By Evi Tsakali,
Nowadays, after almost every election that takes place in the world, the media dedicate a large part of their attention not only to the winner of the elections or the circumstances under which they were carried out, but also to the participation of women in the newly elected government, the number of indigenous people, disabled people, LGBTQ people or people coming from immigrant families in the new governmental formation. What they are checking for is affirmative action.
Indeed, affirmative action is an issue rarely discussed when talking about the rights of minorities. Policies in this framework focus on improving opportunities for groups of people, like women and minorities, who have been historically excluded from our society. The initial emphasis was on education and employment, but has now been extended to other sectors as well.
Affirmative action could be the name for the terrible paradox of the civil rights movement: outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. Please, allow me to explain… For the past century, we have signed and ratified conventions, amended our Constitutions and passed laws to protect people from being treated differently due to race in ways that were harmful to them. However, once we did that, governments had to enact programs that treat people of racial and ethnic minorities in ways that might be beneficial. Consequently, taking race out of the equation, we find ourselves in a less than perfect circumstance where we have won equality of opportunity but have lost equality of result.
The positive aspect of affirmative action
Affirmative action can be considered a major victory of the civil rights movement. It is a way to compensate that some people, due to many forms of oppression, “started late in the race” of the pursuit of success in the academic and professional field. It helps disadvantaged people who come from areas where there are not many opportunities to be able to advance where they otherwise could not. Simply put, it gives everyone an equal playing field.
Last but not least, affirmative action is a means to ensure that diversity is obtained and maintained in schools and in the workplace. That fosters the creation of tolerant communities as it exposes us to a plethora of cultures and ideas different from our own…
The negative aspect of affirmative action
According to Justice Scalia’s judgement in the case City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (January 23, 1989) “The difficulty of overcoming the effects of past discrimination is as nothing compared to the difficulty of eradicating from our society the source of those effects, which is the tendency -fatal to a Nation such as to ours- to classify and judge men and women on the basis of their country of origin or the color of their skin. A solution to the problem that aggravates the second is no solution at all”.
References
- Affirmative action fast facts, CNN. Available here.
- Menand, Louis, The changing meaning of affirmative action. The New Yorker. Available here.
