The Rant

The beliefs that were necessary to create the affirmative action plan were as racist as the ideals they thought they were trying to counter attack. By selecting people based on qualities other than individual skill, preferential treatment shows itself to be greatly unjust. By giving minorities this advantage, the programs have also implied that these people are victims and incapable of accomplishing anything by themselves. By simultaneously putting whites at a disadvantage and treating minorities as “presumptively defective,” the creators of the programs wind up ironically offending just about everyone, and as if this weren’t enough the policies haven't even worked as planned. They only serve to increase white dissent towards minorities and by decreasing the quality and integrity of colleges and business that are forced to accept people who may not be at all qualified.
Furthermore, the quotas that this system creates have ruined the lives of many hard working people by taking away their jobs without even helping those in need in the first place.
Here's the deal. I certainly believe that diversity is a good thing, but not at the expense of hard working individuals. Minorities should not be given shortcuts simply because they are minorities, and neither should the majorities. If someone who is underprivileged works hard and succeeds, then good for him. He deserves it. But once moot qualities like race and sex become involved, the fairness of everything is thrown off balance. Choosing people based on these traits is as ridiculous as choosing them based on height, weight or hair color. Maybe once the advocates of affirmative action learn that minorities do not need any help and that skill is the only criterion that matters for job selection, they will discover not only that the policies are unnecessary, but that they are harmful to almost every group of people.

For further ranting see the satire paragraph in the "My Position" post below.

What The Experts Say

Steven Yates, Ph.D. argues in an excerpt from Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong with Affirmative Action many of the reasons why affirmative action is wrong and should be eliminated. He states that one of the worst parts of the plan is that it does indeed create quotas, no matter what the advocates say. "I have concluded that quotas do exist," he states firmly. His position is that these quotas have "devastated the lives and careers of many people wihtout significantly helping those in targeted groups." To support his argument, he recalls the 1991 case of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. The Daniel Lamp Co., which was featured on 60 minutes. In this case, the owner of the lamp company, Mike Welbel, was a white man who had employed a workforce of nearly all Hispanic and black men and women. Although he certianly had not violated any rules, and was, if anything, showing a bias in employment toward minorities, the EEOC still accused him of racial discrimination when he did not hire a black woman who applied for a hop in 1989. In the proceedings, the representative from the country pulled out a computer and calculated that "based on the 363 companies employing 100 or more people and located within a three-mile radius of Daniel Lamp, Daniel Lamp should employ at any given moment exactly 8.45 blacks, which to Mike Welbel sounded like a quota. And the law says the EEOC can't set quotas.
"It's not that ther's a magic number," said the representative of the EEOC. "Please believe me. We don't set magical numbers for people like Mr. Welbel to meet.
When the hearing was showcased on 60 minutes, the voiceover announced, "That's what Mr. Lafferty says, but, in a sense, it did set numbers by telling Mike that, based on other larger companies' personnel, Daniel Lamp should employ 8.45 blacks."
Welbel pretty much summed up the whole situation by stating, "Any way you slice the pie, it's a quota system." And when asked if he could live with this, he said, "Could I live with it? Yes. Is it more difficult than hiring by qualification? Yes. What the government is asking me to do is hire by color. They're saying, 'Look, this black individual may not be as qualified, but that's who we want to see in your workplace.' What they've become is-They do the hiring and I run the place under their direction. I no longer decide who's good and who's bad."

Just The Facts

Here are twelve interesting facts about Affirmative Action
1. Men like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller came to be famous through their own hard work, although they were born with very little to their names. One of America's most important principles is that a person can, like these men, rise from nothing, through hard work and determination. Affirmative action works to counteract this principle in many ways, as it makes it harder for people to do this by changing the criteria from hard work to ethnicity or gender.

2. During the 1980’s the California legislature ordered the University of California to base student enrollments “not on the students’ grade or achievement but on the ethnic proportions of graduation high-school seniors” (Billingsley).

3. Records from the University of California confirmed that "you had a better chance to win the California lottery than to be admitted as a white or Asian with a 4.0 grade average over another minority with a 3.2 average’" (Wood).

