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Affirmative Action Argumentative Essay

553 Words3 Pages

Jenna Boelter

Affirmative Action

Affirmative action programs are meant to give everyone an equal playing field. African Americans, women, people with disabilities and others facing discrimination are benefited by affirmative action. It helps disadvantaged people coming from places where they’re not given many opportunities to be able to advance where they otherwise could not. Overtime, affirmative action has created opportunities for African Americans in employment and education. Although affirmative action is the cause of many heated debates, it is a necessary program in America today. In 1961, President Kennedy first introduced the term “affirmative action” as a method to ensure that applicants are employed without regard to their race. In 1965, only five percent of undergraduate students, two percent of medical students, and one percent of law students in the country were African American. Then, President Lyndon Johnson signed an Executive Order that required government contractors to increase the number of minority employees by using affirmative action policies. Over time, enrollment rates for …show more content…

It’s important to remember affirmative action is a response to the discrimination that already exists. Even with affirmative action, women continue to earn seventy-seven cents for every male dollar. African Americans continue to have twice the unemployment rate of white people. Only two research universities in states with affirmative action bans have at least the same proportion of black students as the state’s college-age population. “Many events in recent years have served as important reminders that our Nation, despite path-breaking progress on some fronts, continues to face, and at times to struggle with, matters of race and inclusion that remain ever present in our communities,” lawyers for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote in a brief to the

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The benefits of Affirmative Action are meant to level the opportunities for African Americans in all aspects of American life. After Kennedy’s implementation, President Johnson and his administration extended Affirmative Action benefits to more groups of people in the promotion of social equality throughout the United States. With Affirmative Action still in effect today, the United States of America more than remedied the initial loopholes of federal benefits with the first drafts. To continue to further extend federal benefits for Affirmative Action today could completely reverse the original scenario in time and create even more inequalities within the American political system. Affirmative Action helped the remedy the disadvantage African Americans faced and create equal opportunities for more social groups.

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Critics of affirmative action frequent describe the policy as being unfair, asserting that it contravenes a conserved system of meritocracy in the country by basing selection decisions on demographic characteristics at the expense of ability and achievement (Thernstrom & Thernstrom, 1997). Defenders take a different position that can be explained by two facts: racism and sexism are still present in the United States society and affirmative action is the most efficient and effective way of reducing discrimination than the present alternatives. However, affirmative action increases fusion and fairness in employment and in education because it works as a proactive observing system. As Crosby and Smith (2005) consider, “such policies may help ensure that patterns of bias—including selective system bias— are uncovered and

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Thus, often without realizing it, the United States has practiced what, in effect, was white affirmative action on a highly generous and widespread basis, followed by a much more modest program of black affirmative action. By understanding this history, we can come to terms with the widening gap between blacks and whites noted by Lyndon Johnson and with the incapacity of many blacks to be able to make good this gap in the following four decades (Katznelson,

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