Race Relations In America Essay, Research Paper

Race Relations In America Today

Somewhere in time America has seemed to have lost the ultimate goal of equal rights, and truly equal rights. In the early sixties great men took the stage in order to start paving the way to equality in America. Now in the twenty-first century people all over this country has forgotten what equal rights actually means. Equal rights is supposed to ensure equality for all people. Somewhere along the line we surpassed equal rights and have now begun to oppress whites. Through government programs such as affirmative action, race classification and his whole politically correctness idea, America has tipped the scales of oppression towards the whites of America.

In 1973 a thirty-three year-old Caucasian male named Allan Bakke applied to and was denied admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis. In 1974 he filed another application and was once again rejected, even though his test scores were considerably higher than various minorities that were admitted under a special program. This special program specified that 16 out of 100 possible spaces for the students in the medical program were set aside solely for minorities, while the other 84 slots were for anyone who qualified, including minorities.

What happened to Bakke is known as reverse discrimination. Bakke felt his rejections to be violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment, so he took the University of California Regents to the Superior Court of California. It was ruled that “the admissions program violated his rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

The arguments for and against the special admissions program are complicated. The arguments for special admissions and affirmative action are described by Dr Howard Stelcher former sociology professor at Harvard: Because of past injustices, compensation should be granted to minorities, and one possible form is as affirmative action, which, in this case, is the role of the special admissions program. In addition, racial diversity in educational institutions was seen as a plus. The diversity would teach students more about different races and religions and prepare t hem for the future when they would most likely have to work along side someone different from themselves. Hopefully, minorities in professional areas would return to their minority community and be seen as a role model for minority youth while benefitting the entire community as well. The final argument for the special admissions program is that advantage should not be associated with race, i.e. because one is of the Caucasian majority he/she should not have more advantages and likewise because one is of a minority he/she should not be disadvantaged.

The arguments against the special admissions program are obvios to most objectionable people. The Constitution was intended to overlook race and ethnicity in public authority and decisions. The problem in special admissions programs is that they will use skin color as a way to judge weather or not an applicant will get in or not. Which could mean those who deserve getting in may not because of affirmative action and reverse discrimination. As a result of this, the various ethnic groups will be divided and possibly end up competing. Another problem with the special admissions program is that it does not consider the disadvantaged who are in the majority, not the minority.

Affirmative action was proposed in order to bridge the gap between salaries of woman verses men and also to help ensure minorities were not being oppressed upon. In theory Affirmative action was probably a very good idea. On paper it allowed women to get better jobs and minorities get jobs that they may not have gotten because of discrimination. The repercussions of affirmative action must not have been explored thoroughly enough. As whites in America looked at it more closely they discovered the unfair advantage it gave torwards minorities.

Affirmative action is an excellent example of giving minorities an unfair advantage over whites. A great way to judge if this situation, or any, is reverse racism, just think about it if the roles were reversed. What would you say if you heard about some young black basketball player who could not make it to the NBA because the teams that were interested in him had to fill a white guy quota. If I heard that I would say that s rediculis, if he is the best person for the job than he should get it. That s exactly what affirmative action does, it makes it so the person best suited for the job does not always get it.