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Affirmative Action: A Solution or Problem?

Introduction

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.

The term affirmative action refers to those positive actions to reduce or ideally eliminate discriminatory practices against historically excluded sectors such as women or ethnic groups, sexual preference or race. It then aims to increase the representation of these, through a preferential treatment for themselves and selection mechanisms designed expressly and positively to these purposes. Thus, there is a selection "bias" based precisely that motivate the characters, or rather that traditionally have led to the discrimination . That is, using instruments of reverse discrimination which is intended to operate as a compensation mechanism for these groups.

Examples are scholarships with quotas for certain social groups, laws that favor the woman in cases of gender violence , admission policies of schools and colleges to promote diversity, subsidies or tax breaks to disadvantaged sectors, among other measures .

The debate is still going on today, mainly in the United States and Europe. This discussion is related to the fact that they generate inequalities and stereotypes in the social body and the required availability of “equal opportunity "for the structural balance with social justice.

Some of the criticisms associated with these measures underscore the fact that these, in turn, are discriminatory against disadvantaged groups are not the same and that would otherwise be eligible to access these privileges. In line with this, it is also argued that in this way it helps to aggravate the situation of segregation against people, to the extent that generate feelings of discontent towards them for being the subject of these privileges.

Finally, one might criticize further from the argument made by Kenji Yoshino, according to which the present forms of discrimination, much more subtle than the traditional ones, are designed to incline by a homogenization within and between groups and attack; therefore, members of those group who refuse to assimilate the dominant standards. This means that there is a bias toward assimilation which protects only those features inherent to the person (skin color, gender, etc), But not the elements "accessories" which can be altered, but they are for part of their identity. For obvious reasons, affirmative action does not serve to eliminate this form of discrimination, it only makes distinctions based on elements related to the individual and does not provide any protection for the purpose of conserving features "expendable" (Sowell, pp.156).

History

In its original sense, ...