Does anyone else think that Affirmative Action could actually be a step back in achieving equality? It was set up to help minorities gain equal representation in the work force and other places. At first glance this seems like a good thing, but I am not so sure it is. To me it seems like someone taking Tylenol to get rid of a headache caused by a brain tumor…sure, maybe the pain will go away temporarily, but the brain tumor is still gonna be there getting worse and worse. The reason we had to come up with Affirmative Action in the first place is because minorities are not looked at as equal by a lot of people…this is the main problem…the brain tumor. By initiating Affirmative Action we have not removed the tumor, but instead perpetuated its growth because some people think that they were not hired because of quotas or other Affirmative Action policies. I have been told that Affirmative Action is not quotas, but without quotas what other way is there to enforce it?? Anyway, many people that did not get the job because of Affirmative Action are going to become angry with the people that Affirmative Action is meant to help…hence taking a step backward in ever achieving equality. I think the way to truly achieve equality is through education starting at a very young age. Parents need to teach their kids to treat everyone equally. All the people that feel they have been “screwed over” by Affirmative Action are less likely to teach their kids that all people are equal.
Bottom line: A policy put forth to achieve equality by defining the differences between people will never work.
Affirmitive action is selecting people with regards to race (or other characteristic i.e. sex) which is racism (sexism).
I agree in part with your observation and disagree in part. The theory behind affirmative action makes sense because the way that racism exists in our society is counter-intuitive. First, race is socially constructed. There are no genetic markers to define race–no real lines, scientifically speaking, to separate races. Our differences are cultural–and they cross “racial” lines. Additionally, neither sex (genetics) nor gender (behavioral characteristics) are as bipolar as we make them out to be.
Second, those who are privileged don’t consciously notice their privilege. Thus, if you ask a white woman to give you three words to describe herself, woman will probably be one, but white will not.
Third, at the same time, when making choices about people we want to join us, which is basically what hiring is, those in the dominant group (who usually do the hiring) identify more easily with others in their same group. It’s a gut thing.
Affirmative action forces hirers to pick someone outside their group instead of an insider. By forcing them to consider race or sex, we actually are forcing them to recognize their own proclivities and to ignore those criteria if the criteria are not relevant to the job.
Additionally there is the education component you discussed, just at the adult level. The more types of people we are exposed to in the world in collegial terms, the more likely we are to notice our commonalities, rather than our differences. Someone who is a colleague or a peer, is someone like us for relevant purposes. If enough of our peers are of a different race or sex, then suddenly, those identifiers are not important. We define differences differently.
Finally, in practical terms, there has been such a sustained attack on the idea of affirmative action that actually pursuing it is nearly impossible. The label is stigmatizing, and justifies ignorant assumptions of privilege. There are places, however, where affirmative action in recruiting practice has worked well. The biggest differences are that those places approach the matter with the idea that they are recruiting equally qualified people just from sources previously untapped, and those places have created support systems for the “outsiders” once they are taken in.
Well, I would certainly agree that a lot of companies have taken this quick and dirty (and counterproductive) way to address Affirmative Action. And when they have done that, they do, indeed, create much of the backlash against which you are speaking.
However, quotas are not needed.
One of the earliest AA programs in the country (a couple of years before the first government policies were promulgated), was established in General Motors when Gerstenberg was the CEO. He laid out a directive that for any new-hires at a certain level of technical expertise, the person hiring had to show that they had made a good faith effort to seek out qualified minority applicants.
In other words, rather than placing a want-ad only in the local daily and hiring the first white man that walked through the door, they had to place ads in minority newspapers, do recruitment at colleges with large minority populations, and contact the placement centers at those colleges to let them know that minority candidates were welcome to apply for jobs.
It did, indeed, slow down the hiring process because the department managers had to document where they had placed ads and where they had gone on recruitment drives, but it had the effect of introducing a lot of black candidates to jobs at GM where only two years earlier it was “understood” that blacks did not need to apply for any job beyond a machinist.
Did a lot of managers bluff their way past the rules? Sure. Were there managers who went through all the motions, but still never quite got around to actually hiring a minority applicant? Yes.
But the pressure from management encouraged enough managers to take affirmative action to employ minorities that many more minorities were hired than had been, previously. That is the point of AA.
