Un-racist Racism | Teen Ink

Un-racist Racism

January 12, 2010
By shinyhippo BRONZE, Houston, Texas
shinyhippo BRONZE, Houston, Texas
4 articles 0 photos 1 comment

Affirmative action is a bad policy because it does not fairly decide matters based on merit but on how you look and where you are from. Affirmative action is a policy or a program that seeks to not show discrimination through active measures of favoritism to ensure equal opportunity through extra consideration for schools and other fields. This policy helps give people of different cultures or people living in rural areas the advantage by giving “points” to them to help their overall admissions score. This trend in many colleges around the nation is not rewarding the personal achievements of the applicants. Colleges are using affirmative action to admit minorities that would not otherwise be able to get into college on their own and the action is increasing racism in people who are enraged that they are being unfairly picked over.

Would you rather accept someone that tried harder in school and got better grades and a student who had extra curricular activities and was a good person or someone lesser than that? It is an obvious choice on who deserves the opportunity to go to the school, but just because he might be white, he would not receive the advantage of affirmative action so the other student who could be a minority would most likely be accepted. For me this shows that schools would rather take someone less qualified and less intelligent over someone who is more deserving just because of what country their heritage originated from or where they live. This is an unfair decision that just results in the school having a diverse student population and nothing else.

Another problem with affirmative action is that racism can be started because of this thinking that people need help to get into schools. It makes people assume that minorities get into schools only because of affirmative action. In addition, some minorities do not like being given an unfair advantage because they feel that they are perfectly qualified to make it themselves without this undeserved boost. The minorities resent being thought of as needing help to be successful.

The opposing side would argue that they are not being racist and are being open to all cultures but this being a comment showing Tokenism that the schools say they are not racist at all by letting minorities in. In reality, affirmative action is being racist to whites and oriental people who are left behind. People who defend affirmative action will use this hasty generalization of East St. Louis and how it is in bad condition so every single minority must live in those conditions.

The issue of affirmative action is a defective way to end racism and to show diversity. The opposing statements all have qualities that show fallacies and they don’t ever look at the consequences by leaving out the ones who aren’t given that advantage. No one should be allowed to use this in part for any admission due to its underlying racism and the unfairness taking away what people have worked for. Affirmative action has its’ hidden faults because whenever you give someone a head start there is always a person who is already behind.



Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.