Originally Posted by
YardleyLabs
It is virtually impossible to have a balanced conversation about affirmative action without going well beyond the sound bites traditionally allowed in news or even forum environments. I do not believe that affirmative action is in any manner whatsoever equivalent to reverse racism. Those who condemn it as such are usually choosing to look at only one side of the decisions being made. However, I agree absolutely that many blacks are set up for failure by people claiming to be responding to requirements for affirmative action. The fact is that no requirements for affirmative action require anyone to hire an unqualified individual. If they do so the fault is the incompetence of the person doing the hiring -- not the affirmative action requirements and not the individual being hired. There was a post on this forum several months ago that is illustrative of the type of problem encountered (I will make no effort to find the post since my comment is not intended as a reflection on the poster). The person indicated that he had been passed over for a job to hire a less qualified minority person. He noted that his father and other family members worked in the field, that he had summer jobs in the field, and that he was well connected to the other workers in the field but still did not get the job. In many industries, hiring is done traditionally through such personal networks. A by product of this is that fields that are dominated by a particular group tend to be closed to people outside of that group.
Affirmative action, done correctly, forces employers to expand their horizons in looking for new recruits. I believe that this benefits both the people hired and the companies that do the hiring because those new people bring new blood and new perspectives that can help improve the ways things are done. Unfortunately, the individuals who would have benefited from the more restrictive recruiting perspective lose when competition for jobs is opened up in this way.
Even more insidious are the arguments of reverse discrimination when test results are over-turned. In college admissions, there have been many law suits where people with higher college admission test scores have sued when minorities were admitted with lower scores. In another context, these same individuals might be the ones arguing that such test results are artificial. However, in this context the test scores are assigned some miraculously unerring skill in determining who is or is not most qualified. Personally, my experience and the experience of people who make admission decisions on a regular basis is that such test scores are simply one tool to be used in identifying the best candidates. While there are real differences between candidates with widely varying scores, there is almost no difference between individuals with scores in similar ranges. Further, scores are often inordinately affected by certain factors that are not at all related to the actual capabilities of the individuals tested. For example, cultural differences, language differences, class differences, prior test taking experience, etc. can all affect results significantly but have no implications for future success. Even in the absence of affirmative action, this results in decisions that would appear irrational if measured solely against test results.
Another consideration is that when making admission decisions or hiring decisions, my goal is not to hire the most "qualified" individual for the job. My goal is to create to most qualified team or, in the case of a school, the student body that will provide the most challenging educational environment for helping students to excel. For example, in staffing large teams to design and implement computer systems, I found that I needed a mix of people who were highly experienced with the tools being used balanced by a group of highly motivated and intelligent people with little to no experience with the tools being used. If I replaced those less experienced staff with more experienced programmers, total team productivity declined dramatically even while costs of development went up. There are lots of reasons for this, but they underscore the point that there are no simple measures of who is "best qualified" for a position. In particular, I found that cultural diversity was one of the factors that measurably improved team productivity.
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