Affirmative action is one such strategy.
The costs of assimilation and social mobility are enormous for any minority group. Race or nationality-based affirmative action is thus one of many possible strategies. But there is a critical difference. The mobility strategies used by communities of African Americans, Chinese, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews were home-grown responses of these communities to discrimination and economic need. Race-based affirmative action was designed by the federal government to solve a political and moral problem of its own making.