United States action to help erase discrimination by giving special consider to ethnic minorities and women.Places that received federal funds had to adhere to the action.. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act (1972) set up a commission to enforce such plans. The racial quotas in the name of affirmative action brought charges of so-called reverse discrimination in the late 1970s. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted such an argument in 1978 in the University of California Regents Vs. Bakke. In the 1980s, under President Reagan,the federal government's role in affirmative action was weakened. The 1991 Civil Rights Act, however, restored some of the protections of the earlier laws.