Academic literature on the topic 'Affirmative Action Continuum'

Abstract As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term “data activism”. Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Technology Studies with Social Movement Studies, this theoretical article offers a foretaste of a research agenda on data activism. It foregrounds democratic agency vis-à-vis datafication, and unites under the same label ways of affirmative engagement with data (“proactive data activism”, e. g. databased advocacy) and tactics of resistance to massive data collection (“reactive data activism”, e. g. encryption practices), understood as a continuum along which activists position and reposition themselves and their tactics. The article argues that data activism supports the emergence of novel epistemic cultures within the realm of civil society, making sense of data as a way of knowing the world and turning it into a point of intervention and generation of data countercultures. It offers the notion of data activism as a heuristic tool for the study of new forms of political participation and civil engagement in the age of datafication, and explores data activism as an evolving theoretical construct susceptible to contestation and revision.

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of progress toward critical mass since Grutter and reveals the continued need for affirmative action in law school admissions.

This article examines how firms respond to federal affirmative action regulation when it is temporary. As intended, affirmative action increases a firm’s black share of employees. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow at a similar pace even after a firm is deregulated. This persistence is driven in part by affirmative action inducing employers to improve their methods for screening potential hires.

I estimate the dynamic effects of federal affirmative action regulation, exploiting variation in the timing of regulation and deregulation across work establishments. Affirmative action increases the black share of employees over time: in 5 years after an establishment is first regulated, the black share of employees increases by an average of 0.8 percentage points. Strikingly, the black share continues to grow at a similar pace even after an establishment is deregulated. I argue that this persistence is driven in part by affirmative action inducing employers to improve their methods for screening potential hires. (JEL J15, J23, J24, J83, K31)

In June of 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas that threatened the continued use of affirmative action to promote diversity in university admissions. It vacated the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld its use, and remanded the case back to the appellate court. This legal brief examines the implications of the Fifth Circuit’s decision on remand. It examines the appellate court’s response to the High Court on remand, where it once again upheld the affirmative action program at the University of Texas.

The institutionalization of race-conscious inclusion policies in employment, education, and contracting has largely endured in post-civil rights America despite predictions of their demise. However, scholarship has continued to mislabel many of the specific policies in these organizations and governments as “affirmative action” policies, even though many such policies lack the civil rights roots necessary to warrant this label. In this article, I explain how many organizations have recast, supplemented, or replaced their rights-based affirmative action policies with utilitarian diversity policies. While the conventional, civil rights framework for analyzing affirmative action obscures the rise of such organizational diversity policies, an alternative body of scholarship that employs a diversity framework has shed light on the causes, content, and consequences of this policy and political realignment. The Supreme Court's 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision and the political activism surrounding Michigan's Proposal 2 in 2006 both exemplify the trademark signs of this shift from rights-based affirmative action to organizational diversity policies. The article concludes by assessing the promise and dangers of this trend of rooting racial inclusion policies in a utilitarian diversity logic rather than a civil rights logic.

This study examines the impact of affirmative action programs on federal employment to determine if equality of opportunity has been achieved across the various occupational categories and management, professional and supervisory positions. The study differs from most studies of EEO in that it utilizes the five-percent Public Use Microdata Sample from the 2000 Census rather than the database normally used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The findings suggest that after 40 years of intensive affirmative action efforts the federal government continues to employ a disproportionate number of minority group members than would be expected from their representation in the labor force. The disparity in employment of various minority group members is surprisingly large, suggesting that good intentions may have only intensified discrimination in federal employment for some minority employees.

The Act established, in pursuit of meeting it is proclamation, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, most employers did not abide by the act, and continued to discriminate against minorities and women with lower wages or refuse to hire them. If a minority reported the incident, usually there was nothing done to the employer. The United States office the Civil Rights Commission describes affirmative action as covering every degree of single termination of a discriminatory practice, that allows for race, national origin, sex, or disability, laterally with other benchmarks, and that embraced to offer prospects to a class of persons with historically or actually been deprived of those prospects, and to preclude repetition of discrimination in the future.

