Affirmative Action In Education Research Articles

Seeing Race Like a State: Higher Education Affirmative Action Verification Commissions in Brazil

ABSTRACTA growing body of literature has focused on how different states continuously “make race” by legitimizing certain racial categories while invisibilizing others. Much less has been written on the actual processes of transforming race into a bureaucratic category when implementing antiracist public policies. This article focuses on the recent use of verification commissions to validate the racial self-identification of potential beneficiaries of racial quotas at federal higher education institutions in Brazil. We argue that through their choices, particularly through their definition of what race is, of who can see race, and of how to see race, these commissions are transforming not only understandings about affirmative action’s aims but also understandings of race. The study focuses on three potential consequences of commission practices for Brazilian racial boundaries: the disciplining of racial identifications, the decontextualization of race, and the individualization of racial injustice.

Recent Controversies over Affirmative Action in the United States

Affirmative action has a long history and is a controversial policy. This policy refers to an organization investing resources to ensure that people are not discriminated against on the basis of gender or race. For decades, affirmative action has been a very complete and controversial aspect of college enrollment in the United States. It has played an essential role in supplying educational chances, academic growth, and a community awareness for students. However, others believe that this policy is outdated in our current climate and is sometimes viewed as a form of reverse racial discrimination. Many universities have recently raised questions about affirmative action and its practices. Drawing upon various online sources, this paper looks at the changing attitudes toward affirmative action in education in the United States in recent years. It further explores why universities start to oppose affirmative action policy. The research sheds light on the development of affirmative action in recent years in the United States and contributes to our understanding of equality and justice in education in societies.

Affirmative Action in Education Leads to Complacency or Complementarity? Evidence from Affirmative Action in Education Inclusion in Uttar Pradesh, India

Affirmative Action in Education Leads to Complacency or Complementarity? Evidence from Affirmative Action in Education Inclusion in Uttar Pradesh, India

The Importance of Being Political: How to Understand the US Supreme Court's Approach to Affirmative Action in Education

This article examines the evolving jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court’s decisions on the constitutionality of affirmative action with specific focus on education. Traversing the Court’s affirmative action decisions from the 1970s to 2013, the author argues that the best, and possibly only, way to understand the evolution of this politically contentious doctrine is to focus on politics. This requires paying attention to political commitments of the justices, the role of interest groups, the voter alignments of the Democratic and Republican parties and white elite and public opinion. The author uses leading social science approaches to present three models of judicial decision-making: the attitudinal model, the strategic actor model, and the institutional/public opinion model. The article underlines the need to locate the Court within the political and cultural context in which it operates.

Predicting Support for Affirmative Action in Educational Admissions

The present study examines predictors of support for ethnicity-based affirmative action (AA) in college admissions. There is considerable work focused on predicting support for AA policies in employment, but there is comparative dearth of knowledge about reactions to AA in education. This work applies existing models of support for AA that include beliefs about AA policies (fairness, merit, diversity valuation, and prevalence of discrimination) and individual characteristics (sex, political orientation, and self-interest). White (n = 413) and Hispanic (n = 343) college students completed measures of the model predictors and reactions to a general AA policy and several specific policies (e.g., recruitment of minority applicants, different standards for admission). Regarding the general policy, those who more strongly valued diversity in educational setting and believed discrimination still existed indicated stronger support for general AA policy. Surprisingly, fairness, merit, gender, and political orientation did not uniquely predict support in either sample. Self-interest related to greater support for Hispanic participants only. Across specific policy applications, diversity valuation and recognition of ongoing discrimination were the also most consistent predictors. Findings highlight that models of support for AA in hiring may not be wholly applicable in predicting support for AA in educational admissions.

Culture versus class: towards an understanding of Māori poverty

Interrogating why class has been demoted as a useful concept within anthropology, the author examines the ways in which issues of inequality and ethnicity have been used to explain both the enduring impact of settler colonialism on, and contemporary forms of discrimination against, New Zealand Māori. He weighs up the impact of the cultural turn in academia, the Māori Renaissance, the impact of neoliberalism, and the assumption that class coincides with ethnicity and hence the emphasis on affirmative action in education. The assumption that poverty is either class- or ethnicity-based is false. Māori themselves have been affected by social change: a few making it into a middle class, while, despite growing intermarriage, identification as Māori, appears enhanced by both enduring poverty and racism.

