Affirmative Action 14 Essay, Research Paper

Affirmative Action is not the same as Equal Opportunity. Affirmative Action is idea that minorities and women will have more of a chance to achieve positions in business and industry. I call this an idea because in the long run Affirmative Action in my eyes will only hurt people than improve their lives. As for Equal Opportunity that is the idea of people trying to get a job have the same opportunity as the next person. People should stop Looking for help and start looking for answers. I am saying the word idea because in business and industry people will find loopholes in order to hire that person who they want.

Just compensation for wrongful discrimination is giving people who did not do most of the suffering payment for what there past family members have felt. The good that comes from this is that the people who feel that they have been hurt from the discrimination get jobs which will help them and there family. When in reality it is only hurting society. The way it hurts society is that the person who might have better skills than that person looses out and they could know that they lost the job to a person who has less skill. When that happens the person might have feelings of hate toward not only that person, but also the whole group. When that person feels this we as a country are not moving forward, but in fact we are regressing back to the days of severe hatred. I was was about ten years old when I saw an advertisement on television it showed an African American sports superstar telling kids that he should not be a role model, but instead that the children should look towards the family as role models. He was right then and he is still today parents and teachers should be role models at ten years old these kids not just minorities but all of them should look up to someone with good traits. We as a country have to figure out what is a good way to show kids that parents are role models. We as a society can do this by spending more time with kids and having them spend less time with television. A major draw back to this could be that a little boy could watch his father beat his mother and in the future he will do the same. Another draw back could be in the business industry in which a minority could watch a person with less skill than another obtain a job if this were to happen than this minority might think that he or she might not have to strive to be the best. In business and industry equal results come into play for this a case comes to mind in which the police department tried to recruit people in a minority filled part of town. This did not work due to the lack of interest in policing. The answer to this problem is that not all people want to be police officers. A problem with equal representation is that the people who work together might not like each other due to the fact that they might not be the best qualified for the job. The arguments that are in favor of Affirmative action is that minorities are owed this special right because of the punishment that was put upon their ancestors. Another argument is that minorities will never have the same chances unless they receive Affirmative Action. In both these cases there is no good to come out of them. The reprocutions on the other hand are devastating for one white people will start to hate more and two less skilled people will enter the work place leaving the more highly skilled people at home looking for work.

There are a few arguments that say that Affirmative Action is bad for society. The first argument against the issue is that Affirmative action will make people hate and as I wrote above that we as a country will only revert back to the days when hatred was worse. Another argument is that it is reverse discrimination, reverse discrimination only puts less skilled workers in the work place making our products less effective and slowing down mankind. With this in mind it seems as though the minorities will be using business and industry as a step latter that is fine if minorities have the skills. I want equal opportunity in this country, but I don t think we should have people climbing the corporate latter due to their race.

A few months back I was sitting in my barbershop and my barber is an older man I was sitting there with my father and this topic arose. My barber said something that stood in my mind. He said that most races all down the line have been oppressed. He gave many examples such as the Christians and the Irish all the way up to Africans and Hispanics. He went on to say that it takes time for people to realize what there doing and that it takes generations for those races to be on an equal plain as the rest of society is. Minorities have to stop asking for things and start getting things. Look at right now we as a country have made tremendous leaps and bounds in the fight against racism why not keep fighting like before and if that happens only good will come out of it.