Affirmative Action and Positive Discrimination

A specter is haunting France and America. It is known alternatively as “discrimination positive” or “affirmative action.” The concept refers to policies that legitimate the use of measures that explicitly take into account an individual’s group status in the allocation of jobs, contracts, and university admissions to assist groups that are disadvantaged and that have suffered historically from discrimination. According to its proponents, the larger objectives of these policies include eliminating patterns of negative discrimination, producing greater equality, integrating members of these groups into society by giving them a larger stake in it, and achieving greater representativeness or diversity.