affirmative action
... affirmative action was further promoted by the equal opportunity push of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the seventies President Nixon advanced the idea of affirmative action by “…encouraging employers to set goals, timetables, and preferences for minority hiring.” (Auerbach 35) The programs seemed to work, on paper at least, more minorities were being hired, but at what cost? Ordinary qualifications such as skill and experience could be laid aside for the sake of reaching a quota. Not until the President of the United States the Honorable Ronald Regan came into power did the sham of affirmative action fall to the wayside. President Regan implemented a new mantra, a “colorblind” society where all people are treated equal and no one is treated special in order to “…redress past inequities.” (Auerbach 35) More recently, the Supreme Court has ruled in the Hopwood case that affirmative action is indeed unconstitutional. Are affirmative action, racism, discrimination, and inequality synonyms? Yes. The basis of affirmative action is treating one people group differently than another based solely on race and the false notion that the “system” is unfair. A fair system would be one that attaches no racial tag to a person applying for a job or a seat in a university classroom, or anything else for that matter. Affirmative action divides people into groups (races) and treats one more favorably than the other. Does that not sound like discrimination against the group that is not favored? How can a divided society be equal? One of the most well known examples of affirmative action is in the college admissions process. It all began in the sixties when colleges started to make a concerted effort to increase their minority enrollment. (Jost 745) Race became a significant factor in application/acceptance process. One recent example form the University of Michigan awarded twenty points to an applicant for minority status when only 100 are needed for acceptance. The United States Supreme court ruled this was unconstitutional, and rightly so. The program had good intentions but it is not right to force integrate universities. The idea that an isolated population like a student body should represent the population at large is ridiculous. The public universit...