Affirmative Action

Definitions:"Affirmative Action refers to equal opportunity employment measures that Federal contractors and subcontractors are legally required to adopt. These measures are intended to prevent discrimination against employees or applicants for employment on the basis of "color, religion, sex, or national origin". Examples of affirmative action offered by the United States Department of Labor include outreach campaigns, targeted recruitment, employee and management development, and employee support programs"[1]"A minority group is a sociological category within a demographic. Rather than a relational "social group", as the term would indicate, the term refers to a category that is differentiated and defined by the social majority, that is, those who hold the majority of positions of social power in a society. The differentiation can be based on one or more observable human characteristics, including, for example, ethnicity, race, gender, wealth, health or sexual orientation."[2]The first thing one must understand when looking at affirmative action is understanding why many feel it necessary to begin with. The unfortunate reality is that racism still very much exists in our society. In the study "Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" it was found that applicants with white sounding names were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than people African-American sounding names despite having similar resumes. [3] A pretty similar study was also done in New York City, and again, "black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a call back or job offer. In fact, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than white applicants just released from prison."[4] The idea isn't that people are trying to be racist or are even aware of their racism, it's simply in their subconscious. "Lakisha" is still a name many white people would expect to see in an SNL sketch. There are many negative stereotypes about minorities that people like to joke about, and for many white people who haven't lived in the most diverse towns or cities, that's where they are getting their education on other people's cultures.The second thing that needs to be understood is how Affirmative Action is supposed to work. My opponent brought up the case of Hopwood v. Texas. It would be important to note that the ruling did not find anything wrong with the school implementing Affirmative Action, but how the school was implementing it: "The court reasoned that although affording a minority applicant a racial preference, or "'plus' factor,"29 would be constitutionally permissible, the failure of the law school's admissions process to "afford each individual applicant a comparison with the entire pool of applicants" unnecessarily and impermissibly offended equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."[5] I would say that the case of Hopwood v. Texas isn't so much an argument against Affirmative Action but more of a case against specific ways of implementing Affirmative Action. And I would certainly agree that there are wrong ways to enforce it. But it is up to the individual schools and employers how they want to implement it, there is no set way. Some schools might set-up outreach groups to try to reach and gain interest from kids of color to apply to their school. That doesn't mean every black student who applies will be accepted, but it helps the school have more of a diverse group of applicants to pick from.We should also look at what schools look at when they're interviewing students. It's not just scores and numbers. Personality, background, whether or not they had family attend the school, etc. also play a role in whether or not they'll be accepted. You could be a high-scoring straight A student but still wouldn't necessarily be as desirable as a student who may not of had as high a GPA as you, but had family members who had previously attended the school. Affirmative Action is not giving unfair advantage to a specific groups of people, it is simply leveling the playing field in society that is not always fair to specific groups of people. We can't be colorblind when addressing these problems because we do not live in a colorblind society. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org...[2]http://en.wikipedia.org...[3]http://www.chicagobooth.edu...[4]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...[5]http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu...