Confronting Those Affirmative Action Grumbles (Thomas Weisskopf Festschrift Conference Paper)

Darity examines the primary arguements that emerge around affirmative action policies, specifically: 1) that it violates the principle of meritocracy; 2) that it lowers productivity; 3) that students from the target population are underprepared for higher education; 4) that only the best positioned members of the target population really benefit; 5) that the recipients of affirmative action are stigmatized by the system; and 6) that it should be implemented on the basis of class, not race or ethnicity. Darity argues that none of these arguments invalidates the basic purpose of affirmative action policies, and concludes that not only do these policies work as intended, their very presence forces a society to “acknowledge that it continues to be a site where racism and discrimination operate.”