"Although these assertations might be overstated if applied to affirmative action, it nonetheless seems evident that while affirmative action has shifted the pattern of social inequalities, it has not substantially diminished, and may have even bolstered, the overall amount of inequality. Derrick Bell has suggested that affirmative action mechanisms "have flourished because they offer more benefit to the institutions that adopt them than they do to the minorities whom they're nominally intended to serve." Yet the conclusion to draw is not, as some critics have claimed, that people of color and white women, or American society as a whole, would have been better off without aggressive affirmative action programs; one balance, they clearly have done more good than harm. The point is to look closely at the inadequacies of affirmative action in order to learn how to do more to remove inequality, not less. If remedies based on principles of liberal individualism have proved incapable of pulling society away from entrenched class, race, and gender privilege, and in fact have tended to reinforce it, other strategies out to be considered.
An alternative approach would encourage society to embrace the actualization of communal rights, rights that are simultaneously individual and shared with other citizens, especially rights to social resources. Expanding the original concept of "compensatory justice" sketched in the mid-1960s by black leaders such as Whitney Young, Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, this strategy would call for the rethinking and comprehensive reordering of social priorities. It would aim not at individual solutions but at far-reaching collective ones: reconstruction of public education from the ground up, especially for the poor, to realize the right to a good education; innovative job training programs of a quality and relevance never tried; publicly subsidized work geared to the physical and spiritual rebuilding of American society; diverse and creative housing programs to solved homelessness; community-controlled national health care orientated to prevention as much as treatment. For women in particular, communal rights to compensatory justice would include free and safe abortions, universal child care, paid parental leaves, benefits and pensions for part-time work, a liveable income, and commitment to comparable worth. Ultimately these programs would not only refashion the American political economy, but lead to "new definitions of work and leisure," as Rustin posited in 1965.
The implementation of communal rights would necessarily entail structural reforms that both hinged upon a major redistribution of social power and resources and propelled such redistribution - reform that was thus "non-reformist." Rather than zero-sum game pitting individual against individual and group against group, communal rights would be inclusive not exclusive, motivated by and enhancing cooperation not competition, capable of expansion not driven by scarcity. Properly understood, communal rights would tend to transcend narrow individual or group interests and move toward the realization of universal entitlements for all citizens."

from A PEOPLE'S CHARTER: The Pursuit of Rights in America by James MacGregor Burns and Stewart Burns