Affirmative Action: Is America Really Equal?
America has come to be known as a land of golden opportunity where anyone can come and work to become whatever they dream. No matter where a person starts out, they have the ability to make their own dreams come true through hard work. All people have the opportunity to strive to be the best they can be. Everyone has equal rights, such as the ability to buy land or vote for what they believe in, no matter to what race or gender they belong. The exception to this equality, Affirmative Action, is something that many people don't see as being unjust. In the 1960s, a plan called Affirmative Action was put into effect. The idea behind this proposal was for minorities and women to be given special consideration in employment, education, and contracting decisions (www.uri.edu/affirmative_action/aa.html). While Affirmative Action is meant to help a group of people, the actual practice of this law has been unjust to non-minorities. Affirmative action is a problem because it allows many schools to admit students because of their gender or race, not according to merit. This is extremely unfair to the people who don't fall within the group deemed minorities. For example, Julia McLaughlin, a white thirteen-year-old girl, applied t
Affirmative action is also a major problem in the work force. Employment law orders the promoting of a specific number of minorities and women into job positions they have previously been excluded from (http://www.uri.edu/affirmative_action/definitions.html). This means that work places that did not traditionally hire minorities, such as Kaiser Aluminum who, prior to 1974, only hired persons with prior craft experience as craft workers at its Gramercy, Louisiana plant were forced to hire minorities regardless of skill to create racial diversity (http://www.uri.edu/affirmative_action/main6.html) A negative effect of this was not always having the most qualified worker for the job. Another example of how Affirmative Action has been unfair to non-minorities deals with a white male trying to get a job at the fire department. Allen Langston took the Civil Service test in 1974 in order to become a fireman in Jefferson County, Alabama. About 1500 people took the test; half were white males, half women and men of a different race. He finished within the top three percent of those tested. He was never hired, though, and later found out it wasn't due to lack of skill or intelligence but the fact that they hired many minorities who scored lower to comply with Affirmative Action (Langston). Once again, diversity was attained, but at the possible price of less qualified workers doing jobs that may be done better by others. Perhaps this could make the quality of work not as good as it could possibly
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Approximate Word count = 1014
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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