Where is affirmative action used today

This includes access to education for students who may be disadvantaged and employees who are normally blocked from rising up on the corporate ladder. Proponents of affirmative action say the effort must continue because of the low percentages of diversity in positions of authority, representation in the media, and limited acknowledgment of the achievements of underrepresented groups.

Opponents of affirmative action frequently call these efforts a collective failure, citing the tiny changes to the status quo after decades of effort as evidence of this. The cost of such programs, coupled with a belief that affirmative action forces the populace to make unwarranted accommodations, drives a significant part of the opposition.

Certain individuals cite that there is little to no bias in society, at least from their perspective. In addition, they argue that affirmative action results in reverse discrimination, which can often lead to qualified candidates being overlooked in favor of hiring less qualified candidates that meet policy standards. Affirmative action is a very controversial topic and often leads to heated debates between those who support it and people who feel it doesn't benefit society.

But is there a way to quantify how people feel and how it's working? This is especially important given the issues surrounding race and identity in the United States and elsewhere. Many Americans feel positive about diversity and feel comfortable in the makeup of their communities, saying it positively impacts society as a whole.

But there is some divide when it comes to identifying race and ethnicity when it comes to hiring practices. These practices should only be based on, they say, someone's qualifications. The goal of affirmative action is to open up opportunities to individuals and groups that have historically been underrepresented or in some cases, barred from entering certain parts of academia, the government, and the workforce.

It also provides funding in the form of grants and scholarships to these communities. Policies were adopted to include those from different racial backgrounds and national origins.

The policy has since expanded to include gender, sexual orientation, and various abilities. Affirmative action policies have helped diversify higher education. When the policy was first adopted, the student body at most higher academic institutions was primarily made up of white individuals. But that's changed, leading to a more diverse network of students across the country. The Regents v. Bakke case changed affirmative action policies by striking down the use of racial quotas.

The case was presented by Allan Bakke, who claimed he was denied admission to medical school at the University of California on two separate occasions because he was white. The Supreme Court ruled Bakke's favor, saying racial quotas were unconstitutional. President John F.

Kennedy was the first president to use and define the term affirmative action. He did so in , telling federal contractors to take "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Bush files a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court, opposing the University of Michigan's affirmative action program. June 23, - The Supreme Court rules on Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan Law School may give preferential treatment to minorities during the admissions process.

The Court upholds the law school policy by a vote of five to four. June 23, - In Gratz v. Bollinger, the undergraduate policy in which a point system gave specific "weight" to minority applicants is overturned six to three. December 22, - The Supreme Court rules that race can be a factor in universities' admission programs but it cannot be an overriding factor. This decision affects the Grutter and Gratz cases.

November 7, - The Michigan electorate strikes down affirmative action by approving a proposition barring affirmative action in public education, employment, or contracting. January 31, - After the Supreme Court sends the case back to district court; the case is dismissed. She argues that the university should not use race as a factor in admission policies that favor African-American and Hispanic applicants over whites and Asian-Americans. November 15, - The US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals throws out Michigan's ban on affirmative action in college admissions and public hiring, declaring it unconstitutional.

But affirmative action-style policies can be used to increase diversity in more than just racial terms. And class-based affirmative action programs can also increase socioeconomic diversity in schools.

Many have argued that white women have historically benefited significantly from it. In fact, in the Supreme Court ruled that using racial quotas in college admissions is unconstitutional. But it is legal to consider race or another minority status as one of many factors in an admissions decision. And that plays into what Cookson thinks is another misguided belief relating to affirmative action: that GPAs and test scores should be the only criteria used to evaluate applicants.

Cookson emphasizes that point as well. So I think we need to broaden the discussion about that and what makes for a really healthy, diverse, inclusive, intellectually stimulating student body.

Yet a federal appeals court ruled in November that the statistical evidence shows no such intentional discrimination against Asian American applicants.

The case is now likely headed to the Supreme Court, which is currently stacked with more conservative appointees — so the conversation over affirmative action is far from over. Although the poverty rate for blacks and Hispanics has dropped some since , it is still more than double the rate for whites.

Americans of color are starting from much farther behind. Millions never get on board a train that most whites were born on. The Supreme Court case that admissions offices rely on today is Regents of the University of California v.

It was decided in , and, despite several attempts to relitigate it, it is still the law of the land. Bakke is a good example of the jurisprudential confusion around affirmative action: the Court managed to produce six opinions in that case. The plurality opinion, by Lewis Powell, struck down an admissions program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine, from which Allan Bakke, a white man, had been twice rejected, but it upheld the right of schools to use race-conscious admissions programs.

The problem at Davis was that the medical school basically ran two admissions processes, one for everybody and one that effectively considered only minority applicants, for whom sixteen places were set aside. Bakke was able to show that his record was superior to the records of some of the students who had been admitted through the special program.

The Davis program was obviously not narrowly tailored. One consideration that the university offered in the way of compelling state interest was its belief that minority M.

Powell found no evidentiary basis for this, and it was arguably a racist assumption. The school could have investigated whether applicants had worked with underserved communities in the past. They did not, and Powell suggested that such a standard might be a better proxy than race. Admissions programs determined by race are in violation of both the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which outlaws racial discrimination in institutions that receive federal funding.

Powell argued, however, that another right was in play: the First Amendment; specifically, the right of academic freedom. There is no constitutional right of academic freedom, but Powell cited a case, Sweezy v.

New Hampshire, in which Felix Frankfurter, in a concurring opinion, quoted South African jurists to the effect that the principle of academic freedom allows a university to determine who will teach its classes and who will sit in its classrooms. The Michigan case, Grutter v. Bollinger, in , was basically a relitigation of Bakke.

As was Fisher v. Texas, in , and the second round of that case, known as Fisher II, in The Fisher cases involved a white woman who was turned down for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, U. Each time, the Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in admissions, but they were close calls. The vote in Fisher II was 4—3. Harvard, is the same case one more time. The person behind both Fisher and the Harvard case is Edward Blum, a man who for whatever reason has decided to devote his time to preventing a small number of black and brown teen-agers from attending colleges that are desperate to have them.

Harvard won at the trial level because the judge ruled that its admissions program is consistent with other Supreme Court decisions, such as Bakke. But, given the composition of the Supreme Court, it is all too likely that it will decide that the country has timed out of this particular form of remediation. For remediation is fundamentally what affirmative action is. But the reason we have affirmative action is that we once had slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and racial covenants, and that we once had all-white police forces and all-white union locals and all-white college campuses and all-white law firms.

It was zero. Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written. Holder vacating a central provision of the Voting Rights Act has backfired. It turns out that, when you remove enforcement mechanisms and remedial oversight, things tend to revert to the status quo ante. The whole history of affirmative action shows, as Urofsky somewhat reluctantly admits, that when the programs are shut down minority representation drops.

Diversity, however we define it, is politically constructed and politically maintained. It is possible to understand the opposition to affirmative action of white conservatives, like Ronald Reagan, who regard civil-rights laws as federal overreach and affirmative action as enshrining the un-American notion of group rights. And it is possible to understand the opposition of black conservatives, like Clarence Thomas, who see it as patronizing to African-Americans.