This thread is hilarious. It begins with a misattribution of yours truly, and then descends from there.
"Whell began bleating and babbling how Affirmative Action and the Civil Rights movement was discriminatory against white people?"
This is really not what I said.
Have you ever written and had to administer a corporate affirmative action plan? Have you ever experienced an audit of your business by the OFCCP? I have. It's a fascinating and educational process.
First, let's define our terms:
Affirmative Action (AA): For federal contractors and subcontractors, affirmative action must be taken by covered employers to recruit and advance qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and covered veterans. Affirmative actions include training programs, outreach efforts, and other positive steps. These procedures should be incorporated into the company's written personnel policies. Employers with written affirmative action programs must implement them, keep them on file and update them annually.
Affirmative Action Plan (AAP): a written document or “program” outlining the steps a company has taken and will take to ensure equal employment opportunity. A written affirmative action plan - for many covered employers it's a document that can reach 100 pages or more - sample can be seen here:
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/fil...8_Contr508.pdf
In short, an AAP is a document that describes an employer's workforce by race, gender and other protected classes, identifies areas within the workforce where protected classes of individuals are underrepresented, and identifies specific steps the employer will take to address areas of underrepresentation. This includes setting goals to increase the representation of protected classes in areas of the workforce that are underrepresented.
The description sounds benign enough. In practice, OFCCP enforcement of an employer's AAP creates economic penalties for the employer - the potential loss of their government contracts. But hey, if a company wants to be in the world of providing products or services to the gov't, they better understand the potential risks.
In practice, it comes down to this: the requirement to fill jobs, particularly in areas of the business that are under-represented, based on something other than the requirements of the job. In practice, when two applicants possess equivalent knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), and the job these applicants are applying for exists in a part of the organization that is identified as under-represented for protected classes, the employer may need to select the applicant in the protected class to help meet the organization's AA goals.
Where companies are usually best served by making employment decisions based on job-related KSAs, a non-job-related factor is introduced into the selection process.
Another way to say this: an employer is shown to systematically make employment decisions on something other than KSAs face litigation risk under a host of Federal, State, and local government anti-discrimination statutes. An employer with an AAP is actually encouraged to make such decisions based on something other than KSAs if it does so to me certain social goals.
You mentioned your experience with a classmate who went to Ohio State who happened to be white. However, one of the recent college admissions cases decided by SCOTUS - the Harvard Case - actually showed how Asian students faced disparate treatment by Harvard's admissions "process". If you're interested in some background on that case, complete with some rather unsavory details of Harvard's admissions, you might find this interesting:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-c...ve-action-case. Example:
Judge Burroughs’s opinion also addressed the striking fact that, when sending recruitment letters to potential applicants in “Sparse Country” (underrepresented states in the Harvard applicant pool), Harvard used an SAT score cutoff of 1310 for white students, 1350 for Asian American females, and 1380 for Asian American males. There were gasps in the courtroom when this evidence was revealed at trial.
The bottom line: the act of discrimination in employment or admissions is an essential part of the process: an employer, for example, must select one candidate from among many, and the act of making this selection discriminates against those not selected. When such discrimination is done based on elements that are unrelated to success or failure in employment or admissions, it's wrong.
To your point, does AA discriminate against white people? In some cases, sure it does. Witness a case like Bakke where the University of CA was "reserving seats" for applicants in protected classes. As demonstrated in the Harvard case, it can also discriminate against members of the protected classes that it was created to assist.
In practice, an AAP asks an admissions officer or employer to use something other than an applicant's objective qualifications to make an admissions or employment decision. Specifically, if two applicants are otherwise equal, the AAP would ask that a "preference" for the applicant in a protected class help make the selection decision. If discrimination based on unrelated factors is objectively wrong, doing so under an AAP doesn't make it less wrong (two wrongs don't make it right).