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Quote by: Chancellor  Worse, affirmative action is inherently racist against those it was intended to help. It has the effect of "Well, you're not capable of competing on an equal level with whites so we'll just go ahead and make things easier for you with lower test scores, lower qualifications, and preferential treatment."
This is the 21st century: it's time to knock off all this majority/minority nonsense and just be Americans. |
No, the idea of affirmative action is that it examines potential instead of past achievement. If you have two runners trying out for a team and they have equal times, but one has terrible form and the other has good form, who do you take? Answer: the one with terrible form, because if you coach him to improve his form, his time will improve, while the other one has maxed out already, or at least can't improve as much. The same holds if the one with poor form is only slightly behind the one with good form; the potential of the runner with less training is greater, and so he is the better choice, despite the difference in past performance.
Affirmative action was intended to make up for a systemic lack of advantages, primarily the lack of educational funding and a poorer learning environment, that tends to afflict minorities more than whites. If an inner city student has SAT scores, say, 100 points below those of a suburban kid, the inner city kid might be the better choice.
The problem with affirmative action is it, like the Three Strikes law and others that make intelligent decisions unnecessary, should never be mandated. A reasonably intelligent admissions officer should be able to take such things as poor educational environment into account without having the federal government force him to do it. One could also see affirmative action as racist in that it assumes that minority students are the ones who have less educational support -- except the fact is, the vast majority of poor learning environments are predominantly non-white.
So: is affirmative action unnecessary? Yes. Racist? Not in intent.