Are there examples of affirmative action (or equivalent) being applied to White groups?

Question

In Does the VRA require drawing districts for white people in majority-minority states? it was asked if the Voting Rights Act could be applied to white minorities any time soon and the answer seems to be no. This got me curious - are there any examples (in the US or some other country) where affirmative action was applied to a White minority? A hypothetical example would include White students in China being granted free tuition because they’re underrepresented in local universities.

The definition of "White" for me is the same as in the US Census: "having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa."

Answer 1

There is affirmative action in the People's Republic of China, which targets the 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities in China, including the Russian minority, who are of European origin.

According to the linked Wikipedia article, the policies of the affirmative action include/included things such as:

Minority students applying to universities receive bonus points on the National Higher Education Entrance Examination (gaokao)

The government established bilingual programs to help minorities learn Mandarin Chinese

The Chinese government officially allowed minority parents to have more than one child per family instead of the one demanded for Han people as part of the (former) one-child policy

The above policies apply to all officially recognised ethnic minorities, including, but not limited to the Russian minority.

This page provides some details on bonus points for the Russian minority. Here is an automated translation of the first question and answer:

Do Russians get extra points for the college entrance exam?

For ethnic minority candidates from ethnic autonomous counties and ethnic townships who apply for the Chinese language-taught general institutions of higher learning, 20 points will be added for the cultural course when they are admitted.

Answer 2

It's very difficult to prove a negative, as there is no comprehensive listing of every single program endorsed by every single organization in the world anywhere, and if there was then it would be prohibitively long to scan. Therefore, giving a negative answer to this question is difficult to factually back up. However, Wikipedia has a pretty decent listing as a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

Looking through Wikipedia, the only countries with official affirmative action programs/laws are majority-white locales, with the exceptions of the listed locales in Asia: China, Israel, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan. Ignoring Israel, because it is a majority "white" country (in that its population is majority Jewish people descendant from "white" denominations (under the US Census definition), those primarily being the 3 tribes of Ashkenazi (Eastern Europe), Sephardi (Spain), and Mizrachi (Middle East)), we have:

(Paraphrasing from Wikipedia)

• China: Affirmative action in favor of "ethnic minorities", which Wikipedia defines as "non-Han". This is basically a blanket statement including anyone who is not "Han Chinese", which is a subgroup of Chinese people. In theory this could include white people, but is probably not what is being asked about. No.

• India: Affirmative action is based on the Indian historical caste system, to try to raise people of "lower" castes upwards in society. This is not racially based and would not affect white people. No.

• Indonesia: Affirmative action in favor of an ethnic indigenous group in the Indonesian region. No.

• Malaysia: Affirmative action in favor of ethnic Malaysians to help boost them in relation to the Indian and Chinese populations. No.

• Sri Lanka: Affirmative action based on cultural origin, specifically the Tamil population. Not based on race, so No.

• Taiwan: Affirmative action in favor of aboriginal Taiwanese. No.

Therefore, at least in the scope of the examples that Wikipedia cares to list on their page on the topic, the answer appears to be that no, there are no official widespread affirmative action programs in favor of white people anywhere in parts of the world where white people are minorities.

Answer 3

Frame shift: where do you see this both being necessary and to be expected?

• a white minority that is doing badly

• a government that is well-run and compassionate enough to run ethnically-based affirmative action-like programs?

• a government that recognizes race-based criteria in a positive sense

Starting with the last, a number of European states don't allow racial data in official statistics. France is the one I am most familiar with.

Second, I wouldn't expect a dictatorship or some really corrupt country to run this kind of program. So, just to take an example off the top of my head, Zimbabwe is straight out. Japan is well run but not particularly known for going out of its way to support other ethnic groups.

And finishing with the first, from the small list of countries that are left, in most cases whites are either a majority or a somewhat prosperous minority.

If in the future whites do become a significant badly-off minority in some well-run political entities that use affirmative action, well, yes, I would expect the same sense of justice (as well as self-interest not to entrench permanent poor, hence low-tax-value, underclasses) that motivated affirmative action to apply to that white minority.

If it didn't it would undermine the justification for having affirmative action in the first place. Is it about making the country as a whole better off or taking revenge for past misdeeds?

But for now this remains a somewhat hypothetical, if interesting, question.

p.s. Driving everything from guilt isn't super-productive. As a European, white, non-British (French, actually), 1st-gen immigrant to Canada, I am willing to consider the guilt of what was done to indigenous people by the British. After all, most European colonial powers exhibited beastly behaviors in their colonies, so there is a sense of "solidarity" between us.

But Canada is becoming ever more ethnically-mixed. If Europeans become a minority in a province, should you expect say Asian-descent Canadians to take on the tax burden of paying for "white guilt"? Why not vote out those affirmative action programs toward indigenous people? You need a more positive and forward-looking justification for those programs, intended to help people.

Answer 4

The soviet union was a pioneer of affirmative action with a policy known as Korenizatsiya. This aimed to promote the cultural and political interests of non-Russian minorities within the USSR such as the Ukrainians.

The de-Russification was also implemented on ethnic Russian groups and their children. For example, all children in Ukraine were taught the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenization facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life.

Affirmative action in the USSR also included prioritizing minorities including Ukrainians for political appointments and other government jobs

Since Ukrainians would be considered white, I believe this example meets your criteria.

Answer 5

Title, boldface added:

Are there examples of affirmative action (or equivalent) being applied to White groups?

From text of question:

...This got me curious - are there any examples (in the US or some other country) where affirmative action was applied to a White minority?

Re "or equivalent":

Slavery applied many affirmative advantages to a White minority of people-owners.

As did Jim Crow laws, and thousands of once-legal forms of racist discrimination.

As do the Jim Crow 2.0 voting laws the emergence of which the VRA was designed to combat.

Answer 6

Let's be perfectly clear... Institutions like the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action were not created to help minorities. They were created to remedy the systematic political, social, and economic disempowerment — disenfranchisement, segregation, red-lining, barred access to workplaces and financial resources, etc. — that certain groups have historically been subject to. One doesn't need to the concept of 'race' to understand that systematic social and economic alienation can pose excess risks, burdens, and obstacles to groups trying to make their way in society, and we only need to look at the case of women to realize that a group can have a numerical majority and still be subject to such alienation. Framing this as a minority/majority issue is disingenuous at best.

Institutions like the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action address power, and the way that a group with power can use their power to further disempower other groups. If it's a stepladder, it's a stepladder meant to help people climb out of the generations-deep hole that's been dug for them, so they can climb up to something like a level playing field.

Since perhaps the 16^th century, whites of European descent have held hegemonic political, social, and economic power over most of the world. There are places where their influence is weaker (such as China, Japan, and the Koreas), and places where they have left or been driven out (as in India and much of Africa) but there isn't any corner of the world where whites of European descent have been systematically oppressed and disempowered. As a matter of objective history, whites have always dug holes to push other people into. Why would we give a ladder to some group that's already standing at the top?