Affirmative Action

Introduction

The purpose of the study is to know that affirmative action and the employment situation in the United States. Although there is no universally agreed upon definition of affirmative action, the phrase usually refers to policies aimed at ensuring that members of historically disadvantaged groups are among those selected for competitively awarded benefits, such as college or university admission, employment, and government contracts. Affirmative action originated during the civil rights movement in the United States as a policy to end discrimination against African Americans. Since then, other groups have been targeted to benefit from affirmative action, such as women, Native Americans, Hispanics, and some other immigrant groups. Always controversial, affirmative action policies have been accompanied by philosophical, legal, and political battles that largely have developed into a stalemate.

Discussion

In its original sense, affirmative action meant taking active steps to ensure nondiscrimination. The phrase affirmative action was first used in an executive order by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, directing federal contractors to employ applicants without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. In this context, affirmative action simply meant that employers had not merely a “negative” duty not to discriminate but also a positive (affirmative) duty to take steps (action) to ensure that members of traditionally excluded groups particularly African Americans did not face discrimination in hiring or in the terms of their employment. (Anderson, 2004)

In subsequent years, as the federal government sought to enforce antidiscrimination policies, especially after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmative action took the form of goals and timetables to achieve representation of certain groups in rough proportion to their presence in the labor market. Such numerical goals, it was argued, provided the only way to know whether employers were fulfilling their legal duty to employ qualified members of minority groups. At the same time, many colleges and universities voluntarily sought to increase the presence of minorities and women among their students. By the early 1970s, the contemporary meaning of affirmative action was in place: It referred to policies that sought to increase participation of minorities and women in higher education, employment, and government contracts.

These policies were immediately controversial. To its supporters, affirmative action represented the logical extension of the Civil Rights Movement, which, in their view, sought to end the second-class citizenship of African Americans (and, by extension, other traditionally disadvantaged groups). They saw affirmative action as necessary to achieve the full and equal participation of all citizens in the major institutions of society. To its critics, affirmative action policies betrayed American ideals and the ideals of the civil rights movement. In their view, the movement aimed at ending the use of race to discriminate and sought to establish a color-blind society in which people are judged by their individual characteristics, not their group membership. In subsequent decades, the debate over affirmative action has involved the elaboration of these two basic views. (Anderson, 2004)

There is a long history of exclusion of minorities and women in the workplace that raises serious ...