The Injustice of Affirmative Action

Imagine a scenario designed by Dr. Stephen Yates where one team plays with all the regular rules and the other team has to play with one arm tied behind their back. The same two teams play again but with a completely different set of players. Would a turnabout of the rules be fair (Yates)? Most would answer no. They would say that it’s not fair. The new players have no responsibility for what the old players did but they are still getting punished for it. The other team’s new players begin with advantages they don’t deserve because they’ve done nothing to earn them. Many would argue the same reasoning against affirmative action. Minority groups don’t deserve the advantages they get and majority groups have done nothing to be stuck with the disadvantages that they have to work around. All of this leads to the same point: affirmative action should be phased out. Although affirmative action was originally instituted for very important reasons – to ensure diversity in universities and workplaces as a remediation for historically disadvantaged groups – the benefits of affirmative action are outweighed by the injustice it causes and its ineffectiveness to accommodate today’s needs for all ethnic groups.

According to Reshetnivov, affirmative action is the means of considering underrepresented characteristics, such as race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, to determine admission into a university (Reshetnivov). Affirmative action policies were instituted not only to ensure diversity, but to right the wrong of decades of discrimination and to help minorities by giving them extra opportunities (Messerli). The policies were created after the Civil War when slavery was finally abolished. The term was first mentioned by President Kenne...

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...prejudice when it’s truly all in their head and the only ones stopping them are themselves. Racial prejudice is not what’s stopping blacks from thriving, it’s a multitude of things that African Americans bring on themselves. According to Charles Canady, crime, substandard academic performance, and out-of-wedlock births stand in the way of progress. He believes that civil rights groups use these issues to get benefits from the government through racial-preference policies instead of solving the real problems (Canady). Civil rights activists gain unfair benefit by exploiting their problems unrealistically when they really should be working on reforms and policies that will benefit blacks fairly. When studied in detail, it was determined that although affirmative action is meant to help all blacks, only a select group of individuals get the full benefits of the policy.