This is a new section of the Race Man's Home Companion. Since the recent passage of California Proposition 209 aka the California Civil Rights Initiative, the results of the Hopwood and Adarand cases, the pending Taxman case and the redistricting of certain congressional voting districts, the subject has become more important.
I am a defender of the principle and practice of affirmative action. But I'm afraid that it's a bit more complicated than that. First of all, I generally speak about affirmative actions, instead of Affirmative Action, because there are all different types of implementations. But first let's examine the theory.
In my view affirmative actions should work towards two fundamental goals. The first is the integration of a class of beneficiaries into the mainstream of society. The second is the economic improvement on an individual basis of members of that beneficiary class.
The matrix of affirmative action.
The most important distinction in affirmative action is it's class of benerificiaries. The effectiveness of the actions themselves.
Primarily, affirmative action creates a racial preference and weighs the factor of race to achieve some sort of balance.
mbowen, 1997