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Strengths and weaknesses of affirmative action
How can affirmative action be put into practice
Strengths and weaknesses of affirmative action
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Affirmative Action is the name given to programs that try to correct past and ongoing discriminations against women, racial minorities, and others in the work force and in education. The principal goal of Affirmative Action is to create more diversity and equal opportunities in jobs or schools that used to be all or mostly male, white, or both. Affirmative Action programs have been in place only a little over thirty years. Affirmative action works.
There are thousands of examples of situations where people of color, and white women who were previously excluded from jobs or educational opportunities, or were denied opportunities once admitted, have gained access through affirmative action. When these policies received executive branch and judicial support, vast numbers of people of color, and white women gained access they would not otherwise have had. These gains have led to very real changes. Affirmative action has definitely helped women and minorities in their careers. White women now hold 40 percent of all corporate middle-management jobs, and the number of women-owned businesses has grown by 57 percent since 1982” (Dundul, p.64). Affirmative action programs have not eliminated racism, nor have they always been implemented without problems. The implementation of affirmative action was America's first honest attempt at solving a problem it chose to ignore. Comparable imbalances exist for other racial and ethnic minorities as well as for women. Yet, to truly understand the importance of affirmative action, one must look at America's past discrimination.
Affirmative action is needed to level the playing field of the work force in America. Affirmative action has had its greatest amount of success in city, state, and government jobs. Since the 1960s the area of law enforcement witnessed the greatest increase in minority applicants, and in jobs offered to minorities. This should be viewed as extremely positive, because prior to affirmative action these jobs were almost completely closed off to minorities and woman. Affirmative action has experienced considerably less success in integration in big business. This is due to the fact big business has been more resistant to affirmative action and harder to regulate. Affirmative action is also needed to help black women to compete in today's corporate world. Black women in corporate America are still scarce. The Bu...
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...ation would not be open to minorities and women, which could result in poverty and discrimination.
Affirmative action is our only hope not only in for equality in jobs and education but life itself. In conclusion, Affirmative Action is one of the most important and controversial social issues of our time, and will continue to be questionable as long as it is part of our legal system. Legal decisions regarding Affirmative Action are thrusting it towards extinction, but its supporters will fight fiercely to reverse the trend, and it will be interesting to observe the direction taken by the courts in the next few years. Regardless of the outcome, Affirmative Action has revolutionized the way the population views race, whether part of the majority or the minority.
Works Cited
-Dundul,Tom. “Affirmative Action”. Working Women Oct. 1995: 63-66.
-Cyrus, Virgina. Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. Second Edition. Mayfield: Publishing Co. 1996.
- Skylar, Holly. Chaos or Community? Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for bad Economics Boston: South End Press. 1995.
-Chappell, Kevin. “What they Don’t Tell you about Affirmative Action” Ebony Aug. 1995: 24-26.
3.The term Affirmative action has played a huge role in the past one hundred years of American politics. It is simply defined as an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer. Civil Rights of American citizens have drastically changed because of Affirmative action. With almost anything in politics, there is a debate for and against Affirmative action. Supporters of this say that this helps encourage e...
Fiske, R., & Cyrus, V. (2005). Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: Fourth Edition. Boston: McGrawHill
Wilson, William J. More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City. New York: Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
The Affirmative Action Law was formed as a solution to the long history of animosity towards minorities, and to eradicate the segregation between minorities and majorities. The program certainly aided many of disadvantage people living in the United States. The Affirmative Action encouraged many individuals, particularly, women, and group of people that belongs to different ethnic groups to have hopes and dreams due to the fair chance that were being given by the program. However, even though the Affirmative Action Law’s aim is to provide equal human rights for all the citizens of the United States, there will always be a group of people who will oppose, because each individuals’ have different notion and needs.
The purpose of my memoir is to awaken the power of Sociological Imagination in an attempt to analyze my own life experiences through sociological lens in order to understand how my life and opportunities in society have been shaped by race, class and ethnicity.
