RCC is a multicultural crossroad, and serves as an example that affirmative action is no longer needed to cure racial or discriminatory differences. The program is being abused, allowing minorities to gain unnecessary advantages.
“I don’t think it’s fair to compensate people who were never discriminated against,” says student Eugene Levit.
Affirmative action uses reverse racism, lowers the standards for minorities, and is an insult, implying that they need a boost to get a job or get into top notch schools.
This program had been created to compensate for the years of discrimination against certain groups of people and also to give these people a boost. Clearly, looking at the diversity of work places and educational institutions today compared to diversity fifty years ago, the affirmative action program was definitely successful.
The question now: Do we really need a system to artificially create diversity? The program has already done what it is supposed to do; so why keep it around?
The generation that had suffered the wrath of discrimination is long gone. They don’t know what it feels like to be discriminated against.
They are just using the program in a selfish way to gain an advantage over others. So my question is, why is the government paying back people who didn’t suffer from discrimination?
The sole purpose of this program is to get rid of discrimination in general, and it does eliminate discrimination against minorities but it increases discrimination against majorities. Take for instance, a White male who is poverty stricken who is very smart can be passed up for a wealthy minority student who does not work as hard.
Is it fair to say that only minorities have it rough in life? There are plenty of people who are white and are suffering more than minority students. So in order to fix discrimination with minorities, the majorities have to be discriminated against.
“Affirmative action should not work according to race. Instead it should work to help the under privileged students—students who were not given the same resources as other students. If someone went to school in a bad area with a bad school district, they probably did not have great teachers and other resources such as tutoring centers, etc.,” says Anthony Errico, another RCC student.
Errico continued to say: “But, let’s say there are two students who went to the same high school, had access to the same resources, however, one is part of a minority group and another is not. Neither of these students should be favored admission to a college because of race. That’s just not fair.”
This program also lowers the standards for minorities, which is why it is considered to give minorities a boost. Where is their incentive to work hard?
This means a rich, lazy child of minority will get more benefits than a hard-working, lower class white person. So now the government is rewarding people for their race and ethnicity rather than their hard-work and skill.
Doesn’t this take us back to American history, when African Americans were not being hired or accepted into schools due to their skin color? Now it is swapped: the white man isn’t going to get a job or get into a college he deserves to be at.
If the standards are lowered for minorities, but the curriculum remains the same, will the minority student really succeed there? You cut the student a break with admission, so why not make separate tests for minorities in classes too?
If the student cannot reach the requirements as they are set equally for everyone else, how are these students going to keep up?
There is a reason these requirements are set by colleges—if you can’t reach them, you probably don’t deserve to be there.
Is is not a little embarrassing and insulting to say you got a job or got into college because the government lowered the standards for you? Indirectly, affirmative action is saying that minorities are incapable of achieving their goals through hard work.
Lastly, have you ever filled out your hair and eye color on a job application excluding jobs such as modeling? No. This is because hair and eye color have been proven to have no direct correlation to intelligence or ability to perform a certain job.
So there is no reason for an application to ask for hair and eye color and other physical attributes. Skin color and race are also completely irrelevant to intelligence or ability to perform a job. So why is it even a question on an application?
Now ask yourselves how do they even choose which racial groups would be considered minorities? Minorities are “a smaller party or group opposed to a majority.” In other words, when minorities are defined, the total population of each race must be the sole guideline to being considered one.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act introduced the idea of affirmative action as one step to demolishing discrimination in the county. On the other hand, in 1965 as a result of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order to federal contractors requiring them to use affirmative action to ensure they were not discriminating. Although there were occasional court cases against this policy, affirmative action did not become a topic of excitement until 1972.
Fifty years ago, there were not many minorities getting Ph.Ds, but today, the number of minorities going to college and graduating has increased immeasurably.
Bringing me to my main point—affirmative action may have been the right thing to do to compensate people who were discriminated against, to break stereotypes, and to increase diversity in work places and educational institutions at one point in history.
Today, however, when the generation that was discriminated against is long gone, and stereotypes have been decreased a lot over the past few decades and diversity has been greatly increased, there is no need for this program to still be around.
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