Do white males have anything to fear from Affirmative Action? Affirmative Action can be defined as policies used in the United States to increase opportunities for minorities by favoring them in hiring and promotion, college admissions, and the awarding of government contracts. Depending upon the situation, minorities might include any underrepresented group, especially one defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. This action constitutes a good faith effort by employees to address past and/or present discrimination through a variety of specific, results-oriented procedures. This is a step beyond equal opportunity laws that simply ban discriminatory practices.There are four main types of affirmative action that an employer may use. They include:Aggressive recruiting to expand the pool of candidates for job openings;Evaluating and updating selection tools and criteria to ensure their relevance to job performance;Revising traditional measures of merit to more fully recognize talent and performance under varying conditions;Establishing goals and timetables for hiring underrepresented groupsThese are not the only ways that employers use to complement the affirmative action but they are the more favorable ways to attack the problem of discrimination in the workplace. From its beginnings in the United States in the 1960s, affirmative action has been highly controversial. Critics charge that affirmative action policies, which give preferential treatment to people based on their membership in a group, violate the principal that all individuals are equal under the law. These critics argue that it is unfair to discriminate against members of one group today to compensate for discrimination against other groups in the past. They regard affirmative action as a form of reverse discrimination that unfairly prevents whites and men from being hired and promoted.Affirmative action is not a mechanism of discrimination, but a tool for combating discrim...
