A Discussion on the Effectiveness of Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action is defined as special consideration for minorities and women in employment. And education to compensate for the discrimination and lack of opportunities. They experience in the larger society. Affirmative Action from my perspective seems to be an attempt the government tried to do. That made business, even colleges, to meet a quota for the amount of applications from minorities and then make a good faith attempt to review the applicants. In all intents and purposes Affirmative Action is an attempt that is used to address discrimination that minorities, including women, experience from employment and education. Since its beginning there has been a lot of debate among the public, scholars, and elected officials about how it is either good or bad for society. Affirmative action has shown to be effective and ineffective depending on the provided situation.

The effective policies of Affirmative action have led to situations where employment. And higher education have allowed minorities to be given jobs or education. The proponent perspective, provided by the textbook, simply states that Caucasians. Or whites, are better at getting jobs and acceptance to higher education and that Affirmative Action makes up for the ongoing and past discriminations that minorities suffer from. Proponents also state that Affirmative Action provides a wider range of diversity among employees or students. Ironically, proponents also say that Affirmative Action is more likely to let minorities achieve professional degrees and to become more involved with civil affairs more so than Caucasians. The court case that best exemplifies the proponents’ perspective is Grutter v. Bollinger. In this case a university’s undergraduate admissions were implementing a point system for admissions. That gave high school students of color more points than all others. The significance is that the court invalidated the university’s point system and told them that all applicants and their evaluations needed to be more individuals, or more non-discriminate overall.

The areas in which the Affirmative Action policies are ineffective are justified by the opponents of the program. A statement from the textbook says that the people who are benefiting from Affirmative Action are less qualified than many of the whites with whom they compete for employment and college admissions. The opponents of Affirmative Action are not being discriminatory but implying that self-fulfilling stigma is being applied to those who are benefiting from Affirmative Action. There happens to be two court cases that were described in the textbook about the reverse discrimination that is caused by Affirmative Action. The first of which is Regents of The University of California v. Bakke, where Bakke was declined twice his admissions to medical school because of the sixteen spots that were available for people of color. Bakke’s college grades and his scores for the MCAT were higher, more qualified, than the sixteen people of color’s scores. Ultimately the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke’s favor and requested that he be admitted to medical school because having a quota system denied people admission solely based on their race, or reverse discrimination.

My opinion of Affirmative Action is that it was the wrong attempt by the government to make all people fair and equal. There will always be proponents and opponents to any given program set by the government and Affirmative Action was not in the best interest. How I see Affirmative Action is that it is causing more unfair discrimination, the very thing that Affirmative Action was supposed to help alleviate. The answer by judging the good and the bad is that a non-problematic solution is what needs to be done and that is to eliminate race or ethnicity from applications for jobs or higher education.

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