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Rethinking Affirmative Action

by Esther Quintero

President Kennedy first introduced the term "affirmative action." 

Affirmative action has been defined as “voluntary and mandatory efforts undertaken by federal, state, and local governments, private employers and schools to combat discrimination, foster fair hiring and advancement of qualified individuals regardless of their race, ethnicity and gender; and to promote equal opportunity in education and employment for all.” It is also a highly controversial policy, with few fans and many detractors.

Some of this is due to the history of expedient implementation, where affirmative action came to mean a ham-handed system of quotas. But much of the unease is due to disagreement with the policy’s intent.
Many conservatives argue that fairness requires that we do away with preferences and treat everyone exactly the same way. Meanwhile, some liberals criticize nondiscrimination statutes for their focus on race, religion, and gender to the exclusion of socioeconomic factors that can be more socially and economically limiting. How, they argue, could you consider the son of an African-American neurosurgeon to be more disadvantaged than the son of an illiterate white sharecropper?  It’s a very good question.
The bottom line is that “classic” affirmative action is not exactly the flavor of the month.* Historically, there have been two main rationales for these policies. The first is compensatory; that is, the need to “right past wrongs”,