Affirmative Action | Teen Ink

Affirmative Action

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

Favorite Quote:
"Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today."


Say you have worked all of high school to get into a certain college you have had your heart set on since you were a little kid. You get a letter from the school saying that you have not been accepted because a minority with lower grades was accepted over you. How would you feel? What would you do? This happened because of affirmative action. It is the process when a person of a different sex or race is accepted into a school, business etc. over you simply because they are not the white majority. I am against affirmative action and I believe that it is racist and sexist and the person who succeeds academically should get accepted over the less successful one.

Affirmative action will never solve racism. Making a college campus eclectic will only make segregation worse among students. The acceptance board believes they are doing good for the community of the school by accepting minority over majority, when they are only making the situation worse. In an acceptance board, I really cannot see how someone with lower grade point averages and less merit gets accepted over someone with higher everything because of their sex and color of skin.
If I were to be in an operation room, I could really care less if the surgeons operating on me reflected racial or gender balance. I care more if they are qualified for their job. Most football and baseball fans could care less whether their team reflects ethnic and gender diversity, but rather that if they are the best combination of players.

President Kennedy first introduced affirmative action in 1961 as a temporary solution that would work towards a “level playing field” for all Americans, and then stop once this occurred. Reverse discrimination is also represented because of affirmative action. The Bakke case of 1978 is a great example of reverse discrimination.
“Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a row by a medical school that had accepted less qualified minority applicants-the school had a separate admissions policy for minorities and reserved 16 out of 100 places for minority students” (Brunner 1).
After this case, the Supreme Court outlawed systems like the medical school Bakke was rejected by. However, affirmative action remained legal after the court’s decision. This is just one of the many flaws in affirmative action.

In conclusion, affirmative action is not just a policy that was adapted by many schools and businesses; it is just another attempted barrier to reduce segregation that is slowly being taken down by Americans today. Some believe this is a step towards maximizing the diversity of the world, while others believe it is step back towards the segregated world we once lived in. I am one of those who believe it is just a step back towards segregation. Affirmative action will never solve racism or sexism and those who succeed academically should be rewarded for their merits rather than put down.


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