The development of affirmative action strategies designed to achieve equal employment opportunity has been studied along six dimensions of functioning within four separate organisations. Three of these organisations were participants in the Federal Government's Affirmative Action Pilot Program in 1984/5, and one was not. It has been shown that change occurred in a continuous developmental sequence, here called an "Affirmative Action Continuum", within each of these six dimensions over the period of study, with each organisation following a similar sequence of movement. Exceptions occurred where an organisation made no movement at all, or where one or more of the sequential processes was omitted or displaced, in a dimension. The reasons for some of these exceptions, and some of their consequences for later action, have been explored. It has been shown that simultaneous activity occurred across several, dimensions, so that no organisation acted upon only one dimension in isolation from all others. There was some chronological sequencing between dimensions. The indicators of movement along the Affirmative Action Continuum within each dimension were used to describe the change process in each organisation. These indicators proved to be useful both in this regard, and in placing each organisation an the Affirmative Action Continuum in each dimension at two different points in time. In this way, the indicators' usefulness was shown to generalise to four very different institutions, thus suggesting applicability beyond the bounds of this particular study. It is intended that the results of this dissertation, and in particular the model of the Affirmative Action Continuum and the indicators described in Chapter Two, be used by Equal Employment Opportunity practitioners to facilitate their decision making about sequencing of activities designed to achieve equal employment oppportunity.

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The interest in developing this research firstly appeared because of my participation in 2005, as teacher of Portuguese Language of São Paulo public state schools in a program of continuous formation denominated São Paulo: Teaching through Difference for the Equality , whose purpose is to insert, based in the Law nº. 10.639/03, the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture in primary and secondary state schools curricula. Besides, because of subjects related to my African origin. This study aims to describe the proposal of the program São Paulo: Teaching through Difference for the Equality, happened from 2003 to 2006; as well as to identify and characterize how their different participants express their view about their formation process and the probable results in the treatment with the ethnic-racial subjects in the school context. The data collection was accomplished from October 2006 to May 2007, by methodological procedures (oriented by the authors' study as Bogdan & Biklen, Giovanni, Triviños and Selltiz et al) that included: a) accomplishment of interviews (with the aid of semi-structured guidelines, built and tested) with 01 professional of CENP (Coordination of Norms and Pedagogic Studies), responsible for the Program in the State General office of the Education of the State of São Paulo; 01 collaborator of CPDCNSP (Council of Participation and Development of the Black Community of the State of São Paulo); 01 professor from UFSCar (Federal University of São Carlos), responsible institution for the execution of the teachers' formation in the state schools; 01 Pedagogic Technical assistant, responsible for the articulation of the Program in one of the Administration Board of Teaching; 01 Pedagogic Coordinating teacher, responsible for exchanging the information between the Administration Board of Teaching and a school unit in the formative process; 01 primary teacher (from 1st to 4th grades) and 01 primary teacher (from 5th to 8th grades), that participated in the Program of Continuous Education; b) accomplishment of analysis of documents regarding the Pilot Project of the Program São Paulo: Teaching through Difference for the Equality, the Law nº. 10.639/03 and the Resolution CNE/CP N. 1, of June 17, 2004, that established the Curricula Guidelines for the Education of the Ethnic-racial Relationships and for the Teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture. The data were mapped and organized in syntheses charts, analyzed based on the theoretical reference supplied by the authors' study as: Munanga, D Adesky, Peter McLaren and others (concerning the concepts of race, racism, ethnic group, white condition); Nóvoa, Giovanni, Marin and others (for the concepts of teachers' initial and continuous formation and to orientate methodological decisions). it is an investigation of descriptive-analytical and qualitative nature, of the proposal of the Program São Paulo: Teaching through Difference for the Equality and how different participant professionals express themselves about the Program, its operation and results. The analysis of the information allowed the verification that the aspects enunciated by the professionals, in relation to the developed process of continuous formation, accomplished an initial stage towards the perception and understanding of the ethnicracial subjects. Although that Program represents an innovative political initiative, it is still seen as an incipient effort heading for the construction of a multicultural education
O interesse em desenvolver esta pesquisa surgiu, de um lado, de minha participação em 2005, como professora de Língua Portuguesa da rede estadual de ensino do Estado de São Paulo de um programa de formação continuada denominado São Paulo: Educando pela Diferença para a Igualdade, cuja finalidade é inserir com base na Lei nº. 10.639/03, no currículo das escolas estaduais de Ensino Fundamental e Médio, o ensino da cultura e da história afrobrasileira e africana e, de outro lado, de questões relacionadas à minha origem africana. O estudo aqui relatado tem por finalidade descrever a proposta do Programa São Paulo: Educando pela Diferença para a Igualdade, realizado no período de 2003 a 2006; bem como identificar e caracterizar a visão que seus diferentes participantes expressam sobre o processo de formação vivido e os prováveis resultados no trato com as questões étnico-raciais no contexto escolar. A coleta de dados foi realizada nos meses de outubro de 2006 a maio de 2007, mediante procedimentos metodológicos (norteados pelo estudo de autores como Bogdan & Biklen, Giovanni, Triviños e Selltiz et al) que incluíram: a) realização de entrevistas (com auxílio de roteiros semi-estruturados construídos e testados) com 01 profissional da CENP (Coordenadoria de Normas e Estudos Pedagógicos) responsável pelo Programa na Secretaria Estadual da Educação do Estado de São Paulo; 01 colaborador do CPDCNSP (Conselho de Participação e Desenvolvimento da Comunidade Negra do Estado de São Paulo); 01 docente formadora da UFSCar (Universidade Federal de São Carlos) instituição responsável pela execução da formação dos professores na rede estadual de ensino; 01 Assistente Técnico Pedagógico responsável pela articulação do Programa em uma das Diretorias de Ensino da rede estadual; 01 Professor Coordenador Pedagógico responsável por intercambiar as informações entre a Diretoria de Ensino e uma unidade escolar no processo formativo; 01 Professor de Ensino Fundamental I e 01 Professor de Ensino Fundamental II, que participaram do Programa de Educação Continuada; b) realização de análise de documentos referentes ao Projeto Piloto do Programa São Paulo: Educando pela Diferença para a Igualdade, à Lei nº 10.639/03 e à Resolução CNE/CP N. 1, de 17 de junho de 2004, que instituem as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para a Educação das Relações Étnico-Raciais e para o Ensino de História e Cultura Afro-Brasileira e Africana. Os dados obtidos foram mapeados e organizados em quadros-síntese, analisados com base no referencial teórico fornecido pelo estudo de autores como: Munanga, D Adesky, Peter McLaren e outros (no que diz respeito aos conceitos de raça, racismo, etnia, condição branca); Nóvoa, Giovanni, Marin e outros (para os conceitos de formação inicial e continuada de professores e para nortear decisões metodológicas). Trata-se de investigação de natureza qualitativa, descritivo-analítica da proposta do Programa São Paulo: Educando pela Diferença para a Igualdade e da visão que os diferentes profissionais participantes expressam sobre o Programa, seu funcionamento e seus resultados. As análises das informações permitiram a constatação de que os aspectos enunciados pelos profissionais, em relação ao processo de formação continuada desenvolvido, cumpriram uma etapa inicial em direção à percepção e compreensão das questões étnico-raciais. Embora esse Programa represente uma iniciativa política inovadora, trata-se ainda de um esforço incipiente rumo à construção de uma educação multicultural

