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Ada and Affirmative Action Paper

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Critique of ADA and Affirmative Action
Diane Beleau
Cultural Diversity and Special Populations/BSHS422
15 April 2013
Shonette “Shirley” Wilson

In this paper I will discuss the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was established to assist individuals with Disabilities from being discriminated against, and Affirmative Action, whose policies were implemented to have fair treatment of all races, color, religions, or national origins.
The Stanford Encyclopaedia states, “Affirmative action” means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. When those steps involve preferential selection—selection on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity—affirmative action generates intense controversy” (Fullinwider, 2011).
In 1972, affirmative action became an inflammatory public issue. True enough, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already had made something called “affirmative action” a remedy federal courts could impose on violators of the Act. Likewise, after 1965 federal contractors had been subject to President Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, requiring them to take “affirmative action” to make sure they were not discriminating. But what did this 1965 mandate amount to? The Executive Order assigned to the Secretary of Labor the job of specifying rules of implementation. In the meantime, as the federal courts were enforcing the Civil Rights Act against discriminating companies, unions, and other institutions, the Department of Labor mounted an ad hoc attack on the construction industry by cajoling, threatening, negotiating, and generally strong-arming reluctant construction firms into a series of region-wide “plans” in which they committed themselves to numerical hiring goals. Through these contractors’ commitments, the Department could

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