Affirmative Action: Reverse Discrimination

RESEARCH PAPER

Affirmative action is a set of governmental policies which tend to give privileges to minorities who suffered from discrimination in the past by providing them with access to educational and employment opportunities. First nuanced by Franklin Roosevelt with war-related work, Affirmative action only became an executive order (10925) in 1961 under John F. Kennedy to ensure that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin, to which was later on added sex by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 (11246). From that day till now affirmative action has been a controversial issue in America, with some who find it fair and some other who consider it as a reverse discrimination.

Since the very group of words “affirmative action” is in total contradiction with the amendment fourteen which guarantees people equal protection under the law. But coming to affirmative action, we have to remark the sad history behind it, which is once again to disadvantage a group for another one. Therefore we can clearly say that affirmative action is not only illegal but it is also unconstitutional since it violates clearly the fourteenth amendment. Not only that, we need also to notice that affirmative action goes against this American ideal which is equal opportunity, the ability for someone to use whatever wealth and/or talent he/she has to reach his/her fullest potential. Due to affirmative action, we will notice down in the paper how affirmative action prevents people to use their fullest

In the field of education we can once again notice how affirmative action becomes a failure over time. At the very beginning of affirmative action we did believe that it was something fair since it would have helped the country to give the ability to people from the minorities to have access to education and show their real value, since we need to notice that due to ignorance, some whites men used to think that black people for instance could not be educated and be able to ask critical questions. By the way, we do not blame them since actually maybe that this idea of the intellectual black man was strange to them. But when a policy helps one group to catch up the other group’s level of education due some discriminations going on before like the Brown v. the board of education case, we can agree with it at the beginning, however doing the same thing over and over for 50 years can become problematic. Tell us what do we actually want to catch up? The number of educated people within the minorities or we just need to have some well educated people among them who may be raised before the others as examples of success. I think if we want to be fair, the second option is the best. Rather than that affirmative action, tends up to today to privilege a group over the other. As a consequence of that, we must know that it may sooner or later lead to the protest of some of the people discriminated who have