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One of the main issues that divide the blacks and whites of America
is the debate on continuing with affirmative action or not. Affirmative
action is a statute that further strengthens existing laws, which deals
with equality in all spheres of life for the American citizens who come
from different backgrounds.
Affirmative actions requires institutions, universities, offices etc
to make significant efforts to make sure that socially discriminated
groups like minorities, women etc are not victimized on the basis of
their social stature, when they discharge their day to day social
duties. Affirmative actions would require the organizations that come
under its purview, to make sustained and often visible efforts to
recruit, train and maintain members of the social groups, which have
long been discriminated against in the USA.
The biggest difference that affirmative actions have in quality, in
comparison with other similar laws is that it is active and requires
authorities to make sustained efforts to ensure that social equality is
maintained and propagated in the society. Since affirmative actions are
active laws, it means that the concerned authorities can always demand
evidence of whether steps against discriminations were taken by
organizations. In this regard, affirmative action shifts responsibility
of its implementation from the individual to a statutory body. The
discriminatory actions against women and minorities that may be counted
as offences may be low wages, low prestige, lowly jobs etc.
Analysis
The question of whether affirmative action must be continued or not,
has been raging in America for a long time and the principle cause for
this controversy is the racial and sexual discrimination that has
marred the history of the nation for many centuries.
There are primarily two groups, in the context of affirmative action
whose views are diametrically opposite to each other. Those who oppose
the affirmative actions argue that racial discrimination in America has
ended and that it is not prudent to continue with concessions to
minorities and women and that everyone must be treated alike. The
defendants of affirmative actions on the contrary argue that
concessions are required in order to make up for years of
discrimination that the minorities and women had to undergo at the
hands of the majority population. They believe that social equality
would become a reality only if the minorities are encouraged through
affirmative actions to defend their own worth and value in a society
that still carries the inherent prejudices of a discriminating society
[Froomkin, 1998]
Although affirmative action could have had its benefits a few
decades before, today it is widely perceived as a partial system that
contributes to reverse discrimination against the majority. Affirmative
actions have fallen from favor of the majority community only recently.
There seems to be strong evidence that all sections of the society
supported affirmative action even until the early nineties. According
to a study by a civil rights organization, in the early 1990s, 61% of
whites supported affirmative action while 27% opposed it. Similarly 75%
of Americans strongly agreed that women and people of color were
discriminated against in more ways than one. It is interesting to note
that the majority community that supported affirmative action is
against it now due to the lack of merits in implementing a system that
has outlived its utility as a social-balancer [Author not known 1,
2003]
It becomes very clear that affirmative action does not actually
promote equality. On the contrary, it only promotes more racial or
other forms of segregation that would be detrimental to the interests
of the country in the long run. There is no logic in the statement that
affirmative action is an effort to implement equality in the society,
because it tries to attain its objective by encouraging inequality.
Hence, the very purpose of the maintaining equality becomes vain. When
people collude to implement partiality to a social group, even if it is
encouraged by genuine concern and supportive mentality, it will soon
create a situation with distinct divisions in the society.
In the long run the minority or the oppressed groups, which were
being supported, would feel that it is their right to be treated so and
will certainly make unjust demands from the government in the name of
social justice. On the contrary, the majority who would have supported
affirmative action on the onset will feel that their chances are being
unjustly snatched away from them. The fact that reservation of benefits
for a separate group sparks disenchantment and revolt in those who have
been denied the benefit is in itself a strong case for opposing
affirmative action. Affirmative action only seems to tilt the balance
of social justice for a favored group and does not solve any problem or
equality.
The problems still persists in the society. If minorities are
benefited by affirmative actions, it will also create a huge number of
disenchanted whites who may be in fact more suited to the jobs or
positions that has been reserved for a candidate just because the
person is from a minority group
Affirmative action also encourages complacency in people who stands
to benefit from it. This is not only bad for the firm in which such a
person is employed, but also affects the national interests in the long
run. This is because affirmative action can create a group of people,
who are not interested to do their job nor do they have the need to
take that extra effort to reach a better position in life. On the
contrary, people who are denied their rights will have to spend their
life in total frustration because they become very insecure. If social
rights groups believe that affirmative action performs a socially
beneficial role to the deprived sections of the society, it must be
understood that it does so, only at the expense of a sizeable number of
the majority who also deserve to be treated well. It is just a question
of who gets the chance to be fairly treated by the existing laws of the
land.
The recent statistics on the enrolment of minorities compared with
the white majority into some of USA's top institutions shows that what
affirmative actions did was that it just changed the subjects of
discrimination. It did nothing to solve the issue of discrimination.
The survey showed that in 1998, black Americans had more than 14
percent chances to be admitted into some of the prestigious
institutions than the majority whites. "In terms of specific
institutions, the number of African-American and Hispanic
undergraduates enrolled between 1980 and 1997 increased, respectively,
by 24 and 117 percent at Harvard University, by 68 and 237 percent at
the University of California-Berkeley, and by 50 and 74 percent at the
University of Texas at Austin"[Author not known 2, 1998]. It is amusing
to note that this imbalance is actually encouraged by the zeal to
maintain social equality.
It would be perhaps amusing to note that affirmative actions affect
males the most. Women and minorities can challenge affirmative actions
by resorting to the provisions of Title VII of the civil rights act.
