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).