Affirmative Action
Affirmative action is necessary when a qualified student loses their deserved place at a university because they are black. When a woman more qualified than a man is denied a job because of her gender, affirmative action is necessary. Affirmative action is necessary to run a stable society. Affirmative action is defined in the dictionary as a policy or program for correcting the effects of discrimination in the employment or education of members of certain groups such as women and blacks.
Affirmative action is an effort to develop a systematic way of opening doors of education, employment and business opportunities to qualified individuals. Programs about reaching out to affirmative action are built on the American dream that there is enough education, employment and respect for everyone in this country. The programs are not about reverse discrimination or hiring unqualified applicants (Colonnese 197).
Our entire history can be seen as trying to preserve the conviction made in the Declaration of Independence, which was established in 1776. The Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths self-evident that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The past reveals a distinct gap between what is stated by this American document and the reality of daily life. When this creed was created, only white men could vote and black slaves were not even counted as whole people. Action needed to be taken in order to make the idea that all men are equal a reality.
It was not until 1954 when the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision was made, that the legal impediments, which...
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...eb Crawler. Internet. Available http://www.igc.apc.org/cfj/whatisaa.html.
Clinton, Bill. “President Clinton’s Remarks on Affirmative Action.” Capitol Building. Washington, DC July 19, 1995.
Colonnese, Tom. “Affirmative Action in Higher Education.” The Clearing House. March 1996:197.
Dovidio, John. “Aversive racism and the need for Affirmative Action.” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Graves, Earl. “Living King’s Dream.” Black Enterprise. January. 1997: 9.
Lewis, Brian. “An Ethical and Practical Defense of Affirmative Action.” Affirmative Action. Chicago: Illinois, 1197. Online. Yahoo. Internet. November 25, 1998. Available http://www.princeton.edu/~bclewis/action.html.
Samuelson, Robert. “Poisonous Symbolism.” Newsweek. July 1997: 53.
Steinburg, Stephan. “The Affirmative Action Debate.” UNESCO Courier. March 1996.
Discrimination is still a chronic global issue, and drastic inequalities still exist at the present time. Thus, the Affirmative Action Law is an important tool to many minorities most especially to women, and people of color, for the reason that this program provides an equality on educational, and professional opportunities for every qualified individual living in the United States. Without this program, a higher education would have been impossible for a “minority students” to attain. Additionally, without the Affirmative Action, a fair opportunity to have a higher-level career...
“The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision holds up fairly well, however, as a catalyst and starting point for wholesale shifts in perspective” (Branch). This angered blacks, and was a call to action for equality, and desegregation. The court decision caused major uproar, and gave the African American community a boost because segregation in schools was now
majority, does not advance the cause of minorities in a meaningful way, and needs to be
Affirmative action, the act of giving preference to an individual for hiring or academic admission based on the race and/or gender of the individual has remained a controversial issue since its inception decades ago. Realizing its past mistake of discriminating against African Americans, women, and other minority groups; the state has legalized and demanded institutions to practice what many has now consider as reverse discrimination. “Victims” of reverse discrimination in college admissions have commonly complained that they were unfairly rejected admission due to their race. They claimed that because colleges wanted to promote diversity, the colleges will often prefer to accept applicants of another race who had significantly lower test scores and merit than the “victims”. In “Discrimination and Disidentification: The Fair-Start Defense of Affirmative Action”, Kenneth Himma responded to these criticisms by proposing to limit affirmative action to actions that negate unfair competitive advantages of white males established by institutions (Himma 277 L. Col.). Himma’s views were quickly challenged by his peers as Lisa Newton stated in “A Fair Defense of a False Start: A Reply to Kenneth Himma” that among other rationales, the Fair-Start Defense based on race and gender is a faulty justification for affirmative action (Newton 146 L. Col.). This paper will also argue that the Fair-Start Defense based on race and gender is a faulty justification for affirmative action because it cannot be fairly applied in the United States of America today. However, affirmative action should still be allowed and reserved for individuals whom the state unfairly discriminates today.
The National Center For Public Research. “Brown v Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) (USSC+).” Supreme Court of The United States. 1982 .
Fryer, Roland G. Jr., and Glenn C. Loury. 2005. "Affirmative Action and Its Mythology." Journal
Affirmative action has been a controversial topic ever since it was established in the 1960s to right past wrongs against minority groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics, and women. The goal of affirmative action is to integrate minorities into public institutions, like universities, who have historically been discriminated against in such environments. Proponents claim that it is necessary in order to give minorities representation in these institutions, while opponents say that it is reverse discrimination. Newsweek has a story on this same debate which has hit the nation spotlight once more with a case being brought against the University of Michigan by some white students who claimed that the University’s admissions policies accepted minority students over them, even though they had better grades than the minority students. William Symonds of Business Week, however, thinks that it does not really matter. He claims that minority status is more or less irrelevant in college admissions and that class is the determining factor.
The United States continued to assimilate and provide greater opportunities for African-Americans, on May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision regarding the case called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which the plaintiffs charged that the education of black children in separate public schools from their white counterparts was unconstitutional. The opinion of the Court stated that the "segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children”. This historic discission further inflamed the racest in the south, and many ...
Sacks, David, and Peter Thiel. "The Case Against Affirmative Action." Stanford Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2014.
Brown v. Board of the Education in 1954 was a landmark decision in the education arena. The decision maintained that schools that separated students by the color of their skin could no longer be maintained. The court saw this as necessary, since in their mind schools for black students would always be inferior. This inferiority would not be caused by lack of resources, although that usually was a contributing factor to the poor quality of the school, physically and performance-wise. As the Supreme Court saw it, s...
The discrimination against Caucasian and Asian American students a long with the toleration of lower quality work produced by African American students and other minority students is an example of the problems caused by Affirmative Action. Although affirmative action intends to do good, lowering the standards by which certain racial groups are admitted to college is not the way to solve the problem of diversity in America's universities. The condition of America's public schools is directly responsible for the poor academic achievement of minority children. Instead of addressing educational discrepancies caused by poverty and discrimination, we are merely covering them up and pretending they do not exist, and allowing ourselves to avoid what it takes to make a d... ... middle of paper ... ...
When people talk about the civil rights movement, the first thing that comes to mind is the famous speech “I have a dream” by Martin Luther King. His dream in short was to have equality among human beings. For the past thirty years, this country has been revolutionizing humanitarianism because there is greater concern for human welfare than one hundred years ago. The revolution began during the 1960’s, and during that era this country was drastically involved in changing the civil rights of minority groups. From this concern, a program called affirmative action evolved. Like other civil right movements, the affirmative action movement was implemented to promote equality.
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (6). Dr. King stated this in his famous “I have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. in 1963. Is affirmative action still needed in America? Affirmative action is still needed because America does not have enough equality and diversity. Almost all of our American history dealt with inequality between the white men and the black men. As time went on, nothing has changed and is still seen in today’s society. There are two definitions of affirmative action: 1) race-neutral, gender-neutral assurance against actual discrimination and 2) racial-preferences and gender-preferences for the correct races and genders (3). Most Americans associate affirmative action with the second definition, causing much controversy. However, the true and intended meaning of affirmative action is the first one. Affirmative action is essential in America because Americans do not have sufficient diversity and equality in our society.
Tanabe, C. (2009). From the courtroom to the voting booth: Defending affirmative action in higher education. Philosophy of Education Yearbook, 291–300.
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...