Affirmative action refers to programs designed to assist disadvantaged groups of people by giving them certain preferences. Affirmative action goes beyond banning negative treatment of members of specified disadvantaged groups to requiring some form of positive treatment in order to equalize opportunity.

In the United States, beneficiaries of affirmative action programs have included African Americans and women, as well as Latinos/as, Native Americans, and Asian and Pacific Islanders. In India, members of "scheduled castes" (the lower-status castes) are the beneficiaries. Preferential treatment is also afforded to women in the European Union, "visible minorities" in Canada, the Maori in New Zealand, and the Roma in eastern Europe. Some affirmative action programs involve small preferences (such as placing job advertisements in African American newspapers to encourage members of a previously excluded group to apply for a job), whereas others can be substantial (going as far as restricting a particular job to members of disadvantaged groups). A quota is when a job or a certain percentage of jobs is open only to members of the disadvantaged group. Not all affirmative action programs involve quotas, and, indeed, in the United States quotas are generally illegal in most situations. Even without quotas, however, affirmative action has been an extremely contentious issue, for what is at stake is the allocation of a society's scarce resources: jobs, university positions, government contracts, and so on.

Some critics of affirmative action, of course, openly want to maintain the subordinate position of the disadvantaged group. But many critics condemn the discriminatory and unfair policies of the past that have harmed the disadvantaged group and call for the elimination of such policies. To this end, they favor vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, prohibiting discrimination in such areas as employment, housing, public accommodations, and educational institutions. What they do not support, however, are policies that give preferences to the disadvantaged. To give advantages to anyone--even the previously disadvantaged--departs from the important moral principle of equal treatment. In the past, jobs were allocated on the basis of race, gender, or some other morally impermissible characteristic, rather than merit. Now, according to this view, jobs should be given out on the basis of merit alone. Employers should be "color-blind" (or "race-blind") and "gender-blind": That is, they should act as if they do not know the race or gender of the applicants. Just as it was wrong to pay attention to people's race or gender in order to discriminate against them, so it is wrong to be "color-conscious" or "gender-conscious" in order to help them.

Critics of affirmative action point out that discriminating in favor of the previously disadvantaged necessarily entails discriminating against those from advantaged groups, a form of reverse discrimination that is morally unacceptable. This is especially so given that any particular member of a disadvantaged group may not have personally experienced discrimination, and any particular member of an advantaged group may never have engaged in any act of discrimination.

Supporters of affirmative action, on the other hand, argue that while a color- and gender-blind society is an ultimate ideal, in the short run color- and genderconscious policies are necessary and justified for remedying past and present discrimination. There is no moral equivalence, in this view, between discrimination intended to keep down some oppressed groups and the discrimination intended to help provide equality--to level the playing field--for these victims of past societal discrimination.

Advocates note that various studies (using matched pairs of job applicants, interviews with employers, and other methodologies) reveal the persistence of discrimination, even after its legal prohibition. Antidiscrimination laws alone are insufficient to eliminate discrimination. How, for example, would an unsuccessful job applicant know that she has been the victim of discrimination unless she had access to the application files of her competitors? Moreover, according to affirmative action supporters, even if all discrimination ended, the harm caused by previous discrimination continues into the present. For example, much hiring occurs through word of mouth, personal connections, and referrals. Many colleges and universities give preferences to those whose parents attended the institution. All of these mechanisms reproduce in the present whatever employment or educational imbalances may have existed previously due to discrimination.

Supporters of affirmative action insist that they too value merit, but not the narrow meaning of merit as measured by standardized tests. If merit is correctly defined as being best able to help an organization achieve its goals, it will often be the case that coloror gender-conscious factors ought to be considered. For example, if the goal of a police department is to serve and protect its community, and if in a particular multiracial city with a history of racial tension the police department is all white because of previous discrimination, it may well be that a new black officer will better help the department serve the community than would a white officer who scored slightly higher on some standardized test.

