Affirmative Action

5 Pages 1252 Words

The Unites States Constitution, in Amendment XIV, Section 1, states, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. (1)" Affirmative action can trace its roots back to the 14th amendment, although it did not really get started until Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, giving minorities equal employment rights. The overall strategy and outline for this plan were contained in Executive Order 11246, which was issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1972 (Gilbert et al. 2). This led to a wave of programs that were intended to further the equal employment opportunities for minority individuals. Affirmative action programs were intended to legally require organizations to be diverse. During the 1990's these programs have come under a lot of scrutiny and are being replaced with a concept known as diversity management. . Managing and valuing diversity are key aspects of organizational behavior, but the question lies in how to create the diversity within the organization. In this paper, I will examine several articles that will give us reasons that affirmative action should be replaced by diversity management, as well as one that believes that affirmative action is still needed in today's society. Mary Guy believes that affirmative action programs are still needed today. She noted that if we lived in a perfect world we would not have a need for organizations to have affirmative action programs (240). However, since people have a tendency to work around people that are most like us, programs are needed to ensure that...