This chapter begins by tracing the historical background to ethnic division in Fiji. Section 4.2 then identifies the groups that fall within the category of ‘minorities’ and ‘indigenous peoples’. Section 4.3 examines the rights of minorities, with particular emphasis on the themes of land, religion, education, language, membership of the military/police, and hate speech. The final section seeks remedies for the continued violations of the rights of minority groups in Fiji, focusing on affirmative action.

This chapter explores both Governor Michael Dukakis's career from the early 1970s to his presidential bid and the state's economic turnaround, dubbed the “Massachusetts Miracle,” which made the high-tech industry and skilled professionals ever more central to the state's economy and politics, and the Democratic Party. Despite Dukakis's loss, his platform of abortion rights, affirmative action, the environment, and other quality-of-life concerns coupled with an emphasis on using market incentives to stimulate high-tech growth had a deep impact. Dukakis's platform influenced the set of policies and approach adopted by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and its leader, Bill Clinton, in their efforts to appeal to suburban voters and move the party closer toward the center. This agenda continued to disproportionately benefit postindustrial professionals, while also perpetuating forms of racial and economic inequality within metropolitan Boston and in the Democratic Party's priorities.

Children have been guaranteed an equal right to life, yet millions of them continue to die due to preventable causes. Their deaths are widely perceived as a biomedical issue, with vaccinations being presented as the ultimate life-saving intervention. This book argues that a clear and consistent pattern of preventable child deaths is primarily a problem of justice. It engages with the debate on ‘equalisandum’—what (metric) needs to be equalized across individuals in a just society—in modern theories of justice in the context of trends in child survival and access to its determinants among selected groups in India. It argues that Amartya Sen’s multifocal metric of justice—with a central focus on ‘maximal potentials’ or ‘capabilities’—is more plausible than its counterparts since it allows equity considerations to be met without compromising the potentials of the better-off or aggregative concerns. It concludes that such an approach to justice is relevant for affirmative action policies too, which have long been a source of enormous resentment, especially in India and the United States.

