Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action

Analyzing Affirmative Action in America doesn’t just mean looking at how to make equality, it also means understanding how inequality has been made. Race and gender are not inherently disadvantageous; one cannot get “more or less race” or “more or less gender.” How do we define this inequality of race and gender? These socially constructed equalities are linked very strongly to real, tangible inequalities such as education, jobs, income, class, and social mobility. Another concern, therefore, is what inequalities are acceptable? These material inequalities of income, education, housing, etc. are necessary to a multi-class capitalist society, but the unacceptable cultural inequalities of race, gender, discrimination, and prejudice must be ameliorated. Current trend in the United States, and in fact the world, is to try to remedy this link between race/gender and measurable inequalities by affecting opportunity. Affirmative Action policies hope to provide more equal opportunity, which will in turn provide more equal outcomes. As J. Blain Hudson puts it, “the term ‘Affirmative Action’ encompasses a body of laws, policies and programs designed to reduce or eliminate racial and other forms of inequality in American society. Such programs are intended, ideally, to compensate for the persistence of past wrongs in the present by desegregating American institutions and altering the opportunity and outcome structures of American society” (260). With access to better schooling and better job markets, the historically disadvantaged groups can hope to obtain advantageous places in the economic world.

HISTORY

The United States has a long history of discrimination against people of color,...

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...utgers.edu/Facts/Officeholders/ocawpfs.html >.{unrestricted; internet publication only; apparently credible}

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