Multiculturalism in a Comparative Perspective: Australia, Canada and India

This paper is an indepth analysis of the policies for managing diversity in three countries that have multicultural populations, namely Australia, Canada and India based on markers of difference such as ethnicity, culture, and caste (in India). These characteristics of the multicultural populations in these three contexts offer an interesting point of comparison for exploring the complex interplay between diversity and equality. Despite complexities involved in cross-cultural comparisons— Multiculturalism (Australia, Canada) and Reservations (India)—this study indicates that both Australia and Canada have been successful in integrating their populations in employment, language learning and shared liberal values. Australia’s push for “core values” weakens multicultural policies but “civic multiculturalism” in some States focuses on a “shared identity”. In Canada, the process of immigrant and minority integration is said to work better than in other countries, e.g., participation in the political structure, but problems remain such as with Indigenous peoples and Quebec’s place in the country. India’s Constitutional provisions have worked towards increasing political participations of the lower castes and tribes, but despite affirmative action in education and employment, discrimination continues towards the historically marginalized populations in all aspects of society.

Diversity’s twilight Zone: how affirmative action in education equals ‘discrimination’ in the colorblind era

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the demise of affirmative action policies. This inverse relationship is not coincidental. Utilizing Critical Race Theory’s methodology of constructing counter stories, this paper traces the history of diversity from the Supreme Court. By locating the ontological being of diversity from the perspective of the Supreme Court, the author establishes a historical narrative that shows the backward and bifurcated approach of how affirmative action equals racial discrimination in the colorblind era. As a result of this backward approach, diversity talk is widely accepted while affirmative action policies in education have been effectively defeated.

A New Approach to Education Affirmative Action

In light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the race-conscious affirmative action program at the University of Texas, this Note examines the increasingly vexing challenges posed by the current race-based university affirmative action and explores a possible alternative to this contentious practice. I argue that the Court’s 2003 affirmative action precedent, Grutter v. Bollinger, is questionable because it presents an unresolvable definitional conundrum regarding the logical endpoint of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action program. Inheriting this conundrum from Grutter, the Court’s Fisher II decision is also constitutionally untenable but nonetheless understandable against the social backdrop of escalating racial tension. With emerging social science arguments against race-conscious affirmative action and the precarious constitutional ground of it, I then propose a constitutionally-robust, two-pronged alternative in which affirmative action jurisprudence is better used to balance competing societal interests in affording equal opportunity to historically disadvantaged groups and equal treatment of all individuals. The first prong is to implement affirmative action programs in public elementary and secondary schools, in the context of the continuing school desegregation movement, to provide requisite resources and opportunities for minority students early on in their lives. The second prong is to establish a class-based affirmative action model in which universities, in addition to assessing applicants’ academic and extracurricular credentials, target such socioeconomic factors as income, wealth, family background, schooling opportunities and neighbourhood demographics to review the applicants on a truly holistic basis.

Juridification of the Right to Development in India

VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 175 - 192

Reverse Discrimination in National College Entrance Examination – Epitome of Preferential Ethnic Affairs Policies in China

This article critically analyses ethnic affairs policies in China; in particular, preferential policies in criminal law, family planning and education. The policy of awarding extra points to ethnic minority candidates in the National College Entrance Examination (ncee) is evaluated as a case study to expound why preferential treatment is discriminatory. China’s regional autonomy model, which replicates that of the former ussr, is unsustainable in the long run, because it could foster separatism and ethnic identity, rather than a common citizenship of China. Lessons are drawn from education affirmative action in the usa, which in recent years has arguably transformed into reverse discrimination in some states. The author argues that China does not have historical persecutions against minorities like those in the usa that require governmental compensatory policy, nor could it afford to cherry-pick amongst 55 ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu 少数民族) and alienate Han ethnicity1 (hanzu 汉族). Preferential ethnic affairs policies could challenge harmony among various ethnic groups. Equality before the law of all citizens regardless of ethnicity must be upheld.

Scrutinizing Strict Scrutiny

Standards of review dominate personal liberties practice, and we must take them seriously if we heed calls to take (constitutional) lawyering seriously. Standards are poorly articulated and undertheorized. They must be properly fashioned by exploring and reconciling the logic and purpose of each of their components. We do this with strict scrutiny both to energize an important standard of review and model a proper approach. Our analysis is primarily within the context of higher education affirmative action cases because they typify the ambiguity of strict scrutiny; one such case – Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin -- could return to the Court next term.We derive a preferred articulation of strict scrutiny with six achievable but rights-protective requirements. Strict scrutiny is especially energized by separating its “ends question” about compellingness from its “means question” about interest advancement. Then state interests are compelling only if of a special nature, analogous to requiring fundamental rights to have special attributes irrespective of any intrusion.The preferred version of strict scrutiny is applied to Fisher, which involves a university program that considers race as one diversity factor combined with a top ten percent law. Our contrarian conclusion is that the law is unconstitutional, but that the Court should save the university program by severing it from the law. It is contrarian because most authorities - whether invoking an anti-subjugation, anti-classification, or antibalkanization perspective -- accept supposedly racially neutral top ten percent laws. We invoke a nuanced conception of antibalkanization applicable in Fisher’s unique circumstances. Our conclusion is also based on a rich conception of academic freedom with two complementary aspects that place it at the foundation of freedom of speech. These aspects combine to protect universities from external impositions such as the Texas law, allowing them to accommodate diversity and demonstrated academic capacity.