American society continues to be characterized by deep racial inequality that is a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. What does justice demand in response? In this book, Andrew Valls argues that justice demands quite a lot—the United States has yet to fully reckon with its racial past, or to confront its ongoing legacies. Valls argues that liberal values and principles have far-reaching implications in the context of the deep injustices along racial lines in American society. In successive chapters, the book takes on such controversial issues as reparations, memorialization, the fate of black institutions and communities, affirmative action, residential segregation, the relation between racial inequality and the criminal justice system, and the intersection of race and public schools. In all of these contexts, Valls argues that liberal values of liberty and equality require profound changes in public policy and institutional arrangements in order to advance the cause of racial equality. Racial inequality will not go away on its own, Valls argues, and past and present injustices create an obligation to address it. But we must rethink some of the fundamental assumptions that shape mainstream approaches to the problem, particularly those that rely on integration as the primary route to racial equality.

This chapter looks at the most recent case to challenge affirmative action in college admissions policies in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin (2013 and 2016). Like chapter 5, the purpose of this chapter is to understand precisely what supporters and opponents are saying about the controversial policy. That is, how are they framing the debate surrounding affirmative action. However, this chapter looks at how framing may have changed over a decade later. We again focus on amicus briefs submitted by social authorities to the U.S. Supreme Court who had interests in the outcome of the cases. While we were interested in variation in types of frames used in these two cases (Fisher I and II) relative to the Gratz and Grutter cases, we mainly focused on authors continued use of both color-blind and group threat frames to state their positions. While some nuanced changes were observed from Gratz/Grutter to Fisher, our findings revealed a great deal of consistency from case to case and that the briefs continued to rely on color-blind and threat frames to characterize the policy. Particularly among opponents’ briefs, threat frames suggested that whites, in general, were losing in a country consumed by liberal agendas of diversification and entitlements only afforded to unqualified and ill-prepared non-whites.

The attack on affirmative action has come from a select few individuals with resource. This fight was thought to have culminated with the end of affirmative action signaled by the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin Supreme Court case. However, the policy received a surprising victory and continues to be an object of disdain by many conservatives today. With that being said, this chapter outlines the role of elite actors in framing prominent social issues, including affirmative action. This chapter also describes how certain frames may be used to not only minimize the discussion of race surrounding the policy but will also attempt to use threat and emotion to produce animosity in order to remove the policy from higher education.

This chapter provides insights into the state of racial inequality in the US today, with a particular eye on income, wealth, jobs, and education disparities. Do these factors continue to be predicted by race? If they do not, then there really is no need to consider race when making policy at the national and state levels or in higher education. The discussions over affirmative action and how it should be implemented would be moot. This chapter also provides an examination of the impact of education in general and in particular for minorities. We look at how the elimination of affirmative action at the state level has affected enrollment of minorities in higher education. We then provide a look at the history of affirmative action related to higher education in the courts. As such, we offer a detailed synopsis of past court cases that have set the stage for how affirmative action is viewed and used in higher education today. In this light, we discuss the ever-present and surprisingly controversial notion of diversity and how it shapes the affirmative action landscape. We end the chapter by discussing our methodological and analytical strategies for the remaining portion of the book.

Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan examines surprising changes in agrarian mobilization in the last decade. After decades of opposing affirmative action, dominant castes are mobilizing to demand affirmative action for themselves. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyaasan show that limited employment generation outside of agriculture, along with agricultural stagnation, has led to economic differentiation among the dominant castes. At the same time, reservations for Other Backward Classes and Dalits have enabled the upper echelons of these groups to earn livelihoods that are more desirable than those of many of the less affluent dominant castes. Members of the dominant castes have responded by demanding to be reclassified as OBCs so that they become eligible for reservations. Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan observe that as economic differentiation continues, it will be interesting to see whether mobilization along caste lines persists or whether rural political mobilization enters a new era.

Since 1990, civil rights advocates have lost ground to conservative attacks on color-conscious remedies for institutionalized racism. Insisting that the Constitution is color-blind, a conservative Supreme Court has limited affirmative action, declared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, limited others, and affirmed state voter ID laws that limit minority voting. Despite electing the first black president in 2008, liberals have enjoyed limited success in defending civil rights protections. They secured passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1991 to reverse damaging Supreme Court decisions, renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and won cases defending affirmative action. Groups like Black Lives Matter have sparked a new grass-roots activism to protest police violence and pressed for an end to mass incarceration. While their success is limited, they continue a tradition that has shaped the nation since its inception.

This chapter focuses on the situation where the innocent party with an option to terminate the contract instead decides to affirm it. What are the obligations of the innocent party in that situation and what are its rights? In particular, what remedies may the innocent party be entitled to in the event that it decides in effect to carry on with the contract? Broadly speaking, the innocent party affirming the contract would be required to continue performing its own primary obligations under the contract and would be entitled to sue for damages for losses caused by the other party's breach. However, the remedy of greater significance by far usually concerns the other party's continuing obligations, which the innocent party might be able to seek to enforce through an action for an agreed sum (the price) if they were money obligations or an order for specific performance if they involved non-monetary acts of performance.

