During Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he said, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” With affirmative action, which is supposed to aid in helping to establish equality, this is the complete opposite of what happens today. Workers and students around the nation are judged based on their skin color, which sometimes ends up being the determining factor for whether or not they are accepted for a job or into a college (Ramanavarapu par. 3). Martin Luther King Jr. would be unhappy with the way our society has failed to recognize such racist problems. His message has been lost along the way because the main point from this quote is that judgment based the color of one’s skin is racist, which would therefore make affirmative action, based on this quote, racist.
One of the claims made by supporters of affirmative action is that affirmative action helps the disadvantaged when it comes to the college application process. This claim is a particularly racist comment in itself because it is making the assumption that anyone who is a minority is disadvantaged. In reality, as the Hoover Institution’s Thomas Sowell has observed, affirmative action primarily benefits the minorities from middle to upper class families. In addition to this, because admissions are a zero-sum game, affirmative action hurts poor white and Asian students who meet admission standards (Sacks par. 3). So if affirmative action was truly meant to help the disadvantaged, then it would not help make decisions based upon race because in today’s society being born a certain skin color does not put you in the same extreme disadvantageous state like what was seen during the civil rights movement when affirmative was necessary. Because of this, affirmative action should not be used to give a particular “disabled” skin color an institutionalized advantage.
Many people believe that affirmative action and other racial preference based systems simply give minorities a very small “plus,” which is truly not the case. For example, the average SAT disparity between Stanford’s African-American and white admittees reached 171 points in 1992, according to data compiled by Consortium on Financing Higher Education and cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve (par. 4). Another example would be Michigan State admissions process, which has a grading scale of 0 to 150. Minorities such as blacks, Hispanics, or American Indians score 20 points, while people who score perfect SAT results (and who are not minorities) are only given 12 points. This is absolutely ridiculous because any system that gives race a higher priority than a perfect SAT score is extremely flawed (Ramanavarapu par. 6). This is just one of the many examples where racial preference has had an unfair and statistically calculable effect on students who are applying to colleges within recent years.
Personally, I believe that there are times when people should be given an extra advantage over others, but it has nothing to do with race. I believe that wealth disparities (rather than racial difference) have a major role in how a student is brought up, how hard their life was, and how easy it was to obtain education. For example, someone that is very poor could possibly be very smart but could never afford a tutor in times of educational problems, they could not afford an expensive SAT class to help them boost their SAT score, or they possibly could not study as much because they were always too busy working part time jobs after school to help their family pay the bills. On the other side of the spectrum, there could be someone who was not as smart, but their family was very rich so they always had the best education, the best SAT classes, and the best everything else to help them educationally. Now when both of these people go to apply to a college with the same grades and scores on the SAT I think that an advantage should be given to the person who had to work twice as hard to get there. This scenario has nothing to do with race, but it obviously seems like a case where some type of advantage should go to the less fortunate person. I think this is what people in favor of affirmative action are assuming, that minorities have had a harder life and a harder time getting where they are, so they need some sort of advantage, but this is a racist assumption.
My personal upbringing is evidence of this. I am not a minority, but I am also lower on the social ladder in terms of how wealthy my family is. With a divorce in my family when I was 10 years old, my mom, my 7 year old brother, and my newborn baby sister could no longer afford to live in an apartment with our new income status, so we moved in with my grandmother. My mom had been out of the job market for the past 15 years so suddenly becoming a single parent who has to raise 3 kids on their own while still being able work a job to put food on the table was difficult. These were initially rough times, but we learned to cope. I helped raise my little sister along with my grandmother, which gave my mom more opportunities to find jobs. I did as much as I could to fill in where I was needed so that my mom was not running a family on her own. In the neighborhood we lived in, the majority of the minorities we lived around were wealthier than us, many were quite wealthy, and all of my minority friends were wealthier than my family. I just use this example to point out that not all minorities are poor and not all white people are rich. The skin colors range drastically within each level of the social ladder. Therefore any type of advantage that is given out should not be based on race, but on family income.
One issue that many people overlook, which is fueled by affirmative action, is the disconnection between those who affirmative action favors and those who are hurt by it. Take for example two friends who are applying to the same college. They seem almost identical in every aspect of their lives except for the fact that one of them is white and the other one is black. Now the black student is accepted for a completely legitimate reason (because the college loved how personal his essay was), while the white student was rejected because when it came down to the determining factor, his essay was not as good. The black student, although he seemed almost identical to his white friend, was obviously the better option for the college to pick, but psychologically the white friend has chalked up his black friend’s acceptance to affirmative action. Now there is jealousy and hatred that have come between the two friends all because of affirmative action even when it was not used. If it did not exist, then the white friend would have accepted that his black friend got in for no other reason than that he was a better candidate, but now their friendship is overly complicated and ruined. People will have a hard time finding an example where affirmative action causes people of different skin colors to become more bonded with each other because in most cases it creates nothing but more problem. This factor alone should be reason enough to have it completely abolished.
In conclusion, we all need to recognize that for equality to truly be an obtainable goal, Affirmative action must be stopped. When our society uses affirmative action as a means to offset discrimination, it means we have forgotten the initial reason why affirmative action was instated. It was supposed to be a temporary solution because civil rights laws were not working as well as they should have been, but none of this applies to the world we live in today. We no longer have problems with civil rights being violated and that alone should make us realize that we no longer need affirmative action. We have lost touch with the original message that people like Martin Luther King Jr. tried to spread, which said that in order to end racism, people need to make it a non-issue. Unfortunately, affirmative action does the exact opposite and until it is stopped, making race a non-issue will never be possible.
Works Cited
Brunner, Borgna. “Affirmative Action History.” Infoplease. 2007. Pearson Education. October 7, 2007 <http://www.infoplease.com/spot/affirmative1.html>.
Kepple, Benjamin. “The Fallacy of Affirmative Action.” University of Michigan webpage archives. 1995. University of Michigan. October 7, 2007
<http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1995/11-15-95/affirm.html>.
Ramanavarapu, Vijay. “Affirmative Action Aids Racism.” The Lantern. January 27, 2003. Ohio State University. October 7, 2007 <http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2003/01/27/Opinion/Affirmative.Action.Aids.Racism-352427.shtml>.
Sacks, David. “The Case Against Affirmative Action.” Stanford Online Magazine. 1996. Stanford University. October 7, 2007 <http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1996/sepoct/articles/against.html>.