Affirmative Action in the United States: A Brief Summary of the Law and Social Science

This paper, written for a Brazilian sociology journal, seeks to acquaint readers unfamiliar with affirmative action in the United States with its history, law and social science. It discusses the law of affirmative action as it has developed in the government contracting, employment and educational spheres, and reviews social science research addressing affirmative action in the educational sphere. It specifically addresses and shows the flaws in and/or limitations of research that supports the educational mismatch hypothesis, the empirical case for “science mismatch,” and the claim that class-based affirmative action would be as or almost as effective in promoting racial diversity as race-based affirmative action. Work by Richard Sander, Richard Kahlenberg, Doug Williams and Peter Arcidiacono is specifically addressed. The article also argues that the Bakke case distorted the jurisprudence of educational affirmative action and conversations about it in ways that have had lasting, unfortunate effects.

Ideology of white racial supremacy: colonization and de-colonization processes

This article is a literature review on how the ideology of white racial supremacy dehumanizes and colonizes the minds of Whites and Blacks in Brazil. For this aim I use critical references about whiteness to highlight dehumanization processes in Whites, and I make use of critical references of Black and African studies to examine specific dehumanization processes of the Black population. Furthermore, the work seeks to reflect on possibilities of mental humanization and de-colonization in both groups considering current policies of Affirmative Action in Education in Brazil.

Affirmative action in education: Evidence from engineering college admissions in India

This paper examines an affirmative action program for “lower-caste” groups in engineering colleges in India. We study both the targeting properties of the program, and its implications for labor market outcomes. We find that affirmative action successfully targets the financially disadvantaged: the upper-caste applicants that are displaced by affirmative action come from a richer economic background than the lower-caste applicants that are displacing them. Targeting by caste, however, may lead to the exclusion of other disadvantaged groups. For example, caste-based targeting reduces the overall number of females entering engineering colleges. We find that despite poor entrance exam scores, lower-caste entrants obtain a positive return to admission. Our estimates, however, also suggest that these gains may come at an absolute cost because the income losses experienced by displaced upper-caste applicants are larger than the income gains experienced by displacing lower-caste students. Limited sample sizes in our preferred econometric specifications, however, prevent us from drawing strong conclusions from these labor market findings.

Nice Legal Studies

Unlike contemporary politics, much of our recent legal theory urges us to “make nice,” that is, to minimize social conflict and economize on disagreement whenever possible. By focusing our attention and energy on what we can agree on, it claims to privatize animosity and promote productive social action. Most important, it purports to have no substantive politics. This essay criticizes both the theorists and jurists who advocate this view for concealing the deep and controversial politics their calls entail. By looking closely at Tom Nagel’s Concealment and Disclosure, which most fully lays out the foundations of this position, and Cass Sunstein’s One Case At A Time: Judicial Minimalism On The Supreme Court, which normatively defends it as appropriate judicial practice, this article shows how theorists employ it in an attempt to disarm conservative politics. Niceness, in their hands, forestalls conflict that could unwind prior judicial accomplishments they approve of. The essay then discusses Chief Justice John Roberts’s seemingly paradoxical championing of this same position. Why does he self-consciously adopt a view liberal theorists developed in order to preserve the legacy of the Warren and Burger Courts against conservative challenge? He employs it differently to pull the sting from conservative judicial practice. The article looks at two of his most important opinions on the Court: his controlling opinion in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life II and his partial majority and plurality opinion in Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The first shows how he employs niceness to overturn the leading constitutional case supporting campaign finance reform: McConnell v. FEC. His strategy is to disarm all criticism by presenting himself as doing nothing at all. The second illustrates a somewhat different use of this strategy. In it, he claims Brown v. Board of Education as authority for a very controversial reading of the equal protection clause-one that would outlaw most affirmative action in education. Here he again tries to appear to be doing nothing at all-this time not by finely parsing leading constitutional precedent but by broadly reweaving the constitutional past in order to make it appear necessarily continuous with his position. To the extent he is successful, his opponents, not he, break with perhaps the most sacrosanct constitutional case of the last several generations.

Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America: Between Race and Culture

In recent years Afro-descendant social movements have won important collective rights from the state in many Latin American countries. In addition to certain collective rights to land and culture embedded in new multicultural citizenship regimes, in a few countries in the region Afro-descendants have also won specific anti-racial discrimination rights, such as affirmative action in education and employment. However, despite such important achievements, the basis of Afro-descendant collective rights remains a highly contested issue throughout the region. This article will explore the challenges that Afro-descendants face when trying to claim collective rights in Latin America, focusing specifically on the kinds of collective rights and modes of justification of such rights open to Afro-descendant movements in Latin America today.

