Leadership Quote by Harold Washington

Calling it the "third fallacy" is Washington doing two things at once: arguing policy and litigating credibility. He’s not entering a neutral seminar on fairness; he’s stepping into a courtroom of public opinion where affirmative action is already on trial. By numbering the claim, he frames opposition as a stack of bad-faith talking points rather than a single honest disagreement. You can hear the cadence of a seasoned ward politician: organized, prosecutorial, impatient with what he sees as recycled myths.

The wording matters. Not "there’s a debate about whether it works", but flatly: the fallacy is that it doesn’t. Washington treats effectiveness as the battlefield because moral arguments about reparative justice can be dismissed as sentiment. "Work" is the language of budgets, contracts, hiring pipelines, and measurable outcomes - the terrain where city governments and employers actually make decisions. He’s insisting that affirmative action be judged like any other public tool: by results and by whether it expands access that was structurally denied.

Context sharpens the edge. As Chicago’s first Black mayor, Washington governed in the early-to-mid 1980s amid intense racial polarization, machine politics, and fights over patronage and public-sector opportunity. Affirmative action wasn’t an abstraction; it was about who got city jobs, who won contracts, who entered professions long kept gated. The subtext: when critics say it "doesn’t work", they often mean it works for the wrong people. Washington flips that accusation into an indictment - not just of a policy critique, but of the political project behind it.