The Case Against Affirmative Action Louis P. Pojman. In this essay I set forth nine arguments against Strong Affirmative Action, which I define as preferential treatment, discriminating in favor of members of under-represented groups, which have been treated unjustly in the past, against innocent people Jan 13, · Affirmative action is an attempt to redress an injustice done to black people. The Fourteenth Amendment protects white people, too, but that is not why it needed to be written Nov 23, · Discuss the social nature of travel essay • affirmative action argumentative essay | ielts essay questions pdf. What is a reaction essay
Affirmative action definition essay. essay about great books & Essay has three parts
View Iframe URL. The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat affirmative action essay of color differently in ways that might be beneficial.
We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted affirmative action essay just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action. The term was introduced to the Kennedy Administration almost sixty years ago, and its arrival was somewhat haphazard. He was a Texan, and when John F. Kennedy was sworn in, inhe dropped in on the inaugural ball for Texans in order to shake hands with the new Vice-President, Lyndon B.
They chatted, and Johnson affirmative action essay him to come by his office, affirmative action essay. Taylor read the draft and said he thought it could use a little work; Johnson asked him to do a rewrite. Its purview, like the purview of committees dating back to the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, was the awarding of federal contracts, and its mandate was to see that companies the federal government did business with did not discriminate on the basis of race.
Do something. Many firms and educational institutions have affirmative-action or diversity officers. Their job is to insure not only that hiring and promotion are handled in a color-blind manner but that good-faith efforts are made to include racial minorities and sometimes individuals in other categories, such as women or veterans or disabled persons in the hiring pool, and, if they are qualified, to attempt to recruit them.
You do not have to give them preferential treatment. But that is essentially what affirmative action in this second sense entails. Apart from stone-cold racists, everyone is happy, or claims to be happy, affirmative action essay, with affirmative action in the first sense. And many people are happy, or will say they are, with affirmative action affirmative action essay the second sense so far as the outcome is concerned.
Legally, we want the system to be color-blind; we want everyone to have the same rights. They want them to be recognized and respected. People take a civic pride in having a racially diverse workplace or educational institution.
One type believes that we can ban all forms of preferential treatment and, so long as we enforce existing laws against discrimination, still achieve equality of result. These people see affirmative action as unfairly penalizing those who are not biased themselves and who have enjoyed no personal benefit from discrimination, affirmative action essay, and they see it as stigmatizing members of underrepresented affirmative action essay with the suspicion that they are underqualified for the jobs they hold or the school they attend.
The other type of affirmative-action skeptic is the person who knows that this is wishful thinking but is unable to get his or her head around the idea that the way to end discrimination is by discriminating. Affirmative action essay wants racial diversity, and he knows that it is not going to come about on its own very soon, affirmative action essay, but he thinks that specific goals or targets are at odds with the rights of individuals.
The history of affirmative action is woven into the history of American race relations, and the history of American race relations is woven into the history of America. It is the eternal bone in the national throat. So when Urofsky takes us through the history of affirmative action—he starts with Reconstruction, but the story really begins in the nineteen-sixties—he is giving us what amounts to a history of the country from John F, affirmative action essay.
Kennedy to Donald Trump. Alternative-facts explanation: Donald Trump is the least racist person you have ever met. The federal affirmative action essay, with the backing of the courts, weaponized the Civil Rights Act and its legislative progeny—notably affirmative action essay Education Amendments ofhome to the notorious in the R. sense Title IX, banning sex discrimination in federally assisted educational institutions—and forced businesses to hire women and racial minorities.
And they did. It found that between and the rate of minority employment in businesses that contracted with the federal government, and were therefore susceptible to being squeezed, rose by twenty per cent, and the rate of employment of women rose by In companies that did not contract with the government, the rates were twelve per cent and 2.
This was so contrary to everything that Reagan had been saying about affirmative affirmative action essay that the Labor Department hired an outside consulting firm to vet its own report. When the firm returned with the news that the methods and the conclusions were valid, the Administration affirmative action essay the only thing it could do.
But it did. And guess what? So did the War on Poverty, affirmative action essay. Inthe poverty rate was an estimated twenty-two per cent; init was below twelve per cent, affirmative action essay, which is about where it is today.
That is still thirty-eight million people, affirmative action essay, more than the population of Canada, affirmative action essay.
Politicians repeat it, and people nod affirmative action essay heads, affirmative action essay. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Did white men suffer as a result of affirmative action? That turns out to be a difficult question to answer.