4. Even when white employers hire a large number of minorities, “they can still face damaging lawsuits if they have not followed all of the strict quota guidelines” (Yates).

5. In the case of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) v. The Daniel Lamp Co., a small lamp business was sued for not hiring a black woman. Although most of the employees of the company were already minorities, the EEOC calculated that based on the amount of companies nearby and the demographics of their staffs, Daniel Lamp should be employing exactly 8.45 blacks. Such a quota is technically illegal and it sounded ridiculous to the owner, but the EEOC insisted that this number was not a quota, yet it must be met by Daniel Lamp.

6. Toni Morrison, upon receiving the Pulitzer Prize, later stated that “’It was too upsetting to have my work considered as an affirmative action award’”, because she felt that it was only given to her because of her race (Billingsley).

7. From 1992 to 1999, a time of many preferential treatment programs, the enrollment rates in college engineering programs fell by 10.5% among African Americans (Franz).

8. Only 45% of black students admitted in 1984 to U.C. Berkeley had graduated by 1989, compared to 73% of whites (Andre).

9. Many of the blacks admitted to colleges as a result of it are not Americans, and therefore not the groups of people that affirmative action was created to help.. In fact, in a study recently conducted by Douglas S. Massey, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, it was observed that “41 percent of the ‘blacks’ at the Ivy League colleges were not ‘American blacks’” (Driscoll). This means that the targeted groups are not the ones benefiting from the programs.

10. In one report, a mostly black inner-city school hired a teacher out of affirmative action, and stipulated that she could not be fired. The report observed that “the desks have been gouged with knives, classroom walls have been defaced with gang-graffiti and the barely literate "students" are out of control, learning nothing” (Conti).

11. According to a study published in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, affirmative action programs in certain construction busniesses have not helped minorities become self-employed or to raise wages from 1979 to 2004.

12. The two parties in that case settled, and now Daniel Lamp employs the “correct” number of blacks, but the company was certainly hurt financially by this case (Yates).

2nd Argument: Affirmative Action is Ironically Racist

Interestingly enough, I believe that the people who push for this new "equal and fair" treatment of minorities are doing so out of their own racism. This can be easily proven. If the affirmative action advocates thought that blacks, hispanics, and other minorities were as capable as whites, then there would be no reason to give them any advantage. Arguing that minorities need a program to help them get ahead is essentially saying that they are not capable of achieving anything by themselves, which is certainly untrue. This also means (I'm sure there's a mathematical property for this) that those who argue against preferential treatment are doing so because they believe that all members of all races are, for the most part, equally capable of working hard to get a certain job or to get into a certain school. We believe that there is no need for this advantage which is being given to minorities because they are not handicapped in any way; they share the same skill and potential as anyone else. This is not to say that everyone can achieve greatness. There are members of every race, gender, and creed that do not possess the aptitude to excel in certain areas. Not everyone is made to be a Harvard graduate or a rocket scientist-this is obvious. But these limitations are not based in any way on such superficial characteristics as race. At birth, a white child is just as likely to fail or succeed as is a black child. The way this child is raised will certainly have an effect on this child's future, but there is no evidence that suggests that minorities do not possess what it takes to make it as far or further than a white person.
Furthermore, many minorities are reportedly offended by the idea of affirmative action. I would be too. Imagine for a second, if all throughout your life, you were given a handicap in every category of academics, athletics, and everything else because you were considered incapable of accomplishing anything by your own doing. Would you not feel like you weren't getting the recognition you deserve, and that you were only being acclaimed because some board of people said that there were not enough people of your "kind" that were being acclaimed? If you got into Yale, would you not question whether you got in because of your own hard work and persistence, or simply because Yale needed to fill a quota and you would have been accepted regardless of your grades? This is called "reverse racism", or an overcompensation of preference so that people don't feel guilty, which ultimately insults the people who are being given the advantages. Not only does this make the minorities feel inferior, but gives those afraid of being called racists an easy way out rather than forcing them to actually learn about other races and discover how similar we all really are. When they learn this, they will learn that the minorities will accomplish what they wish, and that they do not need any help.

My Position

If you like you can ignore this first emotionally-fueled and highly sarcastic paragraph and skip to the real argument in paragraph two.

