Affirmative action, in hiring, is supposed to be about making sure you're recruiting from as diverse a field of qualified candidates as possible.

Managers usually just want to hire friends and family. Affirmative action is supposed to be about making sure as many people as possible apply.

As an example, if you need some entry level workers with a computer science degree, and you have statistics at hand showing that recent graduating classes in your area for that degree have been 30% asian, but your pool of recruits is only 10% Asian, you probably need to improve your company's outreach with the local Asian community. But that doesn't mean you hire one race and not another. It just means you can make the best hiring decision once you have a representative and diverse field of candidates.

Now, affirmative action in other areas is a lot more convoluted and a lot less helpful for society, but for hiring it can really help.

All that said, if you start a process with, "I'm hiring a black woman," that's not really affirmative action. That's being a casting director in a movie or something.

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