Affirmative Action: Government-Approved Discrimination

There has been abundant research, over the several decades since affirmative action was first widely instituted, to show that it demonstrably does nothing, over the long term, to improve the fortunes of individual members of minority groups. One of the more controversial arguments states that artificially elevating individuals to a level they are not sufficiently prepared to excel at does little to improve those individuals' lives.

Justice Clarence Thomas, only the second black justice in the history of the Supreme Court, is perhaps one of the strongest and most capable critics of affirmative action. He has many times argued that these programs serve to, in effect, taint the achievements of even the most deserving and qualified members of minority communities.  The programs cheapen their achievements and causing others to wonder whether they had merely been given an inside track to college admittance or job hiring because of their race, doubts that in turn serve to inhibit the very cause of racial integration, and elimination of historical racial preferences as a stigma, that affirmative action was supposed to help achieve.

However, all of the many varied arguments against affirmative action make a key distinction, treating individuals exactly as that—individuals, rather than as members of a homogenous, communal group. The primary arguments in favor of affirmative action, meanwhile—corrective, to make up for a general lack of opportunity in minority communities; compensatory, in order to pay some form of group reparation directly to the black community to make up for a history of slavery and discrimination; and diversity, to facilitate a more representative and inclusive environment, whether in colleges or in the workforce—do exactly the opposite, treating individuals as merely members of a group.

Furthermore, the debate regarding the policy merits of affirmative action avoid the tougher moral and constitutional questions, since affirmative action, by its very nature, treats individuals differently based solely on their race. Throwing to the wind Martin Luther King Jr.'s wish for future generations to be judged “not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character,” as well as the clear text and intent of the modern Constitution as a "color-blind" document, modern affirmative action programs do exactly the opposite.

As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in one of the last affirmative action cases to reach the Supreme Court, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”