Comments on: Reverse Racism?

By: Anton Sherwood

Anton Sherwood — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 08:34:33 +0000

“AA” can mean a lot of things. Most often the label is applied to various devices to put a thumb on the scale in compensation for the extra obstacles that the target groups face. Originally, I’m told, it merely meant special efforts (hence “affirmative” as an opposite of passive) to make minority candidates aware of the opening, e.g. advertising in minority-oriented media.

By: Zeno

Zeno — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 23:20:56 +0000

There is a problem with the whole “equally competent” thing, since I doubt that candidates can really be ranked in descending order of competence. Still, hiring decisions are made on the basis of doing so as best we can, so I guess we accept that we can approximate the order well enough to make a suitable choice of who is best. In fact, though, candidates tend to clump in bunches, any one of whom is a particular bunch is essentially as good as any other. In that sense, we end up looking at candidates in the #1 clump. That’s where other criteria like AA can reasonably come into play. I ragged on this a bit in my post “The myth of #1″.

By: Passerby

Passerby — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:49:46 +0000

If AA is only giving preference to minorities in the case of equally competent candidates, I guess I’m alright with that. It always seemed to me that (incorrectly?) that blatantly discriminatory practices like quotas and such fell under the AA umbrella though.