Anti-Affirmative Action Essay, Research Paper

Patrick Ching

English Per.3

12-4-96

Anti-Affirmative Action

“That student was accepted because of affirmative action policies.” With my first intake of the phrase, I realized that the student, whom I knew and worked with so many times, the one with such a lack of motivational ability, confidence, and ideas, was now occupying my chances towards a preferred school. “Affirmative action”, I soon found out, was used by President John F. Kennedy over 30 years ago to imply equality and equal access to all, disregarding race, creed, color, or national origin. As a policy setting out to resolve the problems of discrimination, Affirmative Action is simply nothing more than a quota of reverse discrimination.

Affirmative Action emphasizes prospective opportunity more towards statistical measures. It promotes the hiring and acceptance of less experienced jobs of the workforce and less able students. Sometimes the affirmative action policies forces employers and schools to choose the best workers and less privileged students of the minority, in all, regardless of their potential lack basic skills. As remarked by Maarten de Wit, an author who?s article I found on the World Wide Web, affirmative action beneficiaries are “not the best pick, but only the best pick from a limited group.” Another article I found, “Affirmative action: A Counter-Productive Policy” by Ernest Pasour also on the W.W.W., is one example which reveals that Duke, a very famous and prestigious university, adopted a resolution requiring each of it?s department to hire at least one new African-American for a faculty position the 1993 date. More proofs of Affirmative Action in action is the admission practices at the University of California Berkeley. In the same article by Pasour, it states that while whites or Asian-Americans need at least a 3.7 grade point average through high school to be in consideration for admission in Berkeley, most minorities with much lower standards are automatically admitted. All the preferential treatment may provide a basis for employers, employees, as well as real applicable students to fight for an end to Affirmative Action.

The development of more racial tensions are yet another part of the Affirmative Action policy. Tensions between blacks and whites and other racial groups at U.S. colleges are related to preferential treatment. Tensions at the workplace also deal with the toleration of race and sex rather than individual abilities. Racial discrimination was said to have grown with the implementation Affirmative Action. Examples of black students attending North Carolina colleges stating that they were treated like affirmative action cases though they were not, conjured more of the racial discriminatory feelings. As described by the above author, Ernest Pasour, professors at those colleges already assumed that the African-American students lack the qualifications, thus always seeking to help by asking if any tutoring or other assistance is needed.

Solutions to the Affirmative Action policies may be simple and complex. The example alternatives provided by Brian Sterlitz in his article, “Alternatives to Affirmative Action” found on the W.W.W., are: (1) rebuilding of civil society in minority communities; the strengthening of community associations, which will provide a foundation for collective development, (2) increasing minority and female applicant flow; maybe easy to accomplish with the addition of minority colleges and universities in campus recruitment programs at individual companies, and (3) most important promote broad policies for economic opportunity and security that benefit the low and middles-income Americans; Americans should work together toward broad based economic policies by consistently emphasizing broad-based, race-neutral policies. Examples may be, public investment, national health reform, an enlarged earned income, tax credit, child support assurance, and other policies benefiting families with young children.