This chapter traces the U.S. Supreme Court’s mnemonic jurisprudence from Brown v. Board of Education to the present. It shows how, despite occasional instances of redemptive memory—especially during the Warren Court era (1953–1969)—the parenthetical mode of memory continued to predominate. The chapter shows how debates over the legacy of slavery and segregation gradually shifted into debates over the legacy of Brown. Anti-classification readings of Brown have been underwritten by narratives of parenthetical memory, whereas anti-subordination readings of Brown have relied on narratives of redemptive memory. The debates have been most poignant in the context of affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for de jure or de facto race discrimination. In recent years, the parenthetical mode has once again gained the upper hand.

This chapter continues the effort of this Volume to combine both comparative legal concepts with unique features of International Criminal Law. It is thus a direct result of the foundational work in Chapter II: International Criminal Law’s focus on individual criminal responsibility leads to an expressive purpose of punishments that again requires a criminalization of remote behavior by commanders and State leaders. This criminalization is based on the centuries old debate revolving around liability for omission. The chapter thus starts with a general explanation of the concept of omission vis-á-vis action. The author answers the question of whether a general omission liability exists in International Criminal Law affirmatively, recognizing a general principle of law, albeit with strict requirements. Drawing on the results from Chapter II, the author argues in favor of a criminalization of omission based on the prevention of harm and the protection of important legal goods/interests. The basis for this criminalization/liability is the respective person’s duty to act.

In the decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans made historic gains in accessing employment opportunities in racially integrated workplaces in U.S. business firms and government agencies. In the previous working papers in this series, we have shown that in the 1960s and 1970s, Blacks without college degrees were gaining access to the American middle class by moving into well-paid unionized jobs in capital-intensive mass production industries. At that time, major U.S. companies paid these blue-collar workers middle-class wages, offered stable employment, and provided employees with health and retirement benefits. Of particular importance to Blacks was the opening up to them of unionized semiskilled operative and skilled craft jobs, for which in a number of industries, and particularly those in the automobile and electronic manufacturing sectors, there was strong demand. In addition, by the end of the 1970s, buoyed by affirmative action and the growth of public-service employment, Blacks were experiencing upward mobility through employment in government agencies at local, state, and federal levels as well as in civil-society organizations, largely funded by government, to operate social and community development programs aimed at urban areas where Blacks lived. By the end of the 1970s, there was an emergent blue-collar Black middle class in the United States. Most of these workers had no more than high-school educations but had sufficient earnings and benefits to provide their families with economic security, including realistic expectations that their children would have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder to join the ranks of the college-educated white-collar middle class. That is what had happened for whites in the post-World War II decades, and given the momentum provided by the dominant position of the United States in global manufacturing and the nation’s equal employment opportunity legislation, there was every reason to believe that Blacks would experience intergenerational upward mobility along a similar education-and-employment career path. That did not happen. Overall, the 1980s and 1990s were decades of economic growth in the United States. For the emerging blue-collar Black middle class, however, the experience was of job loss, economic insecurity, and downward mobility. As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first century began, moreover, it became apparent that this downward spiral was not confined to Blacks. Whites with only high-school educations also saw their blue-collar employment opportunities disappear, accompanied by lower wages, fewer benefits, and less security for those who continued to find employment in these jobs. The distress experienced by white Americans with the decline of the blue-collar middle class follows the downward trajectory that has adversely affected the socioeconomic positions of the much more vulnerable blue-collar Black middle class from the early 1980s. In this paper, we document when, how, and why the unmaking of the blue-collar Black middle class occurred and intergenerational upward mobility of Blacks to the college-educated middle class was stifled. We focus on blue-collar layoffs and manufacturing-plant closings in an important sector for Black employment, the automobile industry from the early 1980s. We then document the adverse impact on Blacks that has occurred in government-sector employment in a financialized economy in which the dominant ideology is that concentration of income among the richest households promotes productive investment, with government spending only impeding that objective. Reduction of taxes primarily on the wealthy and the corporate sector, the ascendancy of political and economic beliefs that celebrate the efficiency and dynamism of “free market” business enterprise, and the denigration of the idea that government can solve social problems all combined to shrink government budgets, diminish regulatory enforcement, and scuttle initiatives that previously provided greater opportunity for African Americans in the government and civil-society sectors.