Odds in Who's Favor? | Teen Ink

Odds in Who's Favor?

January 11, 2010
By ashlay BRONZE, Houston, Texas
ashlay BRONZE, Houston, Texas
4 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Favorite Quote:
"A hero isn't measured by his strength but by the strength of his heart"
- Hercules the Movie


Why shouldn’t you get affirmative action points if you have health problems or are poor? You can’t control your race or gender. Females, African Americans, Asians, etc. get affirmative action points, when white males do not get those same points, which has changed the way racism is pointed to, also know as “reverse racism”. People have always been complaining about racism, and now they are the ones pointing it back. The middle class white male gets little to no points and a middle class African American male gets points because he is a different race; or an Asian female would get more points then a white women would get. If you are poor, then you probably go to a school that is underprivileged and has little to no school supplies or teachers that care enough to teach the children, and if you have health problems then you should get affirmative action points because you could have a harder time understanding things the way other people do like autistic children. I believe that affirmative action should give points for health problems and if they are poor, but people should not get points for their race or their gender.

Is it really fare for affirmative action to give points to a certain race and let them get into college instead of a smarter different race? Well this is what happens to a lot of people that try to get excepted into college; a white girl gets a very high test score and an African American girl gets a score fifty points lower, the African American girl could get in instead of the white girl because the African American woman is of a different race. “”Reverse Racism” describes affirmative action only if one considers the cancer of racism to be indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it” (Fish 1). What Fish is saying is that affirmative action is like cancer in that the “reverse racism” is indistinguishable like cancer; so the only way to stop it from spreading is to try and cut it off completely.

One reason that certain races get affirmative action points is because they can come from schools that are not in the nicest parts of town or private schools. So why are races getting these points when they are not the only ones in poverty. In the first chapter “East St. Louis” in the book Savage Inequalities, written by Jonathan Kozol, he tells us,
“A teacher in an elementary school in East St. Louis has only one full-color workbook for her class. She photocopies workbook pages for her children, but the copies can’t be made in color and the lessons call for color recognition by the children. A history teacher at the Martin Luther King School has 110 students in four classes-but only 26 books. Some of the books are missing the first hundred pages.” (7)
These are the conditions lived by the poor population in our country. Since they do not receive the same amount of education as a richer person can receive they are not as well educated as the upper class student is who will then have a higher chance of succeeding in life. Since the poor people have fewer materials for class and not enough money to buy tutors, they cannot get what they deserve.
If diversity is desirable, then why can’t another race raise the bar instead of being lazy and leaving it to white people? Diversity is desirable and won't always occur if left to chance. Well actually if you want diversity then you need to have the other races step up to the plate and be the smarter person. The same goes for women, if we leave all of the work to the men then what are we to do except be the stereotypes people have created for women? If affirmative action gives points to certain races then the school will have diversity, but if that is the only reason they got in then people could be even more racist and make fun of them for only making it into the school because they got bonus points and the other kids did not and made it into the school.
I believe that affirmative action should not give points to a persons gender or race because it creates stereotypes and “reverse racism”, but should give points to the poor and the people with health issues. The way that you can change this is to raise the intelligence bar and try to go over and beyond what people know that you deserve to be at the ivy league schools instead of getting points and not doing as well so that your scores are lower.


The author's comments:
I wrote that Affirmative Action is something that should not be based on what you cannot control. I think that it should be about things that you could maybe control.

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