Forum Post: What does everyone think of affirmative action and hiring quotas?
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 5, 2011, 9:49 p.m. EST by queenann
(-220)
from New Rochelle, NY
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
This is determining our countries future employment status.
The thing with affirmative action as far as I'm concerned is that it's a noble idea, but it shouldn't only or even primarily be about race. There was a time when it needed to be explicitly about race, because you had entire populations explicitly barred from quality higher education and middle- to professional-class employment because of their race and that had to be actively reversed.
These days, I'd argue that race is far less of an issue when it comes to these matters as class, particularly if you view affirmative action (as I do) as a means of accounting for differences in the quality of the opportunities available to people in different communities. A white kid or an Asian kid who grew up in a poverty-stricken and/or broken home, attended dysfunctional schools all his life, and self-studied his way through the SAT and a couple of APs had to work far harder to get where he did than a black kid living in an upper middle class suburb with a quality school system and a strong two-parent home, and race-based affirmative action fails to recognize that.
By contrast, a black kid who grew up in the ghetto, spent his early life in broken inner-city schools, and managed to self-study his way through enough material to do well on the SAT and pass a couple of AP tests had to work a lot harder and go through a lot more than a white or Asian kid coming from the UES and having access to that tier of the school system, and whatever reforms or changes we put in place need to result in a policy that encourages colleges and universities to take those factors into account when considering students for admittance.
That said, even though affirmative action needs to change I really don’t trust the current Supreme Court to do it the right way. It’s important to remember that this is still the Roberts court, with a minimum of four guaranteed conservative justices on it and home to the same bloc that gave us the Citizens United debacle. I can see far too many ways that this could go wrong, especially the possibility of the Supreme Court refusing to let colleges take race into account at all and thus tilting the playing field exactly the wrong way. If it were a different court deciding the issue, or an attempt at legislative reform addressing the concerns I mentioned above I’d be all for it, but I’d rather have a slightly broken affirmative action policy than no policy at all.
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[Shudder] this is such an important yet sensitive topic. On one hand, this legislation holds bigoted organizations, hiring managers, etc. in check. On the other, it creates a scenario where individuals are less likely to act on their own because they default to an idea that 'its already being taken care of'. I also think that when you set groups aside and say 'these groups need special attention because they are systematically being discriminated against' that you set a subconscious norm that there is something inherently wrong with that group for it to be so regularly discriminated against. The ideal would be for individual workers to take it upon themselves to hold their organizations accountable. When employees collectively point out discrimination and say, "Well why are only (this group) in upper management?", or "Why is this person not getting the same promotion as this person." I think a good compromise would be to take the accountability and funding away from government, because they have failed more or less in this, and hand it over to NPOs and committees who audit companies on counts of discrimination. Workers are less likely to want to work for companies who are not approved by those committees and they are much better at creating media buzz to highlight problems. This is just an idea, any one else have a better one?
Hiring practices should be fundamentally based on hiring the most qualified person for the job. Period. This is critical to keep USA # 1 and strong.
You're absolutely right. But there are scenarios in which you have candidates for a job that are equally qualified, and some organizations will repeatedly award the job to the non-minority applicant. For instance, a company I worked for for many years would routinely have field management positions open up. The applicant pool for those positions was always varied and representative of many equally qualified applicants. However, those jobs almost exclusively went to heterosexual males. This preference was brought up many times without action. And I wish you wouldn't use the USA #1 rhetoric, it isn't a competition.
You obviously aren't Chinese.
America is the best country in the world. American exceptionalism is word.
Eff the nigs