AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND BLACK MEN Introduction An

Robbs (1990) has defined affirmative action as an attempt to provide programs that afford women and racial minorities equality of opportunities not previously available to them in the employment sector and academic milieu. In other words, in its essence, affirmative action attempts to redress historical injustices.

However, in a review of Federal Affirmative Action programs, the Supreme Court ruled, in June of 1995, that federal programs of affirmative action must stand up under "strict scrutiny," which shows that they are "narrowly tailored" to counteract previous, specific injustices. What this means is that programs must be able to empirically demonstrate that they are in place because of historical injustices that have taken place at the specific institution or place of business where they exist and to further show that the programs do, in fact, bring justice and equality to the institution/place of business.

This ruling, effectively, ended most federal affirmative action programs which, as pointed out by Sanchez (1996), contained no demonstrations that there had been injustices in the areas/occupations to which they applied and had in place no evaluative mechanisms for showing that the existence of the affirmative action programs did in fact bring equality/justice to the situation.

Dunkel (1995) pointed out that a large part of the impetus for the Court's ruling had been the concern that rather than meeting their laudabl

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of black males toward affirmative action. Effectiveness of Affirmative Action As noted previously, some authors (e.g.,Sanchez, 1996; Konrad & Linnehan, 1995) have suggested that regardless of their efficacy, affirmative action programs are effective because they serve the symbolic value of helping African Americans to believe that equality and fairness are being created in the American workplace. However, it seems reasonable to ask whether this perception is valid. Is affirmative action doing the job it was created to do? Killian (1986) assessed the effectiveness of a wide variety of policies aimed at redressing ethnic inequities in the United States through a review of the literature from the 1970s and 1980s. In general, results proved to be largely mixed, with the clearest gains in voting and lower-level political representation, rather than in terms of workplace affirmative action programs. At the same time, it was noted that policies had become the focus of intense controversy and have impaired relationships between ethnic minorities and whites. Killian (1986) concluded that affirmative action had largely been divisive rather than integrative in its social impact. Stokes and Scott (1993) addressed the question

Category: Government - A