Affirmative action is one of the more recent and popular civil rights policies that affect today’s society. Affirmative action can be described as nothing more than a lower educational standard for minorities.
It has become quite clear that affirmative action is unfair and unjust. However, in order to blend race, culture, and genders to create a stable and diverse society, someone has to give. How can this be justified? Is there a firm right or wrong to affirmative action? Is this policy simply taking something from one person and giving it to someone else, or is there more to this policy, such as affirmative action being a reward for years of oppression against those whom it affects? There have been many affirmative action plans and experiments attempted over the years; however most have been largely unsuccessful. These plans range from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
In 1986 the Department of Labor published an experiment entitled workforce 2000, which investigated the number of the most recent entrants into the working class from the years nineteen eighty-five to two thousand (Hyde 1). “The analysis showed that of those who would be newly entering the workforce, only fifteen percent would be white males”(Hyde 1). This course approaching prevalent accomplishment of affirmative action is the end outcome of an operation that began in eighteen sixty-four with the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. (Hyde1) This act forbids discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, and national origin. Title VII was meant to serve as a vehicle for affirmative action; however, in order to address the inequities of the nations employment system, another method was needed. About one year after Title VII went into effect, President Johnson required government contractors to take affirmative action in the employment of minorities.
With this idea, he introduced executive order 11246 on September twenty-fourth of nineteen sixty-five and order 113755 for women shortly after. (Hyde 2) In nineteen seventy-three the Rehabilitation Act was introduced. This act enjoined federal contractors that have a contract existing over two thousand five hundred employees to take affirmative action in the employment of people with handicaps. (Hyde 3)There is no doubt that there will always be controversy with affirmative action until an effective policy is put forth. Many citizens, organizations, and businesses seem to be slow to realize that government mandated race and sexually based preferences can only be used under extraordinary circumstances. There are many equal opportunity programs, such as the NAACP, that are designed to protect minoritys rights and privileges.
Therefore, there is no need for affirmative action to be used to its fullest extent in the world today. This policy is wrong because it involves reverse discrimination, promotes the hiring of less qualified workers, and basically does more wrong than right. A person should be hired for a job position because this person is the most qualified, not because this person is a minority or a female. Suppose an employer hires a person because he or she is a minority; if another applicant is more qualified for the job, then the employer is the person being negatively affected. If it is a prejudice act for people to discriminate against minorities, then what makes it right for people to discriminate against the majority? Either way, someone is being discriminated against and affirmative action only legitimizes and legalizes it.
In my personal opinion, affirmative action is a plan that can only enhance racial issues. For instance, what if someone loses out on the job position he or she deserved because this person is a part of the majority? Would race, gender, or a handicap not have anything to do with this injustice? Affirmative action has proven to be an injustice to the majority of society. Over the years there have been numerous cases in which this policy has harmed a great deal of people in order to establish so-called justice for an elite few. Pasour explains one of the thousands of injustices that affirmative action has provided:Affirmative action promotes the hiring of less skilled workers.
It sometimes forces employers to choose the best of the minority workers they can find, regardless
