Affirmative Action

(Con:) "It cannot be morally argued that a group of humans should be given an unjust advantage over another." (Con:) It would perhaps be proper for me to give my definition of affirmative action. It is as follows: An action/policy that favors a particular group, some of which have been discriminated against in the past or present. --------- KEEPING DOWN POVERTY- KEEPING DOWN CRIME- KEEPING DOWN DRUG SELLS/USE- The illegal drug trade is feeding most of the violence that is happening on the streets of Baltimore and on the streets of other cities that face the same problem. There are not a lot of positive outcomes once a person enters the drug game. Typically it means prison, which is another of the main things that drives poverty. Since it is tough to get a job coming from poverty, coming out of prison, it is almost impossible, and so to survive the person returns to selling drugs. Rinse, wash and repeat. I do not think a good response is to throw more police at the situation. We have tried that in the past. In 1994, President Bill Clinton added 100,000 additional police officers to the streets of the U.S. as part of the "1994 Omnibus Crime Bill". What actually manifested was the destruction of the relationship between police and the communities. From the perspective of some guy who can not get a job, who feels forced into drugs and crime, the police are just evil oppressors, and you are just someone with no hope or options trying to survive. To the police, the guy is nothing more than a dangerous, drug induced, violent animal who is high, unpredictable and dangerous. In this situation, the cops see the guy and many others like him as a target to prevent crime. To the guy and many others like him, crime is the only choice to survive. Thus, you have an unendable cycle. Crime vs cops and cops vs crime in an endless loop that never resolves or even can resolve. If you can not get a job, you die or you steal, or you sell drugs. If you are a cop and someone steals or does drugs, you hunt them down. Sadly, this type of cycle can also lead to becoming a part of a gang to survive. There are an estimated 33,000 gangs with 1.4 million members in the United States. What is really needed to stop the cycle? Well it's complicated, but here are some highlight points I put together. EDUCATION & JOB OPPORTUNITIES begats KEEPING DOWN POVERTY begats KEEPING DOWN CRIME- begats KEEPING DOWN DRUG SELLS/USE equals SAFER, BETTER, & MORE ASSIMILATED/UNIFIED/HAPPIER SOCIETY ---------- Celia Neustadt, the Executive Director of Inner Harbor Project in Baltimore is quoted as saying: "What I see in the Inner Harbor and what was being expressed is the feeling of being discriminated, excluded from mainstream society and retaliating in the only way they know how.” "These kids don’t have anything to lose. They are not engaged academically; they are not engaged in traditional social structures,” she said. “They have created their own independent structures to support the things they care about, but they don’t have anything to lose in our current mainstream society because we haven’t created space for them." Some reasonable forms of Affirmative Action can create this space for blacks who need a hand up to move into a productive position in society. ----- SUPREME COURT- In 2013, the Supreme Court avoided a major ruling in an affirmative action case involving a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas's Austin campus. The student, Abigail Fisher, argued that she was denied admission because of the school's affirmative action admissions policy. But the Supreme Court, in a 7-1 ruling, did not uphold or strike down the policy, and returned the case back to a lower court for a deeper review. The Supreme Court's official statement stated schools could: "include race as a factor for admissions after determining no other 'race-neutral alternatives' would achieve the benefits of diversity." As controversy has risen in recent times to the Constitutionality and ethical position of very broad Affirmative Action use, the Supreme Court has pulled the action more into the realm of what is called "Poverty Preference Admissions", which is labeled by many as "The New Affirmative Action". This allows for a non-race-based preference in admissions for a certain amount of poor students. FINAL THOUGHTS- It is not like the average, every day student applying to college is going to be affected by this in a substantial way. At public institutions, if you look at what their student bodies actually look like, they are disproportionately populated with students from advantaged backgrounds. Certain forms of Affirmative Action simply gives some students a chance who might not otherwise get or have a chance. In reality, blacks, with or without Affirmative Action, only make up a small percentage of college students at most universities. (14% in 2013 while being 13% of the overall population of the U.S.) If 23% of college students were black, that would show Affirmative Action working dispraportionately, but this is not the case, per those statistics. https://www.marketingcharts.com... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... ---------- REFERENCES- http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... https://en.m.wikipedia.org... http://www.businessinsider.com... https://www.usnews.com... https://www.forbes.com... http://hechingerreport.org...