AFFIRMATIVE ACTIONhas a positive air, and in public opinion polls will
receive considerable support. Label the same pro-
grams ‘‘racial preference’’—which indeed is spe-
cifically what they are—and public support drops
radically. In the 1990s, as campaigns were launched
to ban affirmative action programs by popular
referendum, just what language could or should
be used in these referenda became hotly disputed.
Controversy also arises over the categories of
employees that contractors must report on and
over whose utilization they must be concerned.
The executive order lists four categories: blacks,
Spanish-surnamed Americans, American Indians,
and Orientals. (These are the terms in the order as
of 1971 and are still used in the Code of Federal
Regulations.) The preferred names of these groups
have changed since then to Afro- or African Ameri-
cans, Hispanics or Latinos, Native Americans, and
Asians. While the original executive order and the
Civil Rights Act was a response to the political
action of black civil rights groups, and it was the
plight of blacks that motivated both the executive
order and the Civil Rights Act, it was apparently
deemed unwise in the mid-1960s to limit affirma-
tive action requirements to blacks alone. The Civil
Rights Act bans discrimination against any person
on grounds of race, national origin, and sex and
specifies no group in particular for protection; but
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,
set up by the Civil Rights Act to monitor discrimi-
nation in employment, from the beginning re-
quired reports on the four groups listed above,
despite the fact that even in the 1960s it could be
argued that discrimination against Asians was far
less acute and much less of a problem than dis-
crimination against blacks, that discrimination
against American Indians also differed in severity
and character from discrimination against blacks,
and that discrimination against Spanish-surnamed
Americans ranged from the nonexistent or hardly
existent (Spaniards from Spain? Cubans? Sephardic
Jews?) to the possibly significant. Nevertheless,
these four categories set up in the mid-1960s are
still the groups that governmental programs of
affirmative action target for special attention (Glaz-
er 1987).
Since affirmative action is a governmental
program operated by government agencies that
grant contracts and is overseen by the Office of
Federal Contract Compliance Programs, one ma-
jor issue of controversy has been over the degree
to which these programs are really enforced. It is
generally believed that enforcement is more se-
vere under Democratic administrations than un-
der Republican administrations, even though the
program was first fully developed under the Re-
publican administration of President Richard Nix-
on. President Ronald Reagan was an avowed op-
ponent of affirmative action, but despite his eight-
year administration no modification of the pro-
gram took place. Changes were proposed by some
parts of the Republican administration but op-
posed by others. Business, in particular big busi-
ness, had learned to live with affirmative action
and was not eager to upset the apple cart (Belz 1990).One of the most controversial areas in which
affirmative action is applied is in the employment
and promotion of police, firefighting and sanita-
tion personnel, and teachers and other local gov-
ernment employees. Here strict racial quotas of-
ten do apply. They are strongly resented by many
employees when new employees are hired by race
and even more when promotions are given out by
race and layoffs are determined by race. The basis
of these quotas is not the presidential executive
order but rather consent decrees entered into by
local government on the basis of charges of dis-
crimination brought by the federal government.
These charges are brought on the basis of the Civil
Rights Act; under this act, if discrimination is
found, quotas can be required by courts as a
remedy. Since local government employment is
generally on the basis of tests, one very controver-
sial aspect of such cases is the role of civil service
examinations. Blacks and Hispanics characteristi-
cally do worse than white applicants. Are these
poorer results to be taken as evidence of discrimi-
nation? A complex body of law has been built up
on the basis of various cases determining when a
test should be considered discriminatory. In the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, one provision read ‘‘it
shall not be an unlawful employment practice...
for an employer to give and act upon the results of
any professionally developed ability test provided
that such test... is not designed, intended, or
used to discriminate.’’ But the courts decide wheth-
er the test is ‘‘designed, intended, or used to
discriminate.’’ Because of the frequency with which
courts have found tests for the police, fire, or