What is Affirmative Action?

The articles written by NCSU students like Steven Crisp, Emily Laura Pitt, and Bret Poteat all reflect a larger, national confusion over what affirmative action really is and how it should function in hiring processes and university admissions.  All of these students denounce the idea of quotas, partly because of the political climate of the 1990s, which played on white fears of loss of status.  However, none of these articles actually defined affirmative action.

This lack of clarity on the meaning of affirmative action was partly the result of lack of cohesion among companies and universities over what affirmative action should look like.  While Title VII actually made the use of quotas illegal, and many more white students of marginal quality were admitted than African American students, the fear mongering of the 1992 election impressed in white minds that schools were unfairly admitting unqualified African American students.[1]

Like debates about the African American cultural center and African American identity, the Technician debates about affirmative action in the Spring of 1992 contributed to a sense of racial tension and charged racial dialogue on campus.  This racial tension would explode in the fall semester of 1992 when a large rally at UNC Chapel Hill for a free-standing Black Cultural Center would result in an explosion of angry editorials, letters, and columns in the Technician.