Papers are piling up on top of a desk. People are running around tryingto meet their deadlines. Assignments are being pushed back to later dates.
Phones are being answered, but put on hold for the next availablerepresentatives. The president of the firm puts out a notice of hire. The wordis spread throughout the business community through the newspaper and theinternet. Resumes are received every business day. The board members of thefirm review hundreds of resumes that are received daily. They rate theapplications according to qualifications and experiences.
The names aredisregarded at this point. A dozen of the applicants are chosen, and notifiedto setup initial interviews. One applicant meets all the qualifications, andhas had numerous experiences in the field. This applicant clearly surpasses allthe other applicants. The commitee is very impressed by this young man.
Heheads home in delight, hoping to hear from the marketing firm again. Unfortunately, he never hears fromthem again. The main reason why he was not chosen, was because of the colorof his skin. Since he is Asian, they could not hire him, because 50% of theiremployees are Asian. Under the affirmative action, they must employ someone whois underrepresented. This type of situation happens often.
It is not thequalifications, but the color of the skin that employers look for today. Affirmative action is a step backwards. We are back to color and racedifferences. We are all Americans and should be treated as so, not whatethnicity we are. Affirmative action should be abolished solely because we donot want to make the same mistake our society made in the past — discriminateaccording to color.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Many people say that we should keep affirmative action to renderfairness to the minorities because of the wrongs that was once put on to them. This simply does not make sense. To compensate someone, a person must have gonethrough an experience. People today did not go through such discrimination, astheir past ancestors.
How can we punish someone for what they had no control?Our white society today did not commit the wrongs that were committed ageneration ago. We should not punish them, but rather treat everyone fairly. We should treat everyone as Americans. As Bakke quotes the Constitution,”. . .
The guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment extend to all persons. It’slanguage is explicit: “No State shall. . . deny to any person within itsjurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
” It is settled beyond questionthat the rights created by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment are, byits terms, guaranteed to the individual. ” (Bakke, p. 485)In the past, we were fighting to abolish racial separation, but today, we haveaffirmative action, which still brings about the separation of the differentraces. We should fight for equality for all. Affirmative action affectseveryone, including our children.
Under the affirmative action law, our schools are currently recruitingstudents according to race and color. According to a critic on affirmativeaction,”A college board survey, described in Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations, in 1992 theaverage combined SAT score for black students whose parents earn more than$70,000 a year was 854, which was twenty-five points lower than the average SATfor white students whose parents earn less than $20,000 a year. ” (Rosen, p. 3)In effect, the solution by supporters of affirmative action is to lowerthe school’s standards so that they can accept a more diverse group of students.
This solution is ridiculous, simply because everyone has a chance to do good. It is just a matter of effort. If a student is spoiled, and does not realizehow important an education is, he will not study as hard as someone who has beenbrought up with education as their number one goal. Family incomes have less todo with SAT scores than the efforts students put into their studies. We shouldnot lower our standards.
Instead, all students should raise their own standardsin order to improve our society. For example, the University of California inBerkeley has a diverse student body with a majority of Asians. An Asian studentcoming out of high school with a 4. 0 GPA, and a list of extra curricularactivities would not be accepted simply because of his ethnicity. Instead theschool would rather accept a Mexican student with a 3.
0 GPA. Why should thestudent who did not study as hard be rewarded just because of his race? Nobodyhas the choice of ethnicity when they are born, so we should not deprive anyonewhen they make the effort. Affirmative action also brings about differentstandards in grading. The National Merit Scholarship has one standard for African Americans,and one for the rest of the applicants. This type of double standards is absurd,because black students are not graded any differently in the classroom.
Thisalso implies that black students are not capable of handling the same materialas the rest of the Americans are. This double standard, in itself, is an insultto the black community. There are many black people who want to be treatedequally, without any special assistance. By giving minorities special treatment,we are simultaneously insulting them by implying they are of a lower class. AsJudge O’Connor of Richmond county states,”Classifications based on race carry a danger of stigmatic harm.
Unless theyare strictly reserved for remedial settings, they may in fact promote notions ofracial inferiority and lead to a politics of racial hostility. We thus reaffirmthe view expressed by the plurality in Wygant that the standard of review underthe Equal Protection Clause is not dependent on the race of those burdened orbenefited by a particular classification. ” (O’Connor, p. 500)We do not want to cause any more hostility than there already is in our societyby imposing special standards.
Our goal is to promote unity in our society, notseparation. This also affects the efficiency in our workforce. In the work place, people hired under special assistance may slow theprocess. If someone was hired over another simply because of the color of hisskin, and not by his qualifications, the business loses as well. They must paysomeone the same salary they would have paid a more efficient employee.
Lowering standards in the workplace, to accommodate a race, is a step back topoorly made products. In the 1980’s, American cars were marked with adistinction of poor quality. Since then, our cars have vastly improved, but thedistinction is still planted in many people’s minds. If we lower our standardsin the white collar force, we may develop the same distinction in our corporatebusinesses as we have in our cars. Another point is that many people say thataffirmative action will bring diversity to our workforce. A projection done bythe San Jose Tribune suggests that by the year 2000, white males will make uponly 10% of new hires.
This does not promote diversity, rather reversediscrimination. To have a unified and peaceful society, we must move away from theseparation of color lines. We moved forward when we abolished segregation, butwe are now moving back by imposing Affirmative action. This is not the way tosolve anything. Affirmative action will just cause more hostility between races,which in turn, can lead to hatred.
Category: English
