<p>Did the term “affirmative action” come into use before colleges decided to include more minorities or after? In other words, is it considered affirmative action to include minorities at an all white school or to include whites at a school that already has an even number of each minority?</p>
<p>Affirmative Action as a term describes more than the inclusion of a larger number of ethnic minorities into schools; it is also applicable to employment. It, as a policy, was implemented via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 along with some XOs and at the time was used as a way for certain institutions to procure government funding so long as they met predetermined quotas. Since then, strides have been made to curtail that practice, but some controversies within the educational system concerning minority representation have essentially been dealt with as a separate issue; most notably, with the Bakke v. UC Regents case in 1978 which prohibited racial quotas in the UC System and Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003, which outlawed the use of point systems that favored minorities. </p>
<p>The practice of admitting white people into, say, a HBCU in order to increase diversity would not constitute Affirmative Action since the original (and current) intent of it is to increase the representation of ethnic minorities. Technically, most schools don’t really practice Affirmative Action as it is commonly defined (which is, if two candidates are equally qualified, the minority would get the nod) since adcoms don’t really compare individual applications to each other.</p>
<p>Affirmative Action is a type of cheese :]</p>