Affirmative Action: A Road to Discrimination and Prejudice

Affirmative Action: A Road to Discrimination and Prejudice

Affirmative action: these words bring to mind many different things to many different people. To some it is a leveler of the playing field and a right for past injustices, but to others it is a tool used to cause reverse discrimination and continues prejudices. Affirmative action was born into a time when our country was attempting to provide equality for all and was only intended to be a temporary measure to bring about this equality into areas where it had been lacking. Now almost forty years later this temporary measure known as affirmative action is still being used and has in the most part failed to bring about the equality it was supposed to. Instead, we have today a system of reverse discrimination that has developed and further prejudices against those that it was to help. Affirmative action is a failure that has caused new problems to exist and has further been weakened by the Supreme Court's ambiguous decisions concerning its legality.

Affirmative action was born into the liberal age of President Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency and came to its full formation on September 24, 1965, in its originating document, Executive Order 11246, in which it took the control of affirmative action out of the hands of the White House and set up a division of the Labor Department to handle it (Lemann, 1995, p.144). This ruling allowed affirmative action to be monitored by a larger and more permanent staff than an ever changing White House staff could have provided. It is interesting that this original form of affirmative action called for in Executive Order 11246 did not call for affirmative action to be used to combat gender discrimination, only to combat racial discriminat...

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