Obviously, affirmative action essay, just by the nature of the policy, some significant number of whites and males who would have been admitted or hired before affirmative-action programs were in place were not.
Turned down by one place, they went someplace else. Most colleges affirmative action essay almost everyone who applies, so when we talk about race-conscious admissions we are talking about policies that affect a relatively small number of people.
Board of Education or Roe v, affirmative action essay. Wade for affirmative action, no well-established precedent. A lot of the cases that people rely on about university admissions are 5—4 decisions. Holder, that part of the Voting Rights Act has outlived our need for it. It also creates uncertainty in the marketplace. The judicial parameters are known: to pass constitutional muster, an affirmative-action program must serve a compelling state interest, it must be narrowly tailored, and it must survive strict scrutiny.
But one can never be sure how the Court will apply these criteria, or whether it will one day decide that all affirmative-action programs are unconstitutional per se and close out the exception. The Court is effectively inviting these lawsuits. The marketplace matters because the biggest defenders of affirmative action are not the N.
and the Democratic National Committee, affirmative action essay. The biggest defenders are corporations and the military. The same thing happened with the Civil Rights Act. The most controversial part of that act was Title II, which applies to public accommodations, like restaurants and hotels. This struck at what was, along with suppression of African-American voting rights, one of the pillars of Jim Crow: social segregation.
In December,five months after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, the Affirmative action essay Court, in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, upheld the constitutionality of Title II under the commerce clause. This was not a blow to business.
On the contrary. From a business viewpoint, refusing to serve people who want to rent a room in your hotel or order a sandwich at your lunch counter is irrational. The only economic incentive for denying them service is a fear of their driving white customers away. Once the Court made it clear that every hotel and lunch counter must serve every affirmative action essay regardless of race, that fear was significantly reduced. Under Jimmy Carter, affirmative-action requirements were extended to virtually all firms, educational institutions, and state and local governments that received contracts or grants from the federal government—which covers a lot of the national waterfront.
By and large, affirmative action essay, the courts went along. And so did businesses. When a company is serving customers of different races, it wants to present a diversified face. If you are selling cars to African-Americans, you do not want all the salesmen in your showroom to be white. If, to achieve this result, a company diversifies on its own, it is open to lawsuits claiming reverse discrimination. But when a company or a police department or a fire department adopts a race-conscious hiring program under government guidance it is immunized.
When Reagan made noises about abolishing affirmative-action requirements, the National Association of Manufacturers lobbied him to leave the program alone. It was helping manufacturing companies do what they could not have done without it. It was dealing with labor unions, whose seniority systems overwhelmingly favored white male workers.
Small businesses also resented the paperwork. The extent of the corporate buy-in was put on dramatic display inwhen the Supreme Court heard Grutter v, affirmative action essay.
Bollinger, another admissions case, this one involving the University of Michigan Law School. They supported affirmative-action admissions because they wanted universities to produce educated people for a diversified workforce.
The Court voted to uphold the Michigan program, affirmative action essay, but it was a 5—4 decision. No sector is more committed to diversity than higher education is, but it has proved to be one of the stickiest areas for affirmative action, both legally and practically.
Urofsky, perhaps because he is an academic, is more patient with the trouble that universities have had in achieving diversity than he is with the problems of labor unions, to which, in general, he is uncharitable, affirmative action essay.
It is true that probably the main reason Nixon promoted affirmative-action programs was to pit African-Americans against labor, both traditionally Democratic voting bases. And, by many accounts, he succeeded, and created Archie Bunker—the Reagan Democrat, a man who resents special government help for minorities.
Still, the leadership of unions like the United Auto Workers, though sometimes fighting their own membership, were active in support of civil rights. Higher education and unions have a similar problem when it comes to changing the demographics: we are dealing with a cake that cannot be unbaked. The affirmative action essay population turns over every four years, but the faculty turns over every forty years.
When the new students arrive on campus, affirmative action essay, they often wonder where the professors of color are. The answer is: wait twenty years, and they will show up. Even so, the lag in diversification between university faculties and their student bodies is striking. As late as affirmative action essay, less than five per cent of all professors had African or Asian ancestry, and around eighty per cent were men. Schools like Harvard and Stanford have had trouble even getting to gender balance.
Inaffirmative action essay, women made up 1. Even at Berkeley, which had been admitting women sinceaffirmative action essay made up just 5.
Correction essay affirmative action
, time: 11:04Colin Powell’s affirmative action stance also defined him as a Black Republican
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