If there is another solution than "affirmative action" this might not be divisive.
Have you ever noticed that this opinion isn't the only one out there?
> The term "affirmative action" was first used in the United States in "Executive Order No. 10925",[17] signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".[18] It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to "hire without regard to race, religion and national origin" and "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin."[19]
You asked for:
> is there other form of affirmative action that are not : - just a type of quota to give preferential treatment to a group of people not because of merit but simply as a way to increase diversity for some arbitrary measurement (gender, race ...)
Are you asserting that treating people fairly (what JFK said) is somehow not "because of merit"? If so, there's the difference of opinion I was recommending you learn about.
1-Diversity quota 2-lawsuits against the company for not hiring you.
everything you quoted just say “be nice” but doesn’t describe the mechanism that can be used to increase fairness.
I don't know about you, but my companies have never had a quota, and have never been sued, and, had more diverse employees than our peer companies.
Maybe you can explain how we did that?
It's almost as if, in practice, JFK's idea worked for us.
It's normal for any system which creates an incentive to hire minorities to still be so biased in favor of white dudes that you are still much better off being a white dude.
Basically for every minority that wouldn't have made it on merit it's likely you could find two white dudes with the same level of actual merit.
This degrades substantially the virtue of complaints about such discrimination.
And you justify it because statistically if you take a random white people and a random black people the black person would deserve it more.
While this is true this logic is morally wrong because you punish or reward an individual not because of this individual merit but because he happens to have the same skin color as other individual.
It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.
If the end goal is that after a number of generations we finally have the proportionate number of redhead basketball players that would have existed if we didn't discriminate against recruiting redhead players in the past, then no, the idea isn't absurd at all.
Note the keyword here is the end goal - of creating a equal and just basketball team... or society, if you reel in the ad absurdum.
So the best you can do is create a new sport “ redhead basketball” the same way we now have “ women basketball” to not discriminate women !
That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little preference there is before making any dent in rampant discrimination will on average net out to a decrease in justice.
Consider even in microcosm a white man applies to 10 positions who loses one due to preference given to a minority while 7 identically skilled black man fills out 10 apps each and 5 take lesser jobs. It's hard to imagine that the victim here is the white dude. Speaking as a white man white victimhood doesn't really pass the sniff test.
You mention education so lets talk about Harvard. This blew my mind.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...
> Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said.
Almost all the minorities are people who belong their by merit. About half the white people do. Before reading this I was against racial preference in education.
But it’s still morally wrong because for one particular individual it would not.
It the same thing as laws making it illegal to own a pit bull dogs in some city.
Maybe it’s true the majority of pitbull are dangerous! but is it still fair to the pitbull owner that have a well trained one to suffer the ban because it will average out ?
In my example you can say that affirmative action (banning pitbull) is still discrimination against pitbull !
which is why people call it reverse discrimination. but if you prefer you can simply call it legal discrimination
So your probability of getting hired will become less than a minority.
You are correct in saying the Majority of white (80%) will have better odd of getting a call back compared to an average black person.
But while forcing company to use hiring quota will help the the black population. it will make it harder for poor white people to get hired as compared to poor black people.
you could say it’s acceptable collateral damage but you can’t say it’s not true .
option 1:No affirmative action: 50% of white are legacy and all other student art there on merits
option 2: affirmative action: 100% of white students are legacy 0% are on merits and 50% of all other race are accepted because of merit
I picked some random number for option 2 but i assume you see the problem.
If this is done you cannot say the university are racist anymore.
If they decide to do this, there will be a lot more asian at Ivy league university because on average they score much better.
As someone who is not asian I would still be 100% OK with this because this would be they only accept base on merit.
But people will still complain there is an equal proportion of student from each race.