Custom essays on Affirmative action

The Anti-Affirmative Action side is sure that Affirmative Action leads to a reverse discrimination and also to hiring people based on their race, gender and so on rather than merit. They claim that this program makes people more prejudiced to each other, because it increases the sense of “us versus them.” (Sztuczko-Payk. 1998).
1. Affirmative action leads to opposite, reverse discrimination. Affirmative action is created in order to stop unfair attitude or discrimination of employees and students because of the color of their skin, but it creates an opposite effect. White people who work harder and are sometimes more qualified can be checked strictly because they are white. It is also known that a lot of minorities are of a middle or upper class, and many white people live in poverty, that is opposite to stereotypes. Unfortunately, just now hard working and disciplined students from poor families can be passed over by a rich minority student who even does not make any effort.
2. Affirmative action reduces standards of accountability and responsibility needed to push students or employees to work or study better. The problem is that because of the possibility of a minority student enter Harvard with a 3.2 grade-point average, he doesn’t want to push himself to get a 4.0. There are students and employees who are self-motivated, but most people need some extra push or incentive to do their best. Setting lower standards for hiring and admission society lowers the level of accountability. Society should reward hard work, discipline, and achievement and not to reward a student simply because he is a certain race, and not to punish another student simply because he isn’t.
3. Students involved in affirmative action are often not able to handle the schools to which they have been admitted. If we imagine a high school science fair contestant who is unexpectedly asked to take a job at NASA as a rocket scientist. Certainly there is a possibility of success in such a situation, but it is more likely he will not cope with it. Schools like Harvard and Yale have extremely high requirements because it is very difficult to graduate from them. That is why, when such educational institutions are forced to lower standards in order to achieve a quota for minorities, some students can’t cope with studying. I don’t mean that these students are less capable, but if they can’t meet minimum requirements, so may be they are just not ready to go there.
4. Providing affirmative action would help lead a fully color-blind society. When we fill out a college application or apply for a job, we are not usually asked about things like the color of our hair or eyes or height, unless it is for a modeling or sport position. This doesn’t happen because hair and eye color are not connected with the ability to do a good job or succeed in studying. There is no any association between the color of hair or eyes and skills or qualities like ambition, discipline and intelligence. So why do we keep paying attention to it? May be it would be easier if we live in a society in which the color of skin is ignored as much as hair and eye color…
5. It is indulgent to minorities to say they need special help in order to succeed. When minorities are given preferential treatment in admission or hiring practices, they can think that the employer consider them stupid or incapable of achieving on their own, that is why he helps them. It is indulgent and insulting to think that minorities can’t achieve their goals through their hard work and skills.
6. Such program demeans true minority achievement; that is why success is understood as a result of affirmative action and not as a hard work and ability. A lot of successful people, for example Condi Rice and Colin Powell got to where they are because of hard work, because they are bright and well-suited for their positions. So, they got there not because affirmative action. The same thing can be told about minority doctors, lawyers, business leaders and so on. Very often their great achievements are demeaned by people who think that some special treatment got them to their nowadays positions. In such situations minorities have to work twice as hard to earn respect (Tomasson. p. 204).
Considering legal treatment of affirmative action, it is necessary to mention that the courts of the U.S.A. have studied the topic of if the use of affirmative action to help minorities is as controversial as the use of race or gender to harm socially disfavored groups. Dominated by conservative judges who were appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush lately, the courts have decided that “any” use of affirmative action is considered to be a kind of discrimination by race. Racial discrimination must meet strict control in the courts, so it must be necessary to achieve a government purpose. Strict control and scrutiny is a very inexorable level of judicial review that is met very rarely. The professor Gerald Gunther from Stanford said that strict scrutiny was “strict in theory, but fatal in fact.” In Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, in 1995, the Supreme Court said: “All racial classifications, imposed by whatever federal, state, or local governmental actor, must be analyzed by a reviewing court under strict scrutiny.” (Article from encyclopedia).
Those who are against affirmative action say that the Constitution demands that the government treat every person as an individual without paying attention to his race and strict scrutiny is used to be sure it doesn’t occur.
Supporters of affirmative action claim that there is a great difference between how the government uses racial classifications to support minorities and how it uses racial classifications to disadvantage minorities. We know a lot of facts of racism and discrimination against minorities, but there are no similar facts of persecution of white people.
According to some researches, the public doesn’t support affirmative action. The opinion that the government ought to be color-blind is attractive and allows for people to limit an affirmative action while feeling noble. From the other side, those people who are sure that affirmative action is necessary in order to remedy discrimination that was in the past and achieve diversity had difficulties with overcoming the impression that these programs are reverse discrimination.
Discussing the future of affirmative action, I can say that the positive impact of it is very controversial that is why it will lead to political and legal debates on this topic. After some changes in the Supreme Court, the challenges to such programs may gain additional momentum. The Grutter decision says that the Supreme Court has limited, but not stopped an affirmative action. That is why an affirmative action programs is a topic that is likely to be discussed again and again (Article from encyclopedia).
Summing up everything that was written above, I can say that and affirmative action means giving preferences to minority groups of people in admission to universities or employment. The government tried to correct the ages of discrimination and to give disadvantaged minorities a boost. Our current society has changed a lot during the last 50 years and seems to indicate that the programs worked successfully. But nowadays, many people think that society doesn’t need these policies any longer and that they lead to more new problems than they solve.