Affirmative Action

 

The original stated idea of affirmative action was that people hiring employees, recruiting students, or looking for vendors or contractors should consider not only the types of people they had done business with in the past but also look for and at people from other groups and backgrounds. However it quickly became a de facto and sometimes explicit and official quota system under which people and organizations satisfied the government by selecting people based on their race and sometimes sex. As such it is a bad policy that should be eliminated.

In the first place it goes against the reason discrimination is wrong – the principle that people should not be discriminated against by race, sex, or ethnicity but should be judged as individuals on their merit and qualities. The argument that quotas are necessary to correct past discrimination does not work after over fifty years. Affirmative action now punishes people who have not discriminated against anyone and rewards people who have not been discriminated against.

It usually lowers overall quality by at least some amount in situations and organizations where it is practiced. If filling the quota is the priority, then other criteria, such as competence and ability, are necessarily secondary. It would be a  coincidence for the group of people in a beneficiary class selected to fill a quota to be the same as the group of people from that class seeking selection who would have been successful if judged on merit. And in  cases where such a coincidence did occur, affirmative action would have been superfluous. (The same lessening of quality of course occurs with selections based on other things unrelated to merit such as legacy, connections, nepotism, and having been someone’s frat brother.)

Affirmative action also is  unfair to competent people in the beneficiary classes who didn’t need it and got ahead on their own. It leads others to wonder if they are good enough to be where they are or are only “affirmative action hires” – a term commonly used to denote a less competent or even incompetent person selected to fill a quota. There are people who, knowing nothing else about them, would rather use a white or Asian doctor or contractor than a black one, solely because they know he or she got there without a boost from quotas and lower standards. That is a sad situation.

I hope the supreme court ends affirmative action in admissions to colleges that get government money, and that it ends in other places as well. The country would be better off for it.