that existing anti-discrimination laws offered adequate individual remedies and that the country should move toward class-based criteria rather than race- or gender-based preferences. The two debated whether numerical goals were meaningfully different from quotas, whether Hawaii's particular ethnic composition made the state a special case, and whether achieving statistical parity in a workforce could be squared with strictly merit-based hiring.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
