how can we promote equality by affirmative action
Answers
Another problem is that we generally see the problem of equal opportunity through the very contentious and highly charged prism of race. If we shift the argument to gender we get a better view of how it works and what it does. We’ll have to return to that at some point but by reframing the argument perhaps it can be understood much better.
Back in the day of the Kennedy administration women were, for all practical purposes, second class citizens who had a second class education and very limited access to many careers. Nearly every elite college restricted admissions by gender and women were actively discouraged from application to professional schools. In terms of careers women were openly restricted from many professions and civil service opportunities. It was perfectly legal to restrict them from credit markets, including credit cards, mortgages and car loans.
The various legislation signed into law in the Civil Rights era upended that significantly, giving women equal access to all these things even if they had to go to court to force the matter. In many fields women now have parity with men. In education schools that once disdained women, such as the elite colleges, now have roughly equal populations. Same goes for the professions. While we can’t say there is equality legislation and, yes, some preferential action, turned a situation of outright discrimination into rough equivalency.
In terms of race that’s been a bit less successful as most of the equal opportunity programs are actually not directed to race per se as by law race is something you self-identify and in many if not most cases race cannot even be considered except as a post test, not a pre test. Most programs that are “affirmative action” only measure family income and related economic factors on intake and then race after the fact. There is this big myth that race is something we do before hiring, college admissions and other such things but the law itself doesn’t allow for racial considerations. What is expected is that if the system is fairly applied outcomes will be equal. The affirmative action plans are targets and objectives that generally look for means to meet certain goals and identify barriers to access but they can’t in most cases use outright quotas. If you look at the famous case of the Texas public higher education system it doesn’t use race at all but attempts to seek equitable outcomes by giving every graduating senior at the top of their class a seat in the university.
Since in most cases programs like this really deal more with economic measures such as income and class affirmative action programs actually benefit low income and ethnic whites as well. They truly are equal opportunity programs.
It’s time that people actually learn what affirmative action is, not what they believe it is. You can start by getting rid of some baggage about it somehow being unfair and instead see it as something that acts to open up doors and promote fairness broadly across institutional settings. It isn’t perfect of course, but it also is very much maligned by people who never bothered to understand it or work with it in practice. As someone who has been doing hiring under affirmative action polices for my whole career my professional training and directives from the administrators has always been hire the best person for the job, just make sure you aren’t throwing up any barriers or treating anyone different from anyone else. I am even forbidden by law to ask about racial or ethnic identity or include it in deliberations. The Affirmative Action/EOC officer has always said if we are fair we’ll have fair outcomes. We do. It works.
Explanation:
How does affirmative action promote equality of opportunity?
Loretta B DeLoggio
Answered 2 years ago
Affirmative action is a remedy allowed by courts in a very narrowly-tailored case of prior discrimination. It is not a general societal guilt for previous bigotry. The commonest forms of affirmative action still allowed are when companies or schools have a documented or admitted history of refusing to admit a person based solely on a discriminatory factor. Like the classic stories of bars and restaurants that had signs in the windows that said things such as "no Irish or black served," the discrimination has been admitted and documented. This most often still continues in correcting imbalances in labor unions and in some educational institutions.
Absent a history of actual discrimination, an institution or organization is not allowed to use affirmative action, which is giving a preference to a person of some minority over a mainstream applicant. What the Supreme Court permits is diversity admissions for the benefit of the majority of the students. In the famous Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court acknowledged that if the school sees part of its mission as training future legislators and governors of society, it is reasonable to have those future leaders become familiar with the various segments of society that they might have to govern. In order to do so, it is much better to have a variety of people that you deal with on a regular basis than it is to have those delightful special events like "diversity day" on a campus, where each ethnic group gets an hour to present their arts and traditional style of dress.
So affirmative action is a form of direct reparations for past discrimination, and that is the only kind of affirmative action that is currently allowed. All the other things that we call affirmative-action are in fact not that. Affirmative action equalizes opportunities in that narrow range when an institution admits that it unfairly gave advantages to white people in the past.