Against Affirmative Action
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stated that no employer is required to “grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on account of any imbalance which may exist.” Affirmative action seeks to amend past injustice by reversing discussion and believes that fairness should come in the results and not in the process. It disregards our deeply held ideal of equal opportunity and instead aims at providing equal results.
Affirmative action is a regressive measure because it works to quell the effects of racism, rather than tackling racism head on. In other words, the government should shift its focus and provide African Americans with equal opportunity starting in pre-K. This includes abolishing the Common Core, establishing schools in underdeveloped segregated communities and allocating more money to extracurricular enrichment opportunities in minority schools. In evaluating education, the government must value not only the ends, but also the means; a strong K-12 experience is just as significant as a strong college experience.
Even more, affirmative action destroys the morale of the African American community, because it furthers the narrative that blacks are by birth disadvantaged and therefore have no way to succeed without government help. It encourages young African Americans to concentrate on the sufferings of the past, rather than on how to create a better future. Affirmative action urges young black students to blame their failures on an inherently racist society and to depend on affirmative action, a debilitating mentality that rests on the idea that our country is racist at its core. The government must realize that most of the impediments in the admissions process come not in the form of race, but in the form of socioeconomic status.
Affirmative action also fails to achieve its purpose because it whets the anger of white and Asian Americans and thus only highlights racial tensions. Young white males increasingly feel stigmatized by the policy and thus further the divide between the races. The social revolution that Donald Trump has created across the United States is, in fact, a representation of the growing disappointment of the blue-collar white man, a class of society that often gets left out of governmental debates about social justice.
This debate does not come down to whether race is a problem. Rather, it comes down to how we can best address it. In the end, affirmative action only promotes a debilitating and self-destructive mentality amongst African Americans, one that prevents change. At the same time, it alienates the white American and in doing so makes cooperation in solving the issue impossible. Instead of allowing disadvantaged African Americans to prosper from the very beginning (from their first step into kindergarten), affirmative action prioritizes the result and not the process.