Affirmative Action Explained: Policies, Pros, Cons, and Myths

What Is Affirmative Action?

Affirmative action (U.S. English), or positive discrimination (British English), is a policy or program that provides advantages for people of a minority group who are seen to have traditionally been discriminated against, with the aim of creating a more egalitarian society. This consists of preferential access to education, employment, health care, or social welfare.

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

Affirmative action is controversial. Critics often regard it as racialism and reverse discrimination, arguing that it takes a situational stand against racial and gender preference — supporting it in some situations but not others — instead of a principled stand that always objects to such preferences. Another criticism is the claim that affirmative action is anti-meritocratic, reducing incentive for productive work, and that demographic differences actually arise in part from cultural differences. Critics are also concerned that affirmative action may encourage animosity on both sides, as well as tribalistic thinking.

Affirmative action exists to change the distribution of jobs, education, wealth, or other resources based on characteristics that typically include race, sex, or ethnicity. A certain minority group or gender may be less proportionately represented in an area — often employment or education — due predominantly, in the view of proponents, to past or ongoing discrimination against members of that group. In such circumstances, proponents believe that government action giving members of the group preferential treatment is necessary in order to achieve a proportionate distribution.

Though affirmative action in the U.S. is primarily associated with racial issues, the American civil rights movement originally gave as its purpose the correction of a history of oppression against all working-class and low-income people.

The inability of most people to define affirmative action is understandable in light of the fact that current statutes, Executive Orders, and government regulations contain only a very few clearly delineated or comprehensive definitions of the concept. The Constitution of the United States contains no reference to affirmative action. Of particular relevance in the affirmative action debate is the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."