23rd June 2003, 6:00 PM
Quote:affirmative action maybe was somthing you do for a year but not for 50. Your just giving neo nazi justification were they can say minorities are stealing jobs and education and actually sadly admit some truth in it.
All miniroties desserve is a equal right to compete and be treated as equals they may receive whatever help they need to do it money wise. But to me education and employment is about skills and abilities not your skin texture, It makes no sense to give a person with lower marks a free jump ahead agiast one with higher marks, Unless its 50/50 and your school lacks diversity choose the black guy but if you got more blacks then whites and its 50/50 pick the white guy.
Just because whites miss treated blacks decades ago doesnt justify vengeance on todays generation who had nothing to do with it.
What you say really has nothing to do with affirmative action. You clearly think it does, but it doesn't.
You see, blacks (and some other groups, but mostly blacks) have disadvantages in TODAY'S society. We aren't talking about "revenge" for past problems. That's irrelevant to this issue.
This is about correcting the inherent unfairness of modern society.
Most black people just DONT HAVE THE SAME POSSIBILITIES THAT WHITE PEOPLE HAVE. This is a FACT. More black people are poor. More don't have access to the things richer people have access to -- good schools, help for standardized tests, more chances of going to those colleges... its sad, but its true. And when there is a inherent flaw in society it is the responsibility of the government to do what it can to fix it! Affirmative action goes a long way towards doing this, of course, helping to make up for all the disadvantages that those students have had to overcome.
The point is that if those same exact people were white and middle-class they'd be doing as well as the rest of the class entering. Its just because of their disadvantaged situation that they are behind and get some help to make up for it. Its just fair.
As I said, there is very good proof about this stuff. I have read some studies that VERY clearly show that when a college drops Affirmative Action, its minority population dramatically goes down. Dramatically. More middle and upper class white people make it in, predictably, since those are the people with access to the good schools that actually prepare you for college and the SATs, tutors, and all those other things that almost all beneficiaries of affirmative action don't have and suffer academically for the lack of.
So it'd be a "fair" system that is inherently based on tilting the scales so the lower classes will never get out of their situation.
Of course, that's been the main plank of the Republican platform for decades, so no surprise there.