By Isaac Adeyemi
Affirmative action is when institutions favour individuals belonging to groups known to have been discriminated against previously in the past. Including outreach campaigns, targeted recruitment, employee and management development, and employee support programs. It can be a policy in education, employment sports etc. The most common example is when prestigious schools or jobs are given a quota to meet of minority groups they must employ or admit into the school regardless of merit. Affirmative action is meant to make these institutions more diversly populated by positive discrimination against potentially more deserving citizens based on race or gender for other characteristics. Affirmative action basically discriminates against certain groups to benefit other groups when discrimination is the problem that this policy is meant to fix it ends up not only encouraging discrimination but enforcing it.
An example of Affirmative Action In the USA is law AB 979 it required that by the end of 2021 California-headquartered public companies have at least one director on their boards who is from an underrepresented community, defined as “an individual who self‑identifies as Black, African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Alaska Native, or who self‑identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.” Another example of positive discrimination is, before President Biden appointed supreme court judge (Kentaji Brown Jackson) he said the new nominee will be a black woman this is positively discriminating against men and other ethnicities who could have potentially been a better fit for the job. An example of Affirmative Action casing unrest is the cases filed against two prestigious universities in the USA the Students for Fair Admissions v. President of and Fellows of Harvard College and the Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
These cases were filed because Asian applicants to Harvard felt they were being discriminated as they were likely to be rejected in place of another ethnic group with a lower test score due to affirmative action. The data showed from 1995 – 2013 Asians scored the highest’s repeatedly on SAT tests and applied for Harvard the most followed by white students. African Americans scored the lowest in the SATs and applied the least, but Asians had the lowest acceptance rate followed by white people and African Americans had the highest acceptance rate. This blatant discrimination and racism of Affirmative action is hypocritical the policy may have good intentions but is enforced in an unfair way. As the USA is meritocratic wouldn’t it make more sense to hide the names and races of applicants and just judge them on their scores so the most qualified het the spaces/ positions. In the UK, any discrimination, quotas, or favouritism due to sex, race, and ethnicity among other "protected characteristics" is illegal by default in education, employment, during commercial transactions, in a private club or association, and while using public services, although exceptions exist, (equality Act 2010 Section 159).