Week 3: Affirmative Action

On the eve of Black History Month and following the recent death of civil rights activist, Coretta Scott King, the following discussion seems especially appropriate. Rather than get bogged down in the history of/legal basis for affirmative action, I think we should instead focus our discussion on whether we think affirmative action programs are necessary/appropriate, have been successful, and whether or not there is a continued need for such programs.

Just so we all know what we’re talking about, here’s a definition of affirmative action (courtesy of Wikipedia):

“Affirmative action, or positive discrimination, is a policy or a program promoting the representation in various systems of people of a group who have traditionally been discriminated against, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society. This typically focuses on education, employment, health care, or social welfare.

In employment, affirmative action may also be known as employment equity or preferential hiring. In this context affirmative action requires that institutions increase hiring and promotion of candidates of mandated groups.”

To get things started, here are quotes from two proponents of affirmative action:

"Whenever this issue [compensatory treatment] is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up."
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others', and still justly believe that you have been completely fair."
-Pres. Lyndon Johnson

And here’s some criticism of affirmative action programs from the economist, Dr. Thomas Sowell (again, courtesy of Wikipedia):

• They encourage non-preferred groups to designate themselves as members of preferred groups [i.e. primary beneficiary of affirmative action] to take advantage of group preference policies;
• They tend to benefit primarily the most fortunate among the preferred group (e.g. black millionaires), oftentimes to the detriment of the least fortunate among the non-preferred groups (e.g. poor whites);
• They reduce the incentives of both the preferred and non-preferred to perform at their best — the former because doing so is unnecessary and the latter because it can prove futile — thereby resulting in net losses for society as a whole; and
• They engender animosity toward preferred groups as well as on the part of preferred groups themselves, whose main problem in some cases has been their own inadequacy combined with their resentment of non-preferred groups who — without preferences — consistently outperform them.

So, is affirmative action an appropriate response to racial inequality? If so, has it been effective and is there still a need for such programs today? If not, why is it not an appropriate response, and what do you think would have been a more effective course of action?