Affirmative action programs were traditionally created to help avoid discrimination against women and minority applicants at educational institutions, like colleges, and in hiring for jobs.
Affirmative action policies act like a pair of corrective lenses for decision makers with a long history of race-based stereotyping.
In addition to its failure to reach disadvantaged Black and Latino students, Cashin argues that race-based
affirmative action poses too high a social cost because "it engenders [racial] resentment," particularly among working-class Whites.
The
affirmative action society, if allowed to continue, could lead the country further down the road to fragmentation and schism.
Voters in several states, including California and Michigan, have used referendums to outlaw
affirmative action in admissions at public universities and in public hiring.
The rise of the diversity rationale for
affirmative action has not been costless, but it has ensured that appreciable numbers of racial minorities are in strategic positions, while dampening certain side effects that attend any regime of racial selectivity.
Many use the terms diversity and
affirmative action interchangeably, however, these terms are not equal.
Yuill relies heavily on archival sources to help fill out the record on Nixon's role in the expansion of
affirmative action. This represents one of the major strengths of the book.
While many proponents of
affirmative action have made the argument that the existing hiring and tenure standards at universities are already subjective and distorted by "the prejudices and cultural assumptions of the white males who have defined these standards for many years," or whether "those hired according to prevailing standards really are best qualified in the true sense," (11) they have failed to note the lack of existence of standards prior to the institutionalization of
affirmative action in the university.
The goal of
affirmative action was to bring diversity to the upper echelons of society with the belief that those at the top could then turn and help others achieve their goals.
First, arguments against
affirmative action are defended in terms of the principles of justice, equality and fairness, while
affirmative action is portrayed as 'reverse discrimination' (Pincus 2001) or 'reverse apartheid' (Wambugu 2005).
When
affirmative action was banned in California in 1996, admission rates among black freshmen to the University of California at Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego plummeted.