Of Positives and Actions

Affirmative action or positive discrimination, is a policy or a program of giving certain preferences to certain (usually under-represented) groups. This typically focuses on education, employment, government contracts, health care, or social welfare.

There is much debate concerning claims that it fails to achieve its desired goal, and that it has unintended and undesirable side-effects. There are also claims that the practice is itself racist or sexist.

Affirmative action began as a corrective measure for governmental and social injustices against demographic groups that have been subjected to prejudice. Such groups are characterized most commonly by race, gender, or ethnicity. Affirmative action seeks to increase the representation of these demographic groups in fields of study and work in which they have traditionally been underrepresented.

A certain group or gender may be less proportionately represented in an area, often employment or education, due predominantly, in the view of proponents, to past or ongoing discrimination against members of the group. The theory is that a simple adoption of meritocratic principles along the lines of race-blindness or gender-blindness will not suffice to change the situation for several reasons:

* Discrimination practices of the past preclude the acquisition of 'merit' by limiting access to educational opportunities and job experiences.
* Ostensible measures of 'merit' may well be biased toward the same groups who are already empowered.
* Regardless of overt principles, people already in positions of power are likely to hire people they already know, and/or people from similar backgrounds.

The terms "affirmative action" and "positive discrimination" originate in law, where it is common for lawyers to speak of "affirmative" or "positive" remedies that command the wrongdoer to do something. In contrast, "negative" remedies command the wrongdoer not to do something or to stop doing something.

In 1962, James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, held a meeting with then vice president Lyndon B. Johnson.

Farmer proposed that a program that he called Compensatory Preferential Treatment should be put in place in order to advance the equality of the black race. In 1965, Johnson (then president) renamed Compensatory Preferential Treatment "affirmative action" in a famous speech at Howard University, which became the national justification for moving the country beyond nondiscrimination to a more vigorous effort to improve the status of black Americans.

It was a counter-argument to the previously prevailing notion of meritocracy. The skills that merit-based admission rewards are cultivated in children by parents with money. Affirmative action was to be a method by which minorities could eventually develop those skills in their own children.

In the 1960s and 1970s, affirmative action became overwhelmingly popular on campuses across America as mass student protests spurred schools to actively recruit minority applicants.

In the U.S., the most prominent form of affirmative action centers on access to education, particularly admission to universities and other forms of tertiary instruction. Race, ethnicity, native language, social class, geographical origin, parental attendance of the university in question (legacy admissions), and/or gender are often taken into account when assessing the meaning of an applicant's grades and test scores.

For example, the college admission chances of a female university student will tend to be equal to that of a male student with SAT scores fifty points higher than hers. Individuals can also be awarded scholarships and have fees paid on the basis of criteria listed above.

Affirmative action programs at universities benefit mostly African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and women (in engineering and the physical sciences). Asian Americans, although a racial minority, do not benefit at most colleges because the rate of college education among Asian Americans is higher than the other racial groups (including whites).

The following are problems with affirmative action based on a review[11] of Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (ISBN 0-30010-199-6, 2004) by economist Dr. Thomas Sowell, himself African-American:
* They encourage non-preferred groups to designate themselves as members of preferred groups [i.e. primary beneficiary of affirmative action] to take advantage of group preference policies;
* They tend to benefit primarily the most fortunate among the preferred group (e.g. black millionaires), oftentimes to the detriment of the least fortunate among the non-preferred groups (e.g. poor whites);
* They reduce the incentives of both the preferred and non-preferred to perform at their best — the former because doing so is unnecessary and the latter because it can prove futile — thereby resulting in net losses for society as a whole; and
* They engender animosity toward preferred groups as well as on the part of preferred groups themselves, whose main problem in some cases has been their own inadequacy combined with their resentment of non-preferred groups who — without preferences — consistently

Critics often object to the use of racial quotas and gender quotas in affirmative action. However, quotas are ILLEGAL in the United States, except when a judge issues an order for a specific institution to make up for extreme past discrimination.

There is dispute over whether this de jure illegality prevents de facto quotas. Much time has been spent attempting to show that these "goals" are not quotas.

An increasingly assertive opposition movement argues that the battle to guarantee equal rights for all citizens has been fought and won – and that favoring members of one group over another simply goes against the American grain.

The debate in the US still continues, is affirmative action applicable or not?

--Compiled From Various Sources by Berhael