The Michigan Affirmative Action Cases by Barbara A. Perry

Book Reviews 153 Barbara A. Perry. The Michigan Affirmative Action Cases. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. 232. Bibliographic essay. Index. Cloth, $35.00; paper, $16.95. Barbara A. Perry's The Michigan Affirmative Action Cases analyzes two important 2003 Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in education. This volume, published as part of the Landmark Law Cases and American Society series from the University of Kansas, provides the legal and historical context for Grat^ v. Bollinger et al. and Grutter v. Bollinger et al, which challenged the University of Michigan's admissions practices for undergraduates and law-school applicants. Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter, two white women who were denied admission to the university's undergraduate and law-school programs, respectively, sued the University of Michigan in 1997. Both plaintiffs claimed that they had been denied their Fourteenth Amendment rights to equal protection of the laws and their rights under Tide VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; both suedwith the legal assistance of the Center for Individual Rights (OR), a conservative public-litigation organization dedicated to ending racial preferences. The CIR's involvement portended the intervention of numerous interested third parties in these two cases; when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases in 2002, they received nearly one hundred amici curiae briefs. The heated controversy surrounding these cases was a product of the nation's long and tangled history of race relations. By way of background to Grat% and Grutter, Perry provides a particularly nuanced history of how Michigan's racially polarized politics both gave rise to, and resulted from, previous legal batdes over school busing and affirmative action in employment. The 2003 cases were no different. When the Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan's undergraduate-admissions policies, but upheld those of the law school, affirmative-action supporters celebrated, while opponents mobilized support for an amendment to Michigan's constitution banning the use of racial preferences (itwas approved by voters in 2006, thus rendering the Grutter decision moot inMichigan). Perry's account of the legal issues involved in these cases initially focuses on the Supreme Court's first major educational affirmative action decision, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). In Bakke, a white man denied admission to the University of California Davis's Medical School won a decision that racial quotas were constitutionally impermissible. Yet Justice Lewis Powell also indicated 154 Michigan Historical Review in his opinion in Bakke that "diversity" was a "compelling state interest" (p. 90) that could justify some use of racial preferences in educational settings. Many institutions, including the University of Michigan, subsequendy developed admission procedures accordingly, offering diversity as the rationale for their affirmative-action programs. Given that a majority of justices did not join this portion of Powell's opinion, however, the precedential status of his pronouncement on diversity remained in question until, fittingly, his close friend and fellow "judicial diplomat" (p. 96), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, direcdy embraced diversity as a compelling state interest in her majority opinion in Grutter. After describing the cases' historical background and their controversial journey to the Supreme Court, Perry devotes three entire chapters to the briefs submitted to the Court, oral arguments before the Court, and the Court's decisions. She artfully describes complex legal arguments, even providing an outline of the questions the Supreme Court had to consider. Perry's description of oral arguments is especially fine, as she defdy weaves together the finer points of equal-protection jurisprudence and fascinating biographical details about the justices, all in a dramatic narrative form. Perry's insights into individual personalities were enabled by her contacts at the Court and her ability to interview many of the major participants in the Grat% and Grutter cases. They also serve as a useful reminder that notwithstanding the high-flown legal rhetoric and the powerful interests involved, opinions on both sides of the affirmative action question, even for judges, continue to be intensely personal. With Justice O'Connor's retirement, and a new, conservative majority on the Court, the long-term legacy of her embrace of diversity is in question. The two Michigan affirmative-action cases may ultimately prove...

Merit and Affirmative Action in Education

Throughout the 20th century, one of the central debates pertaining to postsecondary education has been about the concept of merit. Who deserves to go to college? The answer to that question goes to the heart of various policies that have been developed, changed, and debated. Perhaps no other policy has drawn more prominence and criticism than that which has come to be called “affirmative action.” In this article, the author discusses the idea of merit as it relates to affirmative action and postsecondary education. The article first delineates the parameters of what is defined as a “democratic public culture” and then considers the concerns of critics and proponents about affirmative action by exploring the meritocratic assumptions of the concerns. The author concludes by discussing the role that academic institutions might play in advancing the democratic sphere and considers what this role suggests for policies such as affirmative action.

Multiracial Identity and Affirmative Action

This article examines the relationship between a categorical, box-checking race classification system and the diversity-based, higher education affirmative action regime approved by the Supreme Court. It concludes that the two systems are inconsistent: the mere act of checking a box does not indicate anything about the diversity that an applicant might or might not bring to a school.Moreover, the article concludes that box-checking classifications systems are inconsistent with multiracial identity itself. Sociological research collected in the article suggests that multiracial identity is fluid and nuanced; it cannot be captured by the mere act of checking a box on a form. Forcing multiracial applicants to describe their racial identity in this way is both tyrannical, and, ultimately, inaccurate.