Help Wanted: A Look at Affirmative Action

Help Wanted: A Look at Affirmative Action

Minority Relations

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Abstract

“HELP WANTED”. This sign is outdated and severely inaccurate. A revised version of this sign could be “Help wanted, white males need not apply”, or “Help wanted, if you are under

qualified, but obese”. Yes, thanks to a collection of affirmative action legislation, employers have lost a great deal of flexibility in their hiring practices and schools and universities are constantly questioned about the racial mix of their student body. Now, please do not misunderstand me, all affirmative action legislation isn’t damaging, far from it. But, there are severe loopholes and backdoors in the system that are a major source of frustration for supporters and non-supporters of affirmative action, myself included. The focus of my ideas that are presented in this paper will be to examine the definition and beginnings of affirmative action, followed up an in-depth look at what I believe are the three main shortcomings of affirmative action.

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Help Wanted: A Look at Affirmative Action

Affirmative action has made a not so silent transition from the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was a statute forbidding preferences based on race or gender, into a weapon to coerce employers to adopt and implement quotas. Unfortunately, the color-blind principle of equal opportunity lost out to the opportunism of quick-fix quotas. Why did this happen? I doubt we could ever fully answer this question. However, most of the problems stem from intentional misreading or abuse of the legislation itself. But, before we get too far into the debate over affirmative action, let us begin by taking a more in-depth look at the legislation and its beginnings.

What is affirmative action? Affirmative action is intended to be “the positive effort to recruit subordinate group members including women for jobs, promotions, and educational opportunities.” (1) The philosophy behind this legislation lies in the governments need to help the before mentioned members of society obtain and maintain quality employment. When members of society are in need, they turn to the government for help. The most direct means available to the government to foster a greater “equality” among racial, ethnic or other minority groups is to allocate economics benefits to members of those groups that are relatively less off. (2) So, as we can see, affirmative action is a legislative tool to assist minorities in their educational and economic endeavors. Now, on to the problems associated with this thing called “affirmative action”.

The first shortcoming that I see with affirmative action is an institution, not the individual, is required to make most of the accommodations. Hopefully, the following will shed some light on what I mean in regards to this shortcoming.

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If there are only two minority students enrolled at a university with a total student population of 500, is a quota system needed to afford more minority students a chance to attend this school? Just from reading that sentence many supporters of affirmative action would say yes. The correct answer is, not enough information is given. Maybe, these were the only two minorities that wanted to attend this school. Maybe, 500 other minority students applied, but were denied entrance based on their academic achievements, or lack there of. If low academic achievement was the reason, should the entrance standards be lowered? Affirmative action supporters might say yes. But, then where will it end? Should we lower every standard until we have no standards? I say no. Apparently, 500 qualified students, including the 2 minorities, made the cut. Why place the burden on the institution, in this case, the school, to lower their standards. Let’s place the burden where it belongs, on the individual. Minority or not.

Capaldi (1985), after conducting extensive research on affirmative action, made the following observations: Many of the blacks admitted to universities prior to affirmative action were admitted on the basis of a differential admissions policy. That is, the traditional or conventional standards were suspended in part. This was done for two reasons. First, in known individual cases, conventional standards did not give a true picture of potential. Second, a truly voluntary and experimental policy for increasing black participation in university and graduate school was already in existence. Ironically, forcing universities to justify their admissions policies may actually lead to a decrease of this. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that many of the blacks admitted prior to affirmative action did in fact meet conventional standards, some brilliantly. (p. 102)

So, I think we can conclude that most minority students can rest on their own academic merit and most universities are capable of policing the admittance policies of their school.

The second shortcoming associated with affirmative action is probably the most notable or at least, the one most verbalized by non-supporters and the popular media.

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From college admissions to government contracts, affirmative action legislation has been grossly abused to afford minorities primary consideration in admissions and hiring, resulting in blatant reverse discrimination. I have modified Richard T. Schaefers’ definition of “reverse discrimination”, and came up with this; Reverse discrimination is any action that can cause a better or “equally” qualified non-minority to be passed over for a minority in cases of economics or education. (3) There is no question that racism did exist in our society and still does today, but the solution is not reversing the discrimination. The Federal Courts seem to agree on this point. Here