Does affirmative action work as one of the following or something else:
a. Percent of the applicants have to be of the same race (i.e., if 50% of the green applicants are accepted, 50% of the purple applicants must be selected)
b. Percent of the employees (i.e., if there are 500 green employees and 3 purple employees, and there have only been 6 purple applicants, does the company have to go out and find people to fill the shoes of other?)
Thanks in advance.
Affirmative action is an umbrella term used to describe a number of preferential treatments in selection. There is no easy answer to your question; indeed, what exactly affirmative action does and/or should consist of forms the central question in the debate over whether it should be continued.
Practices vary from institution to institution; in a specific case, ask. 
Usually it’s designed to make the percentages of the workplace match the percentages of people in the local community. So if there are to be 100 employees at the factory in Wankerville, and Wankerville is 20% purple people, they may have a quota of 20 purple people. IMO, AA is a terrible idea, as it allows people to aquire jobs based not on their ability, but their race, “Sorry, you’re much more qualified than the others, but we need to hire a purple person today.” Bah. Anticapitalist and Un-American, if you ask me.
I’d have to agree with Friedo, although I understand the good intentions of those who instituted it. Still it penalizes folk who are qualified and may not necessarily have the benefits of being in the majourity (meaning money) that affirmative action assumes. It does keep some of the racist bastards honest, but penalizes everyone for the evils of a few.
There is no ONE approach to “affirmative action.”
Sometimes, it just means an employer or school makes a special effort to seek out and recruit qualified black/female/minority candidates. I see no reasonable objection to such programs.
Sometimes, it simply means that, if there’s a sizable pool of more-or-less equally qualified applicants (for a job, or admission into a school), some preference will be given to groups that have (historically) been underrepesented or discriminated against.
The famous Bakke decision accepts this kind of affirmative action, and even right-wing me finds it acceptable. Fact is, I know from personal experience that there’s very rarely just ONE “qualified” person. In general, a LOT of appplicants are capable of doing MOST jobs. And there are a LOT more straight A students applying to Harvard and Yale each year than either school could take in. Bottom line is, in those cases, no matter HOW you make your selection, a large number of very nice, very qualified people are going to be screwed! In those cases, picking one qualified applicant over another because he’s black/Hispanic/disabled/whatever is no worse than going “eeny meeny miney moe.”
However, in many cases (especially with regard to school admissions) standards ARE watered down for SOME minority applicants.
Under many college affirmative action plans, Asian applicants are compared only to other Asians, whites only to other whites, and blacks only to other blacks. Thus, at many prestigious colleges, a Chinese-American kid with a B+ average and an SAT score of 1200 would be rejected automatically (way too many other Asian kids with better scores). Meanwhile, a white kid with the same grades and the same score would be a borderline/waiting list case. But a black kid with those scores would be a shoe-in.
I happen to agree with the Bakke decision. I think it’s fair to consider race, but not to make it the primary consideration.
I agree that the concept of AA got lost somewhere along the way. Most jobs have more than one applicant. The idea was when you have two or more equally qualified candidates you choose the minority.
However some fields clearly lack a number of minority speicalists. Therefore some companies simply hired non qualified candidates so they won’t look racist.
The idea is good. The application of it is terrible
Affirmative action, as it was introduced, was quite a literal definition, as I understand it–i.e., since it seems inarguable that certain groups are at a significant disadvantage because of historically entrenched racist policies, we ought to actively pursue remedies to this situation. Period. I don’t believe–despite how it may be applied on occasion–that it was originally described or intended as a quota system.
Yes, there are applications of affirmative action that demonstrate a lack of sound judgement–just as there have been injudicious applications of any complex policy. That does not invalidate the concept, except to the extent someone can demonstrate it is inherently (not from time to time) unfair. College application processes were not a 100% pure, objective and faultless process prior to affirmative action, gang. And it isn’t now.
Bottom line, despite any misapplication of the policy in individual instances (not to trivialize these), we continue to have a society where African-Americans (and others) are at a significant economic and political disadvantage. The shapeless grumblings over how whites are now the new aggrieved class simply are not supported by any statistics I’m aware of.
Yes, there are myriad reasons for this, root cause issues that affirmative action may not specifically address. But, unless we are to conclude that minorities are inherently inferior (as demonstrated by economic statistics), we have to conclude that as whites, we continue to enjoy the privilege of our race. Don’t we?
Bottom line: If affirmative action isn’t the solution, what is? I don’t think it’s reasonable to say to minorities, we’ll get back to you when we think of something.
I think it’s fighting discrimination against discrimination. Eventually we’re going to need something to fix AA, and then we’ll probably need a way to fix that…etc.
Someone in my local paper suggested ending it in 2020, marking its 50th anniversary, then see how things went.
Jello, not to belabor this, but your comment that we’ll soon require “something to fix AA” is exactly the type of sentiment I was reacting to (sorry, but this topic seems always to get me on a soapbox). Again, this is not to say there aren’t blameless people who have been injured in the application of affirmative action. But the notion that AA has led us to a different but equally disparate (how’s that for a clunky oxymoron?) situation is just plain wrong.
Whites are not now the disenfranchised and disadvantaged class, relative to minorities who now enjoy the privilege of their race by virtue of this really cool policy. No economic statistics I am aware of suggest that affirmative action has resulted in multitudes of whites who are being kept down by the system (relative to minorities).
