Saturday, July 07, 2012

Minoritisation vs Affirmative Action

So concept 1: Equal Opportunity

That is the ideal world where one has the opportunity to succeed or fail based soley on their merits in any given field regardless of where they stand in terms of race, gender, creed or membership to a professional institution.

concept 2: Affirmative Action

The recognition that the world is not ideal, and thus putting in place a positive bias to create more opportunity for those who generally have less opportunity given where they stand in terms of race, gender, creed, class or membership to a professional institution. Eg. recognising that due to entrenched cross-generational poverty, an ethnic minority thus has less access to quality education and is given a lower threshold to obtain quality education (whereever that can be found). With the view to in time create equal oportunity aka an ideal world.

concept 3: Minoritisation

The celebration of mediocrity in order to pretend the world is ideal, thus subscribing to the view that merits that do not actually exist, exist creating cognitive dissonance between the officially recognised performance and the subjective experience of the performance. Specifically the celebration of mediocrity based on somebodies membership to a minority (race, gender, creed, class, left handedness... etc.) or the wilfull suppression of honest feedback in view of being percieved as discriminatory.

Affirmative action takes the form of scholarships, training programs, tax breaks, guarunteed entry, mentorship etc.

Minoritisation takes the form of subconscious condescention.

The first two concepts I'm all like 'Heyeah!' the third concept I'm all like 'that's fucking annoying.'

No comments: