I am responding to the attack on affirmative action taken by Joseph Daniel Ura (Pernicious Preferences, Feb. 3).

He is correct in stating that the principles of affirmative action programs, both in industry as well as in academic settings, rest upon the idea that all men are created equal. However, he fails to recognize that those people are guaranteed the equal protection of the laws, as stated by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Equal protection of the laws is the sole intent of affirmative action. For hundreds of years in American society, minorities and women have suffered considerable disadvantages in education and employment; affirmative action simply attempts to extend equal opportunity to all Americans. Many, including Ura, try to obscure the debate with allusions to quotas – which are clearly illegal and not a component of affirmative action – and reverse discrimination.

Affirmative action takes positive and tangible steps to help minorities and women gain and expand their access to education and jobs. It’s a strategy for aiding our society’s ailing institutions, which are still plagued with discriminatory attitudes and practices that exclude millions of qualified and deserving people from the American mainstream. Affirmative action is an instrument of inclusion, a means of bringing all Americans into society’s mainstream as equal competitors – with an equal start.

Affirmative action does not penalize white males. Fairness requires ending biased practices, not perpetuating them, and that includes ending the unjust advantages traditionally enjoyed by whites and white men. The conscientious effort to hire or admit women and people of color is a way for employers and schools to break their habit of favoring whites and males, and a way to facilitate the transition to non-discriminatory practices.

Any institution that does not discriminate must be applauded, but we must recognize that there is a bias inherit in the system; that is, to ignore affirmative action and other such policies is the same as saying Whites Only on the gates of our universities.

Ura also states that affirmative action has outlived its purpose. Any serious look at America’s classrooms and boardrooms would quickly dispel such myths.

Discrimination, though not as overt as it was 30 years ago, is still a pervasive part of American society. Higher education is still out of reach for many people of color – only 18 percent of college students are African American, Latino or Native American. Women are still routinely paid less than their male counterparts, and top-level women managers are scarce.

Until this world is truly just, affirmative action will continue to be a powerful tool in the fight against such blatant inequality.

-The writer is founder and vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union at GW.