Affirmative Action And Discrimination Against Women And Minority Groups

Affirmative action is a policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination of minorities through active measures in order to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment. In other words, it is policy that was established to hopefully eliminate racial preference and equalize the United States. The fight against discrimination has been a long lasting one that started with the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, which ended in the desegregation of all schools (Ficker). Affirmative action was put into place in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Executive Order that mandated government contractors to “take affirmative action” in all aspects of hiring and employing minorities (Brunner). Upon its arrival, the policy

Throughout history, the affirmative action has been supporting women and minorities, which has has a reverse discrimination against white men. White men has mainly been seen throughout the years as the dominate individuals who has received a magnificent amount of assistance, respect, and much more compared to the "underdogs"! The "underdogs" (women and minority) has struggled during the last centuries with the right to vote, the right to fight, the right to equality, the right to be free, and the right to work.

Affirmative Action is one of the many social issues facing America today. Affirmative action was signed into place in 1961 by President Kennedy and allows minority groups or people who face discrimination to become employed or get an education that is equal to that of a white male. Groups that Affirmative Action aims to help are women, blacks, Latinos, and people with disabilities. While these policies were signed to slowly rid the workforce and schools from discrimination, it hurts people who do not face discrimination, specifically whites. Many white men and women lose special opportunities to work or go to college because of certain standards that the Affirmative Action laws require. Universities and the military require a certain number of minorities in order to meet the standards and have a more diverse atmosphere. An example of this is the California V. Bakke supreme court case of 1978.

According to Newman, affirmative action is a “program designed to seek out members of minority groups for positions from which they had previously been excluded, thereby seeking to overcome some institutional racism” (Newman, 536). Affirmative action made its debut with a piece of legislature passed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and continues to this day. However, the concept of affirmative action is a controversial issue that continues to be hotly debated.

Affirmative action legislation in the United States has its basic framework in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which mandates that firms with more than 15 employees are subject to a variety of anti-discrimination policies, more of which were passed in subsequent years. In some cases, the concept of affirmative action was taken to be a voluntary act to attain diversity. For the most part, however, courts have interpreted affirmative action laws as having little teeth under the Constitution. It has been suggested that "racial preferences in federal law or policy are a remedy of last resort" (Dale, 2005)

Affirmative Action remains one of the more complicated and controversial topics dealt with in American society. Affirmative Action is an action or policy designed to protect specific groups who suffer from discrimination, and provide them with programs and special opportunities. These government or private programs were designed to set right historical injustices towards the members of these groups who have suffered things like employment and educational disadvantages from racial discrimination. The goal for these actions are to redress past wrong doings by fixing things like inequalities in employment and pay, as well as increasing opportunities for education. By achieving this, the outcome would restore equal access and opportunity in favor of the members of these groups. These groups generally consist of certain minorities that have suffered from social ills such as slavery and segregation.

Affirmative Action is an outcome of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement. Its purpose is to provide equal opportunities for members of minority groups and women in education and employment. It is not until 1961 did the term “affirmative action” was first used by President John F. Kennedy. He made it very clear in an Executive Order that directed government have to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Since a lot of cooperation still tends to hire white male, by enforcing affirmative action, the number of minority groups and women in the labor force will increase.Affirmative Action helps to eliminate the imbalance in the society and reform the American system. The US Department of Labor describes affirmative action as the banning of discrimination.

2. Affirmative action was intended to provide equal opportunities for members of minority groups and women in education and employment. I disagree with this because I feel as if the only reason affirmative action needed to be started was due to the way Whites treated people of color back in the day. Affirmative action does not force a company to hire someone who happens to be a minority if they don’t meet the job requirements. Affirmative action policies are policies an organization actively takes place in the intent to improve opportunities for historically excluded groups in American society. This action was brought to us in the 1960's Civil Rights Movement, a time where blacks or anyone of color were looked at as basically trash. The act

The terms affirmative action refer to policies that take race, ethnicity, or gender into consideration in an attempt to promote equal opportunity or increase ethnic or other forms of diversity. The focus of such policies ranges from employment and education to public contracting and health programs. The impetus towards affirmative action is twofold: to maximize diversity in all levels of society, along with its presumed benefits, and to redress perceived disadvantages due to overt, institutional, or involuntary discrimination.

Affirmative action has been apart of the work environment in America since the 1960s until present time. Its main goal has been to suppress the discrimination against minorities and to give them a fighting chance to succeed in achieving their goal of living the American dream all in an act to counter the inexcusable racism and discrimination that has been inhumanely placed on to the minorities over a century ago in the United States; it will ultimately lead to the end of stereotypes and prejudice (Becker, n.d.). Due to the historical and social aspects connected with affirmative action, this policy should still be part of the workplace in America because it has drastically amplified diversity in companies and permits minorities of all different races to have an equal fighting chance of moving past their poor, horribly lives due to the injustice they faced and into success they have longed yearned for.

I do not think that these affirmative actions should exist, as the past discrimination against these minority groups does not mean that they are being discriminated now. People with different races and gender are treated equally nowadays, as slavery was abolished in 1865 and the rise of feminism. There are several pros and cons of these affirmative action policies.

During that time discrimination among minorities and woman was extremely high and there were barriers. "Minority beneficiaries of affirmative action hiring plans were sometimes stereotyped as inferior employees" (Unknown). What the program did was that it required employers the hire any person regardless of their race. But now and days, affirmative action has changed. The program first started with President John Franklin Kennedy. But his motives weren't what he intended in the 1960's. The programs soul purpose was to give minorities and woman a fair chance for employment and education. The first time the program was actually brought into affect was the dispute between whites and black in the college administrations. The amount of black in colleges was conflicting with the amount of whites enrolled. The second time affirmative action was brought into affect was to help minorities with insufficient financial funds, because many could not afford a better education and thus putting them in a disadvantage.

The first use of affirmative action was to increase ethnic diversity occurred in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy Executive Order (10925), required government contractors to take "affirmative action" in the hiring of more minorities and women and ending workplace discrimination, per historian (Stephen Cahn). However affirmative action was not fully enforced until 1964 under the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act where that under “Federal law which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. Also in 1971, President Richard Nixon followed in JFK's footsteps by ordering all government contractors to develop a written affirmative action. It generally applies to employers

Affirmative action is stated as, “the encouragement of increased representation of women and minority-group members, especially in employment” (dictionary.com, 2015). Within our time and during most of the civil rights movement minority groups have always found it harder to secure more efficient and higher paying jobs due to racism, stereotypical people, and their behavior. With this being the cause to affirmative action congress had to put a law into effect to ensure that this would not continue to happen and that those who were not spoken for largely in the workforce will have a voice and be able to be employed.

Since the times of the origin of the United States of America, the country itself has gone through a significant number of changes aimed at stopping racial and gender discrimination and certain prejudice. With no doubts, this sort of change is not easy to implement, however, the United States developed a federal program which gave birth of the origin of equality for all individuals. In further, one of the outcomes of these efforts was affirmative action. Initiated in the 1960s, affirmative action was centered on preventing historical discrimination faced by women, ethnic minorities, and other groups which were not represented particularly within the education institutions or in the workplace. Affirmative action in its essence has advantages