Affirmative Action

Flexible goals and timetables were one concept the group devised as a means of opening access to typically marginalized groups, primarily women and minorities. As Melvin Urofsky points out in Affirmative Action on Trial, Presidents, American courts, corporations, educational institutions and federal contractors have been arguing over the issue of affirmative action ever since. Urofsky’s book is an effort to understand the current perspectives of both sides in the affirmative action debate. We now live in an era where many argue for dismantling affirmative action, seeing racial and gender quotas and racial or gender preferences are discrimination in reverse. They argue affirmative action programs hurt white people by forcing certain numbers of minorities and women who are less qualified to be hired. The other side of the argument focuses on a misunderstanding of affirmative act

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action is an effort to redress injustices in the past when it comes to equal access to jobs and education for minorities and women. Similar to the theories presented by Urofsky, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering stated “Affirmative action was developed and deployed in the war against racism. It was intended to and has served to allow access to people who would have been denied access by racism or sexism in the past. A society with a history of deeply rooted exclusionary practices demands proactive policies to create opportunity and to eliminate both conscious and inadvertent discrimination.” We see that the Justices of the Supreme Court never have an easy time drawing a conclusion in affirmative action cases. As we see through Urofsky’s skilled handling of the Johnson case, including a host of historical, affirmative action, and legal examples, the Supreme Court justices rarely are unanimous in decisions involving affirmative action. Traditional imbalances when it comes to representation of women and minorities in employment, education and government contracts, are what affirmative action is meant to redress. We see this in Urofsky, when he provides us with Justice Blackmun’s concurrence in Weber:
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Approximate Word count = 2442
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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