Various people know that “curiosity killed the cat” but that is not the initial statement. In 1598, during Every Man in His Humour by English playwright Ben Jonson, the expression was first known as “care’ll kill a cat” (1). This phrase doesn’t implicate care as to nurture or tend to, but rather worry or sorrow. The remark “curiosity killed the cat” is commonly used when one wants another to stop asking nonessential questions. Much like the cat in the play, the 1971 novel Grendel by John Gardner, also holds a beast curious about his life and surroundings. In the novel, Grendel is portrayed as a child with a lack of understanding and a need to adventure throughout the world. Although he is scared to venture too far from his
The experiment began with Milgram placing an advertisement in the local newspaper to recruit volunteers for his experiment. The experiment began with the introduction of the other participant, the other participant being an ally of Milgram’s. Afterwards, each participant would draw straws to decide which role they would take up, the “teacher” or the “learner.” However, the decision was always fixed so that the participant would always end up being the teacher. The learner would then be strapped to an electric chair by the teacher and would have a list of words read to him to be
With the authority figure pressuring the participants to keep going with the shocks, they felt the participants felt they had to obey. Milgram found, “Many subjects will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading of the person being shocked, no matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to be let out.” (Pg. 4-5). Binding factors lock the subject into the situation and lead normal individuals to become agents. In addition a variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place. (pg. 7) The experiments led to a little bit of moral conflict within the participants as understood, “Subjects were frequently in an agitated state. Sometimes, verbal protest was at a minimum…” (pg.21) Milgram’s experiments showed that many simply handled their guilt by using defense mechanisms, such as transferring the responsibility to the experiment leader, or getting absorbed in the technical side of the experiment. An example would be The Professor whom taught Old Testament liturgy whom, even though refused to give the 420 volts, didn’t disobey but merely shifted to take orders from someone else. This is corroborated when Milgram states “voices of morality were raised against the action in question but the typical response of the common man was to obey orders,” (pg.
On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored an essay by Marita Bonner addresses what it means to be black women in a world of white privilege. Bonner reflects about a time when she was younger, how simple her life was, but as she grows older she is forced to work hard to live a life better than those around her. Ultimately, she is a woman living with the roles that women of all colors have been constrained to. Critics, within the last 20 years, believe that Marita Bonners’ essay primarily focuses on the double consciousness ; while others believe that she is focusing on gender , class , “economic hardships, and discrimination” . I argue that Bonner is writing her essay about the historical context of oppression forcing women into intersectional oppression by explaining the naturality of racial discrimination between black and white, how time and money equate to the American Dream, and lastly how gender discrimination silences women, specifically black women.
Rothenberg, P. 1998. Race, Class, and Gender in the United States. New York: St. Martin's Press.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University Psychologist conducted a variety of social psychology experiments on obedience to authority figures. His experiments involved three individuals, one of them was a volunteer who played the role of the teacher, one was an actor who played the role of the student, and one was the experimenter who played the role of the authority. The teacher was instructed by the authority to administrate shocks to the student (who claimed to have a heart condition) whenever they answered a question incorrectly. The voltage of the shock would go up after every wrong answer. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to administrate higher voltages even though pain was being imposed. The teacher would then have to make a choice between his morals and values or the choice of the authority figure. The point of the experiment was to try to comprehend just how far an individual would continue when being ordered by an individual in a trench coat to electrically shock another human being for getting questions incorrect. The experiment consisted of administrating pain to different people and proved that ordinary people will obey people with authority. Some of the various reasons are that the experimenter was wearing a trench coat, fear of the consequences for not cooperating, the experiments were conducted in Yale University a place of prestige, and the authority f...
The intersection of dominant ideologies of race, class, and gender are important in shaping my social location and experiences. By exercising my sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), I will argue how my social location as an Asian American woman with a working class background has worked separately and together to influence how I behave, how others treat and view me, and how I understand the world. The sociological imagination has allowed me to understand my own “biography”, or life experiences by understanding the “history”, or larger social structures in which I grew up in (Mills, 1959). First, I will describe my family’s demographic characteristics in relation to California and the United States to put my analysis into context. I will then talk about how my perceptions of life opportunities have been shaped by the Asian-American model minority myth. Then, I will argue how my working class location has impacted my interactions in institutional settings and my middle/upper class peers. Third, I will discuss how gender inequalities in the workplace and the ideological intersection of my race and gender as an Asian-American woman have shaped my experiences with men. I will use Takaki’s (1999) concepts of model minority myth and American identity, Race; The Power of an Illusion (2003), Espiritu’s (2001) ideological racism, People Like Us: Social Class in America (1999) and Langston’s (2001) definition of class to support my argument.
Affirmative Action Affirmative action can be defined as action taken to compensate for past unfairness in the education of minorities. The current system of affirmative action allows universities to admit applicants from certain ethnic and minority groups with lower credentials. The main purpose of affirmative action is to produce a diverse campus population that is comparable to today's society. The use of race as a facto by which someone is admitted to college in the long run will compromise the quality of the university. Implicating affirmative action to solve the problem of diversity on today's campuses has lead to the creation of problems.
Wright, R. (2001). The ethics of living Jim Crow: An autobiographical sketch. In P. Rothenberg (Ed.). Race, class, and gender in the United States: An integrated study. (5th ed. pp. 21-30). New York: Worth Publishers.
An accountant makes sure that the Nation’s firms are run efficiently, the public records are kept accurately, and that taxes are paid properly and on time (“Accountants and Auditors”). Accounting is the study of how a business tracks their income, assets, expenses, and many other things for a period of time. They also do many other things like quality management, tax strategy, and health care benefits management (“Welcome to Careers in Accounting”). An accountant is crucial to the success of a business, without one the business tends to fail.