HR departments set quotas (and the EEOC follows suit) because it is easier to count noses and divide them by color than it is to actually follow up to see what genuine effort has been made. I think that is very unfortunate. However, it is not much different than the standard business performance review that measures how many hours you spent building a project and never looks at how many hours the guy behind you spent making it work. People tend to be lazy.
As my Dad told a bunch of grumbling managers at the GM Tech Center in 1968, “They moved us out of the back of the Cadillac plant to this facility in 1954. Everyone here who protested when they announced that there wouldn’t be any colored at the Tech Center has a right to complain about the new policies, now.”
I must reluctantly agree: AA is a bad idea. Not a bad intent, mind you. I am wholly in agreement with the intent.
I am almost entirely white. Now, suppose I were also an asshole. Just suppose. Lets say I toddle down to some office and demand AA treatment, on the grounds that I am African-American. This is absurd, on the face of it, I am no more African than Bork.
But: how do you prove that? A matter of law, with penalties and lawyers and the whole magilla, depends on definitions. If the definition is absurd, the law is absurd.
Further: is a “trans-gendered” male female? To my mind, no amount of surgery and/or hormones will produce anything more than a mutilated male.
(Though I much chuckled by the notion of HR Catbert approaching a male suit saying “Well, you can keep your job if…”)
To take an ignoble or absurd route to a noble goal cheapens that goal. The struggle can only meaningfully take place in our hearts and minds, and there we are clearly suceeding, albeit at an agonizingly slow pace. AA creates race-based resentment on the one hand, and a sense of frustrated entitlement on the other. Reluctantly, and with all due respect, I cannot support it.
My personal opinion is that is was a neat stick to beat people with when it was started, but that as a society we have grown and shouldn’t need as big of a stick. Especially since the stick is becoming counter productive.
As a society we should continue to work on accepting people for who they are and what they are capable of. AA is beginning to inhibit that by continuing to point out differences that really don’t matter. (No really, they don’t.) Eventually AA will pinch enough society will get rid of it. I hope.
The one thing that gets me about AA is that it’s almost insulting, saying, “You aren’t going to be able to make it on your own.” For example, the cases of some schools have lower criteria for minorities? Has this actually happened? I would think that would be a terrible insult!
MC: Eventually AA will pinch enough society will get rid of it. I hope.
I bet it will. I hope that by the time society decides to get rid of affirmative action, it will also have gotten rid of severe racial discrimination. But I doubt it; I think that members of the majority are just going to get so impatient with the problems of affirmative action, and remain so largely oblivious to the problems of racism, that at some point we’ll just say “okay, enough of that, the playing field’s as level as it’s going to get, no more institutional attempts at correction required.”
And Guin, I don’t quite see how going out of one’s way to look for qualified minority applicants, in the ways tomndebb described, is insulting to their qualifications; as tomndebb noted, most AA programs don’t in fact involve filling quotas and changing criteria if necessary in order to fill them.
I still don’t see that even criteria-changing is necessarily insulting, though; it sounds a bit naive to assume that setting the bar lower for certain disadvantaged groups should be read as an insult to their innate abilities rather than an acknowledgement of the disadvantages they’ve been saddled with. Would you feel as insulted about that kind of AA based on economic class, for example? Do you think that schools that use a lower minimum required standardized test score for children from very poor families (of whatever race) are offering those children a “terrible insult” and saying “You aren’t going to be able to make it on your own”? Or are they instead saying “You haven’t had anything like the advantages that most of our applicants have had, so we don’t expect you to have scored as well on these national tests; but we still think you’re capable of doing well, and if you show other kinds of evidence of high intelligence and ability, we’ll want you to enroll in our school”?
I think it’s a way of saying, almost, “You’re not smart enough to work hard and make a 4.0, so we’ll just accept a 3.4 or something”.
I don’t think it ENCOURAGES students to work to their potential. I was an education major. I’m not saying that going out of your way to look for qualified minorities is bad. I’m saying that to expressly hire someone ONLY BECAUSE OF RACE/SEX/WHATHAVEYOU is wrong. And I think that lowering standards for one set is a BAD IDEA. It perpetuates a stereotype, and it doesn’t encourage people to try hard.
