Enter the River Study Guide
Session 11: Dealing with Controversy
Handout for Session 11: Affirmative action - what's included?
Countless stories of "reverse discrimination" describe the experience of
people who have, because of affirmative action programs, lost jobs or
advancements "due them." Seldom asked and more rarely answered is the question
of how they came to know the job or advancement "belonged" to them. Even less
often does the question of exactly which affirmative action programs served up
the injustice enter the conversation.
At the heart of affirmative action is a simple commitment to opening the
doors of an institution when they have been previously closed. The means by
which this is accomplished are varied and diverse. Fundamental to
understanding the broad range of possible responses is the recognition that
there are two basic types of affirmative action, remedial and
preferential.
Daniel Maguire provides some helpful clarification when he notes:
"Remedial affirmative action involves such things as collaboration
with minority [sic et al.] organizations and media, the use of minority
recruiters, job recruitment at black colleges, revisions of testing procedures,
advertising targeted to minority groups, new training programs, and remedial
education (including language education). Preferential affirmative action
involves the use of numerical goals and timetables. Employers are asked to
compare their utilization of women and minorities with the proportion of women
and minorities available in the relevant labor pool. They are then asked to
develop a plan involving reasonable and flexible goals and a timetable. The
employer must never be required to hire unqualified persons or to compromise
genuinely appropriate standards."
New American Justice, 1980.
(Italics
added.)
Additional measures not noted above include on-the-job training,
examination of selection criteria, continuing education, contract set-asides
and policy review. In the majority of instances where remedial affirmative
actions measures have been instituted both present and incoming workers have
benefitted from these programs. The same can be said of preferential
affirmative action, especially, if surprisingly, in big business.
The difficulty comes not so much in responding to accusations of reverse
discrimination as described above as in demonstrating how any given
organization is made stronger through instituting the broad range of
affirmative action measures. In most cases, countering popular perception
about those programs is a far greater task than the actual
implementation.
Session 11: Dealing with Controversy
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