Do you remember the days when people were chosen for jobs based on merit? Thank our lucky stars those days are gone, because the idea that people who are skilled should be the ones who get jobs is SO 1920's. People need to know that when employees are selected in this way, the reprocussions can be disastrous. Things are just getting done all over the place. I hear that the companies who do this even make money! But the worst thing of all is that literally billions of innocent, unfit laborers are being denied these positions merely based on the negligible fact that they are not good at their trade. Well I am here to put a stop to this, and to tell the world that not skill level, but race and gender are the most practical criteria for the selection process in both colleges and the employment world. This way, we can be sure that efficiency will finally take a backseat to the more pertinent issue plauging our society since America was founded: inequality. Minorities are not equal to us European rich white males. And so we must help them get whatever jobs they wish, regardless of whether they know what they are doing or not. This is the only way to make them equal. It is simply wrong that a caucasian boy can be accepted to a major university when a Hispanic boy of equal age is denied, just because the caucasian boy got a 750 math and the Hispanic boy got a 520. It is a grave injustice that the 300-pound white marine is chosen for the job of a bouncer when a 100 pound black woman is denied. There is racism oozing out of this dire situation and it must be stopped. That is why quotas must be made to ensure that a certain number of members of each race is always employed at any given time. This is because the only kind of equality that matters is mathematical equality.

But seriously, the main argument here, and the one that cannot be refuted in any way, is that affirmative action is shockingly unfair no matter how you look at it. There is no reason that someone should be given an advantage (or a disadvantage) based on a physical trait like race or sex. Ironically, this is the definition of racism. Diversity is a good thing, but not at the expense of hard working individuals. Minorities should not be given shortcuts simply because they are minorities. And for all the people who say that they deserve it because of all the years of inequality, let me just say that first of all, none of what happened in the past is the fault of any of the hard working people alive today, and so they should not be punished for the crimes of people who may not have even been their ancestors. Secondly, two wrongs do not make a right. Now that the scale of equality has been leveled after a long time of being tipped toward the whites, it should not be tampered with or tipped in favor of anyone. This is one of the many reasons preferential treatment is wrong.

The Arguments

As previously stated, there is controversy surrounding both the fairness and the effectiveness of affirmative action, and the latter can be used to support one's position on the former. So exactly what does each opposing side believe?

The issue is this: Some believe that affirmative action is indeed a good program with a positive goal that is important enough to fight for, and more importantly that minorities should be given extra help in getting into college and obtaining job opportunities. Others feel that this is unfair, and that people should be chosen for their jobs based on personal skill rather than qualities such as race and gender. The opponents of affirmative action say that if someone wants to succeed, he or she must work hard for it. They want a level playing field for everyone. The proponents respond to this that the playing field has never been level, and that giving minorities an advantage actually re-levels it. They feel that white males have always had the upper hand in education and so the minorities have not had an opportunity to succeed. The rebuttal of the anti-AA crowd would be that perhaps more white males have succeeded than men or women of other races because there is a higher percentage of white males who are more intelligent or more hard working than average. The pro-AA group would call them racist. And the debate goes on.

Overview

The question of affirmative action in both college acceptance and job selection has been a controversial issue since its inception. To explore this topic, let us first discover exactly what affirmative action is.
It is defined in a rather biased way as "Positive steps to enhance the diversity of some group, often to remedy the cumulative effect of subtle as well as gross expressions of prejudice."

Although this meaning has some truth to it-the fact that the original creators of the program had good intentions-it falls short of affirmative action's real-life definition. It is the de jure definition. The de facto definition is slightly different:

"A program that became law with the passage of the Equal Economic Opportunity (EEO) Act of 1972. Employers, labor unions, employment agencies, and labor-management apprenticeship programs must actively seek to eliminate discrimination against and increase employment of women and minorities."

Because of the wide spectrum of the interpretation of preferential treatment, there are many questions surrounding it: Is it necessary? Is it morally right? Will it help people, and if so, who? Is it fair? The latter is the question that will be focused on here. The debate over how just affirmative action is has only grown since programs utilizing the idea were put into effect.