Action Against the Affirmative

The next time you fill out and application pay close attention to the section where it asks about your race/ethnicity.

Do you ever wonder why it asks that? And perhaps, do you wonder what would happen if you chose the box that indicated that you would rather not answer. I used to wonder the same thing until I realized it all went into statistical data that generated who was making the race quota for the year. This all goes into account for the debate on affirmative action.

Affirmative action refers to measures to achieve non-discrimination generally in schools or the workplace.

Because it stemmed from the civil rights movement by trying to gain equal oppurtunity for the minority, it did have a good moral standing, which I agreed with.

But I believe the government has taken it too far. It is argued that affirmative action actually hurts minorities because they get accepted on th basis of making a quota and that discredits their actual work ability. When the work place and schools accept minorities this can be back lash on them because most of the time they are ill-equipped for the position or institution and in turn only hurt themselves. This can lead to skewed statistics that can indicate the monority being worse off then if they had been accepted in the first place.

In an article against affirmative action David Sack and Peter Thiel from Standford Magazine state:

The fundamental unfairness and arbitrariness of preferences -- why should the under-qualified son of a black doctor displace the qualified daughter of a Vietnamese boat refugee? -- has led supporters to shift rationales in recent years. Instead of a remedy for disadvantage, many supporters now claim that preferences promote "diversity." This same push for "diversity" also has led Stanford to create racially segregated dormitories, racially segregated freshman orientation programs, racially segregated graduation ceremonies and curricular requirements in race theory and gender studies…What's gone wrong? The basic problem is that a racist past cannot be undone through more racism. Race-conscious programs betray Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind community, and the heightened racial sensitivity they cause is a source of acrimony and tension instead of healing.

This I believe is the main premise of my argument. Affirmative action only harbors more racism and hurts our country. The more we account for the minority, the more we will still see color.

Although it is argued against anti affirmative action activists that “for every dollar earned by men, women on a whole earn 74 cents, African American women earn 63 cents and Latina women earn 57 cents. According to the Census Bureau, only 25% of all doctors and lawyers are women. Less than 1% of auto mechanics are women. And women are only 8.4% of engineers.”  Because these statistics might very well be true I do think that this could pose as a problem to our nation. In regards to the pay rate, yes that is a problem especially if a person of a different race or perhaps a woman can do the same job just as well if not better. But regarding the workforce itself, wouldn’t you think the reason why there are only a certain amount of minorities in specific fields means they obviously were not qualified?

The affirmative action policies are detrimental to our nation and only cause more problems in the workforce and in our schools. What happened to hard work and dedication to make it to the top? All I know is that I would want to be accepted because I was rightly qualified, not because the color of my skin.

Articles:
http://www.now.org/issues/affirm/talking.html
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1996/sepoct/articles/against.html