Broadly defined, affirmative action encompasses any measure that allocates resources through a process that takes into account individual membership in underrepresented groups. The goal is to increase the proportion of individuals from those groups in positions from which they have been excluded as a result of state-sanctioned oppression in the past or societal discrimination in the present. A comparative overview of affirmative action regimes reveals that the most direct and controversial variety of affirmative action emerged as a strategy for conflict management in deeply divided societies; that the policy tends to expand in scope, either embracing additional groups, encompassing wider realms for the same groups, or both; and that in countries where the beneficiaries are numerical majorities, affirmative action programs are more extensive and their transformative purpose is unusually explicit.
This article addresses the question of how the United States' policies of antidiscrimination drew on official racial categories that were traditionally used explicitly for discriminatory purposes. After briefly recounting the history of official racial classification practices in the United States and their relation to racist laws and practices, we describe the development of legal prohibitions on racial discrimination, culminating in the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. This leads to an examination of how statistical data on race are used to implement civil rights law, before outlining contemporary official racial categories. Finally, we assess the debates that have arisen concerning the collection of racial statistics for the purposes of antidiscrimination enforcement. In conclusion, we argue that, more than any autonomous political challenge to the principle of government race classification, what has emerged powerfully in recent years is an awareness of tensions between the needs of the civil rights enforcement machinery and the emerging claim of Americans' “right” to self‐define racially as they see fit – in short, between the politics of distribution and the politics of recognition.
Aux États-Unis, la « discrimination positive » (affirmative action) désigne un ensemble de mesures qui, dans le cadre de la répartition de certaines ressources rares, appliquent un traitement préférentiel aux membres de groupes ayant été soumis dans le passé à un régime juridique discriminatoire : les Noirs, les « Hispaniques », les femmes, les descendants des populations autochtones (Native Americans) et parfois les Asiatiques. En France, s’il existe également des politiques de discrimination positive, le principal critère opérationnel pour repérer les destinataires éventuels des programmes en question n’est pas la race – ni le sexe –, mais le lieu de résidence : les habitants d’une zone définie comme défavorisée sur un plan socio-économique seraient ainsi appelés à bénéficier indirectement des financements publics supplémentaires accordés à cette zone dans son ensemble. Toutefois, à l’automne 2001, le programme « Conventions Zep » mis en place par l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris, sans a priori remettre en cause le primat de la dimension territoriale de l’action publique à vocation compensatoire, a donné lieu à une controverse d’une ampleur inédite, qui fait en partie écho au débat américain sur la discrimination positive et donne à penser qu’il existe bien certaines similitudes entre les variantes états-unienne et française du dispositif – et les difficultés structurelles qu’elles soulèvent.
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