This chapter describes how the bumiputeras, the indigenous people of Malaysia, were in some ways privileged in colonial times but later became the beneficiaries of a sort of affirmative action. America and South Africa, for example, though they share a history of racial oppression which is similar in many ways, differ greatly in terms of the political environment in which affirmative action operates. It is clear that affirmative action can be used, with some semantic plausibility, in ways that make the term at least as unruly as discrimination or indirect discrimination. Affirmative action is typically an intervention which is aimed at increasing the share of economic benefits that certain groups receive. Further progress in the vexed debate about the implications for a theory of distributive equality of a commitment to basic equality would seem to hold the promise of some insights which would help to think about affirmative action.