Shackled Runner Thesis

1. The shackled runner: time to rethink positive discrimination?
Citation: (Noon 2010)
Noon, Mike. 2010. “The shackled runner: time to rethink positive.” Sage Journals 728–739.
Summary: As the title already says this article is about rethinking positive discrimination. It is a very useful article which provides counter arguments to four main criticisms of positive discrimination, which are: 1) Failure to select the “best” candidate; 2) The undermining of meritocracy; 3) The negative impact on the beneficiaries; 4) Injustice of reverse discrimination. This article starts with the analogy of the “shackled runner” given by the US President Lyndon Johnson who introduced affirmative action legislation in 1965 aimed to redress discrimination towards

According to the dominant theory the affirmative action was firstly introduced to deal with two types of social disruption in the 1960s as campus protests and urban riots in the North. However, this article is based on different theory as dominant theory's empirical evidence is limited. It examines the initial reason for advent of race-conscious affirmative action in 17 undergraduate institutions in the United States. And according to the research this article concludes that there were two waves that contributed to affirmative action: 1) first wave in the early 1960s introduced by northern college administrators 2) second wave in the late 1960s introduced as a response to the protests of campus-based students. This article will help me to establish the main reasons for introduction of race-conscious affirmative action in undergraduate

Weak affirmative action which is just an effort to ensure that all qualified minority groups are considered whereas the strong one is when some sort of preference is given to the minority candidate. Later the author concludes that he will focus on the strong affirmative action because it is the most controversial one. Then the author gives us many arguments of different people and critics for and against affirmative action. Later on, David Boonin gives us his own arguments in favor of affirmative action which are 1) the unfair disadvantage argument; 2) the (other) compensation argument; 3) the appeal to diversity; 4) the need for role models; 5) the bias-elimination argument; 6) race as a qualification. “I conclude that while affirmative action may prove to have some desirable features and some beneficial consequences, there’s no reason to believe that it’s morally obligatory. As far as morality and justice are concerned, if a school or business or government declines to practice affirmative action, that’s okay” – says the