Affirmative action does not give someone a job or a place in school. Rather, it embodies two main related aspects: taking action to ensure nondiscrimination and establishing plans designed to improve the diversity of a workforce or college class through analysis and goal-setting...
Far from assigning preferential treatment in hiring or admissions to any particular class or group of applicants based on race or sex, affirmative action provisions and the 1964 Civil Rights Act actually prohibit it. For sure, cases concerning old-fashioned versions of unconstitutional discrimination favoring white males and challenges to 20th- and 21st-century programs to correct these abuses have had their days in the Supreme Court. Webber v. Kaiser Aluminum, Bakke v. the University of California at Davis, two University of Michigan cases, a current University of Texas case, et al. have made their way onto the court docket and into the national conversation...
Despite organizations, news and social media, even courts, as well as others describing these as affirmative action cases, they would more appropriately be labeled alleged discrimination cases. The ways of the world are such that merit, discrimination, luck or some combination may account for a decision resulting in one’s entry into a workforce or enrollment on a college campus. However, the furthest one can get through affirmative action itself is into a candidate pool; from there, the aforementioned variety of factors, not affirmative action, determine a candidate’s fate...
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion...stand-affirmative-action/stories/201603160019
