Imagine yourself being treated like an inefficient, incapable idiot. Imagine teachers letting you re-take test over and over again. You can even try imagining being the Coaches daughter, and getting to play a lot, and even though you are probably really good at the sport, you’re other team members think the coach is just playing you because you’re his daughter. And as if being treated like that isn’t bad enough, think about the outcome. If you’re the teacher’s favorite, do you really think that the other students are going to just love you? Hate to break it you, but most likely not. My point is, you didn’t choose to be the teacher’s favorite, or the coaches kid, it happens whether you want them to or not. This applies to the people affected by a thing I like to call Affirmative Action. When you’re a student being interviewed by a college you have recently applied for, you can’t choose whether or not you want those members of the board, or the admissions staff to apply Affirmative Action to your own acceptance. All I can say is too bad.
There are a lot of things in life a person can and cannot choose. And Affirmative Action is one of them. What exactly is Affirmative Action? Affirmative Action is when a certain minority, race, or gender are all suddenly added to and applied to the acceptance of a college students application. These people are set apart. These people are given more help than most of them probably wanted. What I mean is, when a collage applies affirmative action it can really take away from the strong qualities of a student, usually their GPA or SAT scores. What if that student didn’t want the admissions board to focus on their unique race or even their gender, but to treat them equal, just like any other person? Once again my answer is too bad for them. As David Sacks and Peter Theil stated one of the many problems caused by affirmative action is the major division it is causing in colleges today, “In no other area of public life is there a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and reality” (2). As if that weren’t enough, “This same push for ‘diversity’ also has lead to Stanford to create racially segregated dormitories, racially segregated freshman orientation programs, racially segregated graduation ceremonies and curricular requirements in race and theory and gender studies”(Sacks and Theil 6). Yet another problem produced by affirmative action is the whole overview that all ‘unique’ races are unknowledgeable, cannot think for themselves, and have to have racial preferences help them get into college, and not all of them need financial help either. News flash, not all special races are the same! Also going about who to apply affirmative action is also a huge mistake admissions officers are making. What I mean by this is that “many preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle-and upper-class backgrounds” (Sacks and Thiel 3). This thing we call affirmative action isn’t even being applied to the people it says it applies itself to! See something wrong? Sadly enough, in the end, affirmative action does not equal out the racism in the world, it divides our college students even more, it treats everyone unfairly in some way or another, and it does nothing but cause even more racism every day.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there are some people out there where affirmative action had provided them with many more options, but to me this is really quite rare. In Jonathan Kozal’s paper about how awful school and living conditions are to these poor kids in East St. Louis, he goes on and on about how there’s sewage flooding the streets and the schools and how kids are receiving very poor education. I feel for these children, I really do, but not every African American race or Mexican race is living in these extremely awful conditions. It applies to one setting and a few people, but defiantly not all. So what I am saying is that some people have it really bad, and need affirmative action desperately, and there are some people who really don’t need it all, but they don’t mind if it helps them get into college either. You can’t pick the worst place on earth and base a whole argument defending that one set of living conditions. Also affirmative action is really only applied to people of special races, genders and minorities. I don’t think the appeal of affirmative action is an any way fair to just plain white men, because apparently they don’t need any help at all, or at least nothing like an African American or Hispanic. See the unfairness I do? According to affirmative action everything is based on race. I don’t know about you, but I find something slight wrong about that.
Affirmative action is unfair. It is making racism worse by the minute. It is obviously against white people. It gives off the impression that all minorities are poor and disadvantaged. And it does not put the test scores first. There are a lot of faults with affirmative action. So what if it can help just a few lucky people who actually did need it, did deserve it, and earned some extra help? That is great, but not nearly as great when you look at all the other disadvantages it results in. And not being able to control whether or not you want people to base an acceptance on their race, instead of their scores, is not a logical thing. Affirmative action is that thing you wish could work, but in the end just can’t.