Essay, Research Paper: Affirmative Action

In times of today most topics of conversation generally have something to do with politics and hot political issues. Everything from abortion to gun control to affirmative action and that’s exactly what I am going to talk about, affirmative action. What exactly is affirmative action? According to Dr. Norman Lewis of Time Magazine affirmative action is a call for minorities and women to be given special treatment in cases of employment and education. Personally I think that it is totally wrong and should not be allowed in any case for any reason.
Now that you know what affirmative action is you need to know a little bit about the history of it. Affirmative action first came about during the civil rights movement over three decades ago. The goal of affirmative action is to give equal rights to people of minority to help better integrate the work place, business world, collages and universities. For example if you are a caucation male applying to The University of Michigan and you have a 4.0 grade point average and a good score on your ACT or SATs you have a 11.5% chance of getting accepted, but if you are a minority of any kind and you have a lower grade point average and not quite as good of score on your ACT or SATs, the minority has a 65% better chance of getting accepted than the caucation male. And the same thing goes in the business world although they are not as qualifyed; a woman or anyone of a minority has a substantially better chance of getting hired than a caucation male.
All of this is putting employers in a very bad position ending up with the lesser quality worker. A minority worker that benefits from affirmative action bears the mark of not being the best worker, but only the best of the minority when the employee that is actually better qualified for the job is passed by because of some law. Now I thought that the whole point of this law was to eliminate the problem of discrimination but to me it looks like they are just creating more discrimination and even more of a problem. All they have done is turned it around and discriminated against some else for a change.
Yeah affirmative action gives people a chance to have a job that they may not have gotten with out it (after all that’s what this was introduced for.) In situations like this, no matter what kind of rules and regulations you make it’s not going to help, you have to find a way to please everyone not just the majority. And it’s not easy to so that but I think that the way to do that is to hire the best man for the job no matter what race or gender. After all that’s what you want right????


Word Count: 477