Affirmative action refers to policies that take gender, race, or ethnicity into account in an attempt to promote equal opportunity. In other words, the main goals of affirmative actions are basically to:
- to maximize the benefits of diversity in all levels of society
- to redress disadvantages due to overt, institutional, or involuntary discrimination
Well, yes and no. In the United States, affirmative actions commonly refers to minorities. But that begs the question of who the minorities are. The beneficiaries of affirmative include:
- racial minorities
- ethnic minorities
- in India, underprivileged castes (social class)
- women
- physically disabled
- veterans (those who served in the military)
Opposition/Problems with Affirmative Action
Like most policies, Affirmative Action also has controversies that cause the policy in question to sway back and forth in terms of being active and inactive. Some say affirmative action devalues the accomplishments of people who are chosen due to the social group to which they belong rather than their qualifications. Some even claim such "helping hands" will in actually produce side-effects such as tension between ethnic and racial groups.
ex) A boy with a White background gets a 4.0+ high school GPA while a girl with a Hispanic background gets a high school GPA of 3.33. Due to Affirmative Action, there is a chance that the girl with the 3.33 will be accepted into a college that the boy with the 4.0 might not get into, simply because of the fact that she is a girl, and she is of Hispanic heritage, despite the fact that the boy with the 4.0 GPA is clearly a hard worker.
-The problem here is that while it is true the boy with the 4.0 GPA deserves to be rewarded for his outstanding hard work, there may be factors at hand that might have given the girl a handicap. Who knows, maybe she is working part-time at the local store so she can help support her family, while the boy's parents were pretty well off and did the money problems for him.
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My views on Affirmative Action
I personally believe that while affirmative action can be seen as unfair, I see it as a remedy to help put minorities on equal ground with those of majority. Had we not instituted affirmative action, it is possible that tensions between ethnic and racial groups might be more troublesome than they already are today. It's not just a question of jealousy, but also a question of personal pride and the feeling of self-worth that can be altered by the things on is able to accomplish. And regardless, it is still given that minority or not, every human being has an equal stand in terms of working their way up the levels of high school ranking and every human being has the ability to accomplish their dreams and become successful people. However, as I see it, affirmative actions produces more crops than it kills, much similar to a pesticide. A pesticide might be harmful in ways that it can cause crops to lose their status as organic and sometimes healthy, it still saves the crop that would've been eaten up anyway by an incest. In the same manner, while affirmative action has its ups and downs, I see the ups as the winner. And while many argue that now that we have an African-American as President of the United States, we no longer need affirmative action. But if we are to look at Obama in that manner, isn't stating his achievements as a certain race in of itself a problem? We should look at Obama for the strong-willed and hardworker that he was, not look at him as America's first Black president. We should not point our fingers at just one man and say, because of him, we no longer need affirmative action.
didn't i tell you this video?
ReplyDeletelol
white man with C becomes the president of the United States
while the black man with C barely becomes anything in this country