Affirmative Action Should Be Changed

Affirmative action has been a widely debated topic for many years. Basically, affirmative action is taking into account race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin whenever deciding who might get a job, a place in a university, a scholarship, etc.

Many people support affirmative action and its mission. They claim that the various factors such as race, gender, etc. that qualify people for affirmative action would be severe disadvantages to those people whenever they are being considered for jobs or university admissions. Some establishments even have encouraged quotas where they are asked to take x number of a certain race. Supporters of affirmative action believe that if such minorities did not receive extra consideration, they would not be adequately represented in those respective establishments and therefore disadvantaged. I see their point but I have to disagree. I do not really support affirmative action because it puts me personally at a disadvantage. I have to work even harder than a minority in order to receive the same amount of consideration as them. I do not think this is fair to me, even though it helps someone else.

Then there are people see affirmative action as unfair because they do not receive extra consideration and therefore have to accomplish more and work harder than minorities to be on the same level of recognition as they are. They feel that everyone should be considered equally and that details such as race, gender, etc. should not be a part of the equation when selecting who might receive benefits such as a job or a place at a selective university. As a white male living in America, I tend to agree. I do not think affirmative action is the correct avenue for making sure that minorities are represented adequately in the workplace or in universities. I think that race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation and national origin should not even be a factor when considering applicants. Unless the job requires things that a woman could not do easily (i.e. heavy lifting) I do not think that hiring managers or admissions officers should even know those details about applicants. If we want to be truly fair society in which every person receives equal consideration, we simply have to remove those details from the equation whenever evaluating applicants; didn’t Martin Luther King Jr. dream about a day whenever his children would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin? I do not recall him saying anything about hoping that his children will receive extra consideration for their college of choice just because the admissions director decided that University of Some State needed to have a more diverse population.

That may have seemed a little rantish and bitter, but I just think that it is not fair to give special consideration to people just because of the way they were born. I know, I was born a white male in the United States of America, but that does not mean that I had a privileged life compared to the other residents of this country. My parents worked very hard to afford for me to attend college. If a wealthier, more privileged person who happened to be a minority applied to the same college as I, and that college was selective, they may receive that spot over me, even if I deserved it more. I just do not that think that this system makes any sense in its current form, and that it needs to change soon.

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