The issues in education are more complicated because they nearly always wander over toward the “quota” side of the field. In the workplace, however, there is no requirement under AA to lower the bar. There is simply an acknowledgement that you will find more people if you actively look for them.
(To the inevitable question “Why can’t they look for themselves?” the answer is that they do. However, when the people who are recruiting omit certain venues from advertising and recruitment, then the people in those venues are not aware of the opportunities. Most hiring occurs through some level of networking. The point of targeted recruitment is to broaden the network. I have never supported the hiring of any person who did not meet some level of competence (generally well above minimum standards–I prefer to have good associates), but finding people involves looking for them.)
I think the meaning is, "We don’t think you can EVER make it, but we’re good liberals, so we’ll pretend never to notice. Furthermore, if anyone DOES notice and points it out, we’ll vilify him as a racist.
Y’know, december, there may be a number of people who actually share the beliefs you have expressed. However, anyone who actually paid attention to the discussion about college admissions through the 70s and early 80s knows that that was not the purpose or belief of anyone who championed lowering some bars to college entrance. There were a number of cases that demonstrated that the majority of kids with marginal or sub-par test scores and lower grades from ghettos and barrios who were allowed into college and were given no more than one year of remedial help actually took the opportunities they were given and made it to graduation on their own in the final years.
There were others who pushed for “open admissions” (following which the administrations never provided adequate remedial help) and a lot of schools fell into the “bring 'em in and flunk 'em out” scenario.
Your broad-brush depiction of simple condescension, however, simply demonstrates that you are not concerned with the dynamics that led to the failures.
There is no question that the ultra-left (demanding open admissions) and the ultra-right (providing no support) combined to set up a recipe for disaster. To simply characterize the entire process as a matter of morally bankrupt liberals does not address actual history and simply perpetuates the name-calling.
My problem with it is that once a kid gets into these schools, with lower scores, can they make the grade?
I used to be an education major. I think that this is a poor way to motivate people. Instead of lowering standards and the like, maybe make programs that go into these disadvantaged areas with extra help and college prep designed for those without the opportunities that others have.
Guinastasia: I think that this is a poor way to motivate people.
Well, maybe it’s time we tried to get the Straight Dope on the subject. What is the actual evidence that you or other AA-opponents offer in support of the claim that AA does not work?
Regarding the education issue, the matter is incredibly complicated. Lowering admissions standards recognizes that non-white students often have been disadvantaged throughout their educational “careers.” A good illustration is the book by Ron Suskind, “A Hope in the Unseen,” which describes the experiences of a young Black man in inner city D.C., who excelled at his high school and went to Brown. The difficulties he faced are very telling. His race, gender, socio-economic status, and geographical location all combined to make it difficult for him to succeed. Each of these factors were intertwined, and his socio-economic and geographical hurdles were created in great part because of his race. He was disadvantaged from the start, and would have benefitted from greater support once he got into Brown. He is a major success story, however.
My point in this illustration, I suppose, is to say that affirmative action is something different than mere numbers or total equality of opportunity for a job or a spot at an educational institution. It has to include supportive elements, and it also has to accompany efforts to bring resources that work to underserved communities before their members are competing for jobs or competing for a slot at a university.
Guin, I’d be very much in favor of trying to have an outreach mentoring program in high school. I have, however, no idea how such a plan could actually be organized or achieved.
Certainly, the two competing idols of the Left and the Right (Throw-More-Money-At-The-Schools-and-They-Will-Be-Fine and Use-Vouchers-And-All-Will-Be-Well) have both been shown to be little more than prejudices sanctified as ideas.
As I noted, the earliest attempts at lowering the bar (before the ultra leftists turned it into the open admissions farce) allowed in a number of students who had shown in ways outside the typical ones (by, for example, looking at their Iowa scores and other tests instead of limiting the selections to the SAT or ACT plus GPA) to enter schools from which they might have been excluded. When those students were then mentored (before the right-wing administrations turned those mentoring programs into under-funded and unsupported dummy classes), they had a very good success rate. (Good does not equal perfect.)
I would be interested in seeing how the Chicago and Milwaukee experiments in assigning local (neighborhood) control to the larger school districts will work. While the privatization plans in Cleveland and outside Boston have already demonstrated to me that they were jokes, the local control experiments, since they involve working with the politics of the existing systems, could use another couple of years to see if they make progress.