Many workplaces and educational institutions consider diversity a positive value, and therefore, according to advocates of affirmative action, favoring applicants who further the diversity of the workforce or student body involves no conflict with the principle of merit. For example, a college applicant from an under-represented minority group might be more qualified than someone with slightly better colorblind credentials when qualification is viewed as including the extent to which the applicant will help the college in its mission of exposing all its students to people from different backgrounds and giving them the experience of interacting with such people. Critics of affirmative action, on the other hand, argue that seeking out applicants with diverse political views would do more for the diversity of a student body than would granting preferences to racial or ethnic minorities.

Critics of affirmative action note that, to decide preferential treatment entitlement, it is necessary to determine the race or ethnicity of applicants. Sometimes the determination is straightforward, but given the prevalence of people with multiracial backgrounds and the ugly history of how racist societies judged which racial category people belonged to, critics charge that it is morally objectionable to assign racial labels to people. Yet without such labels, affirmative action would be impossible. In fact, true color blindness demands that the government not ask for or collect information that distinguishes people by race or ethnicity at all.

Supporters of affirmative action agree that categorizing people by race or ethnicity is morally awkward. However, they note that even minimal enforcement of anti-discrimination laws requires categorizing people. (How can we determine whether a landlord has been discriminating if we don't know the race of prospective renters?) In an ideal society, there would be no need to gather data on any morally irrelevant category. But when a society has a long history of oppressing certain groups, data broken down by group is necessary if we are to measure and judge our progress in overcoming that past oppression. When a society does not collect information on the differential circumstances of dominant groups and oppressed groups, such action may be a sign not of color blindness but of trying to hide ongoing mistreatment.

Considerable debate exists as to the appropriate beneficiaries of affirmative action. In the United States, supporters of affirmative action hoped that, by expanding the coverage to apply to many minority groups, they would broaden the political base favoring such programs. In practice, however, the wider coverage has diluted, in the minds of some, the moral argument in favor of a program intended to help the most obvious victims of governmental discrimination: African Americans and Native Americans. Some argue that the context matters. Thus, because Asian Americans and women are generally not underrepresented among university student bodies, affirmative action admissions for them would now be inappropriate (though they should not be singled out for restrictions). On the other hand, among corporate executives or university faculties, blacks, Asians, Latinos, and women all faced exclusion in the past and remain under-represented today; therefore, in these areas all four groups ought to be beneficiaries of affirmative action.

Some argue that "class-based" affirmative action ought to replace race-based programs, both for reasons of equity (why is the son of a black doctor more deserving of university admissions than the son of a white coal miner?) and to avoid provoking a backlash from poor and working-class whites who might be natural political allies of poor blacks. Many supporters of race-based affirmative action support classbased preferences to supplement, but not supplant, race-based preferences. They note that programs intended to benefit the poor and the working class provoked a political backlash (e.g., "welfare" or equalization of education funding). More important, they argue that race-neutral criteria will still leave minorities--who have been the victims of both class and caste discrimination--under-represented.

Bibliography:

1) Anderson, Terry H. 2004. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. New York: Oxford University Press.

2) Bowen, William G. and Derek Bok. 1998. The Shape of the River: The Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

3) Boxill, Bernard R. 1992. Blacks and Social Justice. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

4) Crosby, Faye J., Aarti Iyer, Susan Clayton, and Roberta A. Downing. 2003. "Affirmative Action: Psychological Data and the Policy Debates." American Psychologist 58(2):93-115.

5) Eastland, Terry. 1996. Ending Affirmative Action: The Case for Colorblind Justice. New York: Basic Books.

6) Ezorsky, Gertrude. 1991. Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

7) Holzer, Harry J. and David Neumark. 2006. "Affirmative Action: What Do We Know?" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 25(2):463-90.

8) Kahlenberg, Richard D. 1996. The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action. New York: Basic Books.

9) Livingston, John C. 1979. Fair Game? Inequality and Affirmative Action. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

10) Thernstrom, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. 1997. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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