Afirmative action

There was a time when affirmative action WAS needed, but I think it should be done away with now. When it was created, its purpose was to stop discrimination. Today, it's not giving everyone a fair chance. In my opinion, I think it's sort of outdated.

I don't think they should do away with affirmative action. Affirmative action was not created to favor minorities and women above everyone else. It was created so people wouldn't discriminate against minority and women in schools, the work place, and other places. I feel if we take away affirmative action, some of the people who have had bad experiences with it will discriminate against the people affirmative action helped in schools, the work place, etc. That would be such a step backwards because women and minorities have been discriminated against for many decades prior to affirmative action.
However, I feel that if affirmative action is being used to favor one group above another it's being misused. Affirmative action was CAUSED because one group was being favored above others. It wasn't meant to put the shoe on the other foot. If anything, I think someone should fix the problems with affirmative action. Like President Clinton said,

"Let me make this clear: Affirmative action is good for America... Let's mend, not end it... When affirmative action is done right, it is flexible, it is fair, and it works." (http://www.americanreview.us/affirm1.htm)

The biggest argument I hear about is colleges and jobs using affirmative action to favor minorities and women above everyone else. I feel that they should take off the “choose your ethnicity” option on all applications for everything. This way everything is done on merit. However, the “choose your gender” section is mandatory for schools because of dorm situations. Other than that, it should probably be done away with too. By doing this people will be picked on merit and not by ethnicity or gender. (But employers and schools might, all of a sudden, start interviewing all their applicants just so they can continue with this)
There are things in this country that are now considered the norm and just a natural part of life in this country. However, some of those very things are only being held up by a law or a document. If they were to be taken away our country would face major problems. For example, women’s voting rights are being held up by the 19th amendment. If someone were to take that away, women would have a hard time voting. But, as I said earlier, affirmative action should not be done away with. It should be fixed.

-The One And Only-

This is probably a good time to push forward a severely shortened version of one of my favorite rants.
Basically, I believe that affirmative action is still needed, simply because of two factors that make up racism today, which have to do with heritage and numbers. The way I see it, most racially unfair laws have been terminated, at least the blatant ones. But that still doesn't help where it left the situation. If you took a black man and a white man, both approximately equal in speed and stature and put them in a race, you'd assume they'd finish fairly near each other. But if, during the first half of the race, there was an outside force impeding the guy, say, the crowd throwing rocks as big as his head at him, he'd of course slow down. But halfway through the race, officials come out and speak on the behalf of the black guy and say, oh, this isn't right, and get the crowd to stop. Would you then expect the black guy to instantly recover and finish just where he would have finished before? Of course not. African-Americans have been oppressed, maligned, mistreated, and yes, thrown rocks at for hundreds of years now, and it just truly stopped around thirty or forty years ago. And every once in a while some idiot in the crowd sneaks another one in, just because. How do you expect the race to suddenly be able to keep pace with people who have been the favorite to win ever since the race started? Let's take a more 'real to life' example, and look at two applicants for a college scholarship, another black guy and a white guy. One is an average middle class white citizen, and his family has been middle class for gnerations. He has a little bit of money behind him, family to support him, and is pretty average in those respects. Look at the black guy. If yopu think about it, the maximum amount of affluence almost any black family could have achieved is about forty years ago, basically one generation. This is if his family had somehow struggled through all the problems African-Americans had and still have. Then, the likelihood that the rest of his family also struggled through and made it to midde class? Aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins? Very, very slim chance. It just doesn't happen that often.
That covers my first point, and leads into my second: numbers. Simply put, the reason minorities need preferential treatment in some cases is simply one of numbers. One last example: if you have twenty applicants, all of similiar academic and social standing, demographics say oonly one of them is black. Not because of the population, but because of the percentage of minorities who actually apply to colleg. Another may be Hispanic, and another may be Chinese. How likely is it that one of them is picked out of the twenty? Even considering that, considering the likelihood of their backgrounds being less than desireabe, they probably did more work than the others, it just isn't going to happen.
Well there's my rant. Wasn't so brief after all, now was it?