Affirmative Action: Positive Discrimination?

Affirmative action is a policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination. Affirmative action is used to reduce any form of discrimination. There are two kinds of discrimination. One is de jure discrimination and the second is de facto discrimination. De jure is by law so any discrimination done by legal matters. De facto is in fact so usually society or customary practices bring about this discrimination. Affirmative action is used for positive discrimination. For example in education, schools are allowed by law, so it is de jure discrimination, to use affirmative action to increase the opportunity of the disadvantage to get into that school. Affirmative action reduces de facto discrimination and increases de jure discrimination so there is a smaller gap between the two. Another example is welfare checks; only the poor get welfare checks by affirmative action. So the fact that by law poor people only get welfare checks than it is de jure discrimination. Using affirmative action with education diversity benefits the minorities because students will get use to interacting with minorities, therefore, reducing de facto discrimination towards minorities. This benefits the state because it encourages minorities to compete to go to a school in a state where they promote diversity. If a school in a state promotes diversity than more minorities will look to apply to that school. Consequently the more people that try to get into the school the higher the income from the school will rise benefitting the state.

Grutter v Bollinger was about a student, Barbara Grutter, with a great GPA being denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School. She sued alleging that the university rejected her based on race to keep the school diverse. Bollinger was the president of the school and was the defendant. The schools admission policy allowed for the school to be diverse in race. The Supreme Court deemed the policy constitutional. The school’s admission policy is a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant's file” according to Justice O’Connor. Basically it is constitutional because the school wanted to promote school diversity, which can improve an individual’s social education, not race discrimination. It is important because the Supreme Court allowed affirmative action in school admission. Justice Thomas had a different opinion. According to Thomas, “there is no compelling state interest in Michigan maintaining an elite law school, due to the fact that a number of states do not have law schools, let alone elite ones.