Affirmative Action

I will be kind of short this round, but I will be more thorough in round 3. I. Reverse Discrimination"In nutshell affirmative action leads to: 1. Reverse discrimination or disparity', or favoritism. It's the unfair treatment of students or employees based on color. A white person can be over looked for a position simply because of the color of their skin, even though the white person is poverty stricken. Many minorities fall into the middle or rich class. Which means the poor white cannot get any extra considerations. 2. Affirmative action lowers the standard or accountability. If you can enter a university with a lower grade point average, why strive to raise it? The same holds true with employment, why do better when you can just get by? "[1]"American economist, social and political commentator Dr. Thomas Sowell identified some negative results of race-based affirmative action in his book, 'Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. ' Sowell writes that affirmative action policies encourage non-preferred groups to designate themselves as members of preferred groups (i. e. , primary beneficiaries of affirmative action) to take advantage of group preference policies; that they tend to benefit primarily the most fortunate among the preferred group (e. g. , upper and middle class blacks), often to the detriment of the least fortunate among the non-preferred groups (e. g. , poor whites or Asians); that they reduce the incentives of both the preferred and non-preferred to perform at their best — the former because doing so is unnecessary and the latter because it can prove futile — thereby resulting in net losses for society as a whole; and that they increase animosity toward preferred groups. " [2][7]Therefore, reverse discrimination is a big problem with affirmative action. II. Effects "Affirmative Action helps to weaken our countries productivity. Preferred groups have less incentive to perform well because it is not needed and non-preferred groups do not preform as well because they don’t feel it will help them. This hurts everyone especially in tough economic times such as these. "[3]"Stories of the bad effects of Affirmative Action abound. The philosopher Sidney Hook writes that "At one Ivy League university, representatives of the Regional HEW demanded an explanation of why there were no women or minority students in the Graduate Department of Religious Studies. They were told that a reading of knowledge of Hebrew and Greek was presupposed. Whereupon the representatives of HEW advised orally: 'Then end those old fashioned programs that require irrelevant languages. And start up programs on relevant things which minority group students can study without learning languages. '"[4][5]Affirmative action causes negative outcomes on the economy and on most people. III. Usefulness The impact on University of California student population was was to quickly raise the population of Asian students from about 30% in Proposition 209. Asians make up about 10% of the California population. With affirmative action in place, Asians were about 37% of the students population. With affirmative action ended, the Asian student population increased to about 44%. The numbers at the Berkeley campus are now approaching 50%. The mantle of affirmative action had been used to impose a quota on Asian students. [6]The affirmative action premise is that lack of opportunities due to past discrimination accounts for differences in the success rates. That's false. Yes, some groups lag behind the general population in outcomes, but that doesn't mean the reason is discrimination. It's about cultural values and tradition. Affirmative action is rather unnecessary and in fact, can be determinal to the rise of certain groups. Sources:[1]: . http://www.helium.com...[2]: . http://en.wikipedia.org...[3]: . http://www.kavmerica.com...[4]: Nicholas Capaldi. Out of Order: Affirmative Action and the Crisis of Doctrinaire Liberalism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1985). [5]: . http://www.csus.edu...[6]: . http://mjperry.blogspot.com...[7]: . http://en.wikipedia.org...