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Affirmative Action is Reverse Discrimination

 

      "That student was accepted because of affirmative action policies."

With my first intake of the phrase, I realized that the student, whom I

knew and worked with so many times, the one with such a lack of

motivational ability, confidence, and ideas, was now occupying my chances

towards a preferred school.  "Affirmative action", I soon found out, was

used by President John F. Kennedy over 30 years ago to imply equality and

equal access to all, disregarding race, creed, color, or national origin.

As a policy setting out to resolve the problems of discrimination,

Affirmative Action is simply nothing more than a quota of reverse

discrimination.

 

      Affirmative Action emphasizes prospective opportunity more towards

statistical measures.  It promotes the hiring and acceptance of less

experienced jobs of the workforce and less able students.  Sometimes the

affirmative action policies forces employers and schools to choose the best

workers and less privileged students of the minority, in all, regardless of

their potential lack basic skills.  As remarked by Maarten de Wit, an

author who's article I found on the World Wide Web, affirmative action

beneficiaries are "not the best pick, but only the best pick from a limited

group."  Another article I found,  "Affirmative action: A Counter-

Productive Policy" by Ernest Pasour also on the W.W.W., is one example

which reveals that Duke, a very famous and prestigious university, adopted

a resolution requiring each of it's department to hire at least one new

African-American for a faculty position the 1993 date.  More proofs of

Affirmative Action in action is the admission practices at the University

of California Berkeley.  In the same article by Pasour, it states that

while whites or Asian-Americans need at least a 3.7 grade point average

through high school to be in consideration for admission in Berkeley, most

minorities with much lower standards are automatically admitted.  All the

preferential treatment may provide a basis for employers, employees, as

well as real applicable students to fight for an end to Affirmative Action.

 

      The development of more racial tensions are yet another part of the

Affirmative Action policy.  Tensions between blacks and whites and other

racial groups at U.S. colleges are related to preferential treatment.

Tensions at the workplace also deal with the toleration of race and sex

rather than individual abilities.  Racial discrimination was said to have

grown with the implementation Affirmative Action.  Examples of black

students attending North Carolina colleges stating that they were treated

like affirmative action cases though they were not, conjured more of the

racial discriminatory feelings.  As described by the above author, Ernest

Pasour, professors at those colleges already assumed that the African-

American students lack the qualifications, thus always seeking  to help by

asking if any tutoring or other assistance is needed.

 

      Solutions to the Affirmative Action policies may be simple and

complex.  The example alternatives provided by Brian Sterlitz in his

article, "Alternatives to Affirmative Action" found on the W.W.W., are: (1)

rebuilding of civil society in minority communities; the strengthening of

community associations, which will provide a foundation for collective

development, (2) increasing minority and female applicant flow; maybe easy

to accomplish with the addition of minority colleges and universities in

campus recruitment programs at individual companies, and (3) most important

promote broad policies for economic opportunity and security that benefit

the low and middles-income Americans; Americans should work together toward

broad based economic policies by consistently emphasizing broad-based,

race-neutral policies.  Examples may be, public investment, national health

reform, an enlarged earned income, tax credit, child support assurance, and

other policies benefiting families with young children.

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