The Roots Of Affirmative Action Can Be Traced Back To The Essay Example For Students

The Roots Of Affirmative Action Can Be Traced Back To The Essay passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act where legislation redefinedpublic and private behavior. The act states that to discriminate inprivate is legal, but anything regarding business or publicdiscrimination is illegal (Affirmative 13). There are two instanceswhen opposing affirmative action might seem the wrong thing to do. Even these two cases dont justify the use of affirmative action. First is the nobility of the cause to help others. Second,affirmative action was a great starter for equality in the work place. The most promanite variable in deciding affirmative action as rightor wrong, is whether or not society is going to treat people as groupsor individuals. Affirmative action is a question of morals. Thesimplicity to form two morals that are both correct but conflicting isthe reason for the division of our nation on affirmative action. Affirmative action is very noble when looking at who benefitsfrom the outcome. Take a closer look at affirmative action. Thepeople that are involved and the damage it takes on our societysurfaces many doubts. Taking a closer look also stirs up a questionof nobility that needs to be answered before making a decision onaffirmative action. Does affirmative action simply change who isdiscriminated against and makes it legal for the new discriminators?Coming from my point of view, the view of a white male, thisis a serious question. One example of this came to my attention fromDave Shiflett who once worked at Rocky Mountain News wrote RockyMountain Hire. In this article he tells about a new hiring strategyused at the Denver news paper Rocky Mountain News. A memo was sentout stating, The job reviews of supervisors and others involved inhiring should address race and sex. Each review should have a hiringgoal of at least half of our hires being women and at least halfnon-white (Shiflett 45). Lets put this strategy to work. We haveten positions to fill, these positions can be filled following theabove guidelines by hiring five black women. It can also be met byhiring five white women and five non-white men. Obviously to meetthis goal successfully would mean to not hire a white male (Shiflett45). I strongly disagree with my white fore fathers and society todaywho both address race and sex when hiring. Using a persons skin colorin hiring is discrimination no matter how society looks at it. At St. Bonaventure University the potential for reversediscrimination became a reality. In May 1994, 22 faculty members werefired, all were male. The president of the university was very bluntabout his motive, to protect the small number of women on theuniversity staff (Magner 18). This was purely a discussion based ongender not qualification. No matter how efficient these men were somewere fired for not being part of a certain minority. Gary A. Abraham,who was fired as a tenured associate professor stated, It seemsludicrous that the university can rectify its failure to engage inaffirmative action on the backs of its male faculty. Twelve of themen took their complaints to the US Equal Employment OpportunityCommission. The commission sided with the men and are even planningto bring the university up on charges themselves (Magner 18). Givingan employer the power to discriminate only towards minorities isunfair and unethical. Now the question is who will the government protect? Societycan not consider its self fair when we are still forming decisionsbased upon gender or race. It is not noble to protect the jobs ofwomen at Bonaventure University simply there are not enough women onthe roster. We should protect the jobs of the experienced. We cannot form a new society from affirmative action and believe the rightsof all United States citizens will be upheld. Thomas Eliot (1328 words) EssayGuadalupe Quintanilla, the assistant Vice President forAcademic Affairs for the University of Houston, stated, Affirmativeaction has been distorted and abused. We need to take a second lookat it. I think affirmative action has opened a lot of doors, but ithas been misrepresented. Im for opportunity, not special treatment. The majority of people in this country are open-minded and willing towork with people without considering their sex or color. So I thinkwe could do away with set asides (Dunkel 42). Problems with equality in our work force and universities cannot be blamed completely on discrimination. The problem today iscolorblind poverty. Affirmative action actually hurts the lowerincome individual of any minority group. Thomas Sowell, in his 1990book, Preferential Policies, used an international survey ofaffirmative action programs to show the consequences. The benefitsof affirmative action went overwhelmingly to people who were alreadybetter off., while the poorer members of the same groups either didnot gain ground or actually fell further behind (Richardson 4C). Thewealthier neighborhoods have better school systems, which in turnoffer greater resources. If we bring equality to our school systems,a rise in minorities in the work force will soon follow. Some universities here in the United States have basedenrollment on College Boards and SATs or ACTs, none of which showintelligence levels. These tests rather show the standards ofeducation that the individual has encountered. The gap between meanSAT scores for black and whites is 938 for whites and 740 forblacks(Shipler 16) These test scores sometimes become thediscrimination against minorities. Another form of evaluatingstudents is where the Universities and government need to focus, toestablish a standard in education that spans across all levels ofincome. Affirmative action is definitely not the answer for equalityin this day in time. Affirmative action has balanced for thirty years on a moralthreat. It is now time to apply new moral threats, not towards theemployers and colleges but towards the government. For it is thegovernment that needs to change its polices. The government needs totake action towards the real problems of equality: poverty, not thebad white man from the past. Affirmative action is simply the sameold discrimination in reverse.