Since only women and minorities are included in the list of people who
can in fact approach the courts for a legal intervention, the cases of
many male workers are not even considered by the courts. Certainly,
this is not the manner in which a responsible government should behave.
Since 1965, when President Lyndon.
B. Johnson established the office of the federal contract
compliance, statistics has been a very important measure, which allowed
authorities to check whether an organization is engaging in
discriminatory practices. It therefore became mandatory for
organizations to hire more women and minorities in order to prove that
they were indeed having minorities according t the stipulated numbers.
This meant that those who had jobs and did not belong to the minority
groups were sure to lose their jobs. Although high flying words like
cultural and social diversity and gender equality may be used to
justify the displacement of people for the sake of another set of
citizens, it somehow does not make sense [McElroy, 2003]
What made the average American turn against affirmative actions in
the recent years? It seems that experience of many decades have proved
that affirmative actions have lived their time and now needs to be
scraped. AN urgent need to challenge affirmative action is most felt in
the colleges and universities, where whites who have been living with
almost three decades of selective admissions are fighting back. The
trend is catching on and more and more members of the majority
community in the USA feel that affirmative actions are not a tool that
ensures social equality. It is a tool that breeds further divisions on
the society.
By the late seventies, affirmative action was being attacked by many
white scholars who felt that affirmative actions were in fact reverse
discrimination and that the whites were losing their opportunities to
the overzealous protection of the blacks. In 1978, the landmark Supreme
Court case 'Regents of the University of California v. Bakke' further
tilted public opinion against affirmative actions. The Supreme Court
ordered that race alone could not be used to increase diversity in the
classrooms. The recent landmark cases that were proclaimed after 1995
convey the general mood against affirmative actions in the country. In
1995, the Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña case initiated much debate
between the judges who were in the jury. While two judges categorically
believed that the affirmative actions should be scrapped, other felt
that affirmative actions were allowable in some particular cases.
More that the outcome of the case, what was significant in this
instance was the fact that the almost all the judges had begun to feel
that affirmative action was becoming irrelevant in the modern world and
that it had outlived its usefulness. In 1996, in the Hopwood v.
University of Texas Law School case, the Supreme Court ruled that the
school authorities in Texas, needed to employ methods of selection that
did not favor the race of people. The idea was slowly being imbibed
into the mainstream society that affirmative action did not have much
life and that it was on its way out. Further, in 1997 a total ban was
imposed in California, which did away with all forms of affirmative
action. In 1998, Washington followed suit and banned affirmative action
in the state [Author not known 3, 2003]
The tendency to bury the imminent social problems, which may be
caused due to affirmative action, with the rhetoric of gender and
social equality is very unfortunate. The recent court ruling upholding
the University of Michigan's affirmative actions is a very encouraging
victory for those who stand for affirmative actions. It is rather sad
to note that they are getting carried away in a wave of arguments which
they feel are socially benevolent. Michigan University, which is one of
the most reputed universities in the world, cannot afford to have
substandard students in the name of social equality. Neither would it
be wise to allow the so-called socially discriminated students to
benefit from the laurels created by hard working students of the bygone
times. They have to earn their credits in adverse conditions or its
value gets lost. Many observers feel that providing financial and other
facilities that encourage minorities to learn are better than limiting
their capacities by protecting them from equal competition. In fact
there have been many welcome changes when affirmative actions were
scraped in many campuses. In the University of California, ending
affirmative actions have in fact increased spending to accommodate
minority students and this is paying rich dividends in the form of
better minority students, who have better grades [Traub,1999 ]
It seems that affirmative action has been blown out of proportion as
a means of social reconstruction. Affirmative action, to a certain
extent helps to serve the interests of the minorities but at the same
time restricts the rightful benefits of the majority of whites in the
country. Hence, it cannot be called as a tool, which ensures social
equality. Therefore, the government must initiate actions that would
help the minorities to compete with the majority and not protect the
minorities from equal competition from the whites.
It is sad to note that affirmative action, which had been created as
a tool to improve social equality is used as a political and
convenience tool by the so-called disadvantaged sections of the
society. Perhaps the affirmative actions were helpful to instill some
kind of social security for the blacks, but today the social milieu of
the United States has become more accommodating and multicultural. The
society has changed from the bipolar section to a conglomerate of world
cultures and ethnicities. Moreover business and employers have been
constrained to consider performance of the individual than his color or
race. Hence in such a situation adhering to affirmative actions will
only erode the confidence that the majority of people have on the
government. Recent examples prove that affirmative actions have
outlived their use. Today the only contribute to reverse
discrimination.
References
- Author not known 1, 2003, University of Wisconsin affirmative action office, retrieved from http://www.uwosh.edu/affirm-act/aaoffice.html, on December 10, 2004
- Author not known 2 , 1998, Assessing affirmative action at
selective colleges and universities, Change, Issue: July-August, 1998
- Author not known 3, 2003, Affirmative action History.
- Froomkin, Dan,1998, Affirmative Action Under Attack, The Washington Post , October 1998, retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/affirm/affirm.htm, on December 10, 2004
- McElroy Wendy, 2003, “What Does Affirmative Action Affirm?”, Sexual
Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women, McFarland &
Company, North Carolina,
- Traub James,1999, The Class of Prop. 209, The New York Times Magazine, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990502mag-traub.html on December 10, 2004
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