Anti-Affirmative Action

Essay by Patrick Ching February 1997

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'That student was accepted because of affirmative action policies.' With my first intake of the phrase, I realized that the student, whom I knew and worked with so many times, the one with such a lack of motivational ability, confidence, and ideas, was now occupying my chances towards a preferred school. 'Affirmative action', I soon found out, was used by President John F. Kennedy over 30 years ago to imply equality and equal access to all, disregarding race, creed, color, or national origin. As a policy setting out to resolve the problems of discrimination, Affirmative Action is simply nothing more than a quota of reverse discrimination.

Affirmative Action emphasizes prospective opportunity more towards statistical measures. It promotes the hiring and acceptance of less experienced jobs of the workforce and less able students. Sometimes the affirmative action policies forces employers and schools to choose the best workers and less privileged students of the minority, in all, regardless of their potential lack basic skills.

As remarked by Maarten de Wit, an author who's article I found on the World Wide Web, affirmative action beneficiaries are 'not the best pick, but only the best pick from a limited group.' Another article I found, 'Affirmative action: A Counter-Productive Policy' by Ernest Pasour also on the W.W.W., is one example which reveals that Duke, a very famous and prestigious university, adopted a resolution requiring each of it's department to hire at least one new African-American for a faculty position the 1993 date. More proofs of Affirmative Action in action is the admission practices at the University of California Berkeley. In the same article by Pasour, it states that while whites or Asian-Americans need at least a 3.7 grade point average through high school to be in consideration for admission in Berkeley, most minorities with much...