All this grumbling to the contrary (and I have taken part myself, prior to being enlightened in a moment of Guiness-induced clarity) doesn’t change this circumstance. There is nothing to fix, if by that we mean that AA has led us to a new down-trodden class.
To get back again to the original question, AA was not intended to be a quota system. That being the case, how can we argue against the thought that there still exists entrenched racism? Who wants to argue that we shouldn’t be doing something to remedy this? That’s the essence of AA, as I understand it. If we want to end it, that’s what we’re ending. (Which doesn’t mean that we can’t keep AA as “official” policy while changing aspects of its execution.)
That sort of depends on what you mean by “entrenched racism” Do you mean that racism is still a problem in the US today. Absolutely. Do you mean that the majourity of Americans are racist? Absolutely not. Most Americans are horrified by the thought or racism. Do you mean that there is some sort of systematic attempt by big business to keep minorities down. I doubt it…I am the last to tout the horn of big business, but they are all about money, not political ideologies.
I agree that AA has not caused whites to be generally “disadvantaged” but it has hurt a number of individual white people, particularly those in need of financial assistance, and that is why the system needs to be changed. No one should be discriminated against, either for financial assistance, or employement on the basis of their race. Now need based programs which are race-neutral would still tend to help minorities more, as they may have more need, but still would be open to whites who also have need.
Oh an interesting tidbit to throw out there: The US Justice Department recently released statistics on hate and racial violence. Who was the #1 victim. Blacks, that will come as little surprise. Who was the #2 victim, though…drum roll please…WHITES. I found that fascinating. Anyone have opinions on this?
Just as an example of what I meant by “entrenched racism,” the US Census Bureau Report on Income and Poverty (1997 Summary) shows that African-American households have a median income that is about $15,000 less than whites. The is significant–in fact, I think it’s safe to say that there is an absolute chasm of economic despair reflected in this statistic.
Is this the result of a majority of whites purposefully attempting to create this circumstance? Is there a systematic attempt afoot in corporate America to achieve this evil goal? No. But the situation exists nonetheless. This is what I mean by entrenched and by the notion that we whites still do, in fact, enjoy the privilege of our race, whether we like to think so or not.
Most of us are well-intentioned and would be appalled to think we might be contributing to this. But we all are, aren’t we, at least to the extent that we don’t solve the problem?
Avalongod, I am interested in your stat on violent crime victims. I am reading this to mean that #1 and #2 are in absolute (not relative) numbers–which might lead us to conclude that whites (being a very large percentage of the population) might be expected to be somewhere near the top of the list (unlike blacks who are only about 10% of the population).
I’m making yet another pitch that this disparity is more evidence of the chasm I’ve described previously–i.e., poverty and crime form a virtual equation. Is this the right interpretation of this stat or am I grasping here? I might be missing the cause of your fascination, so let me know if I’m misunderstanding.
OK, I can see that some people in this country are economically underpriviledged. I have no problem with such people being given special consideration to counterweigh this disadvantage. It’s also pretty well established that, for whatever reason, whites in this country tend to be better off economically than blacks. This does not mean, however, that blacks as a group should be given special consideration… the relevant group should be the poor, of all races. If Oprah Winfrey had college-age kids, they would receive the same affirmative-action consideration as all blacks, based solely on their race. On the other hand, a white inner-city single mother might have a hard time finding those moneys for college education, but would be denied them, again because of race. I think that this is pretty much what avalongod is saying, too.
Certainly, affirmative action as it now exists is not nearly on the scale of, say, the old Jim Crow laws, and I won’t try to argue that the average standard of living or quality of life is better for blacs than it is for whites. I just think that affirmative action is a problem, and we should be trying to fix the small problems, as well as the large ones.
To Bob Cos, I simply found the stats fascinating because they were not what I would have expected…but they do point out that racist violence does go in both directions.
The stats are in absolute terms, so what you say is true…the per capita victimization of whites is lower because they are in the majourity. It also, by contrasts, means that the proportion of minorities which commit racist crimes is HIGHER than white…as you mentioned African-Americans are approximately 10% of the population, yet attacks on whites rank #2. Like I said I just thought this was interesting. A bit of edification, no particular point to it.
Anyway, I agree that blacks on average earn considerably less than whites, and that this is continuing result of historical racism. However I do not believe white (or any other group) or people should be penalized for historical reasons. I DO believe in need-based programs that would benefit any people (white or black) who are in need of financial assistance. And I do not believe that this effect represents current or entrenched racism, but rather long-standing effects or historical racism. I believe that white Americans have done a lot to combat racism, often at their own disadvantage.
Also, the link between poverty and crime has been challenged (read Stanton Samenow). We get those statistics from convictions, but as you are probably aware, those with more $$$ get better lawyers, so those numbers are distorted somewhat.
From Chronos:
Avalongod, I believe this sentiment is consistent with your last post as well (and thanks for clarifying your statistics). In my rush to scale the nearest available soapbox in my prior posts, I probably didn’t make it clear at all that I didn’t want to trivialize the problems AA has produced, and also that I see no reason not to modify/improve it if it makes sense and still serves its purpose (let’s just not abandon it).
Some “needs-based” enhancement to the process seems reasonable to me (though I still think using race as a consideration–not the only consideration–in evaluating more-or-less equally qualified candidates is OK too).