This is an oversimplification. It started out as: all things being equal, pick the black one. It applied to cases where one was torn between two equal candidates, and the idea was that a nudge toward hiring more blacks would help fix the disparities that arose from years of segregation and racial prejudice. The issue was that the standard for success of this program was racial proportions being equal to that of the general (or local) population.
As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.
'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'
Yeah, you make great points. Equal opportunity should be upheld as a feature in an American styled democracy, whereas equal outcome is the proposed result in communist styled forms of governance. In this case, partitioning a fixed number of seats to a certain group of people based on race, wealth, gender (or any other categorization) such that it matches arbitrary demographic percentages year over year is an explicit adherence to equality of outcome. On the other hand, a strictly meritocratic allocation would represent a step towards equality of opportunity.
As years passed and the standard for success was not reached, affirmative action policies became more and more aggressive. This coincided with civil rights legislation that put pressure on companies and institutions to hire more blacks (expanded to include other racial minorities and women). The consequence is the system we have now, where people, if not explicitly using racial quotas, are creating racially oriented jobs (e.g. diversity staff in large companies / universities) or searching for racially loaded standards (e.g. personality scores for Asians in Harvard admissions) in order to engineer an overall impression of meeting racial proportioning criteria.
'Equal outcome' perhaps is the logical conclusion to this process, but I think the way it works in practice and the way it has evolved has little to do with notions of 'opportunity.'