Affirmative Action

Alright, now to move on to my argument. Let's say that you have twenty situations across America one day where an employer has to decide between hiring a black guy and hiring a white guy, with both of them having equal qualifications. Without affirmative action, the employer would flip a coin. Heads, the white guy gets the job. Tails, the black guy gets the job. With affirmative action, the employer always hires the black guy. So, this results in ten black guys gaining jobs that they wouldn't ordinarily have. This also results in ten white guys losing jobs that they would ordinarily have. Now, if each one of the white guys was told that he lost his job because of affirmative action, they would suddenly feel resentment towards affirmative action, the black guy, all black guys, and government. This is bad. However, if you use coin flips, the white guy knows that he lost fair and square, especially if the employer flipped the coin in front of the two potential employees. That's my support for my contentions. Now, you claim that there would be segregation and racial discrimination that would play against the black guy. So, you say we should just reverse this discrimination. I say that reversing discrimination is not fighting discrimination. We should all flip coins. "While you might say that if affirmative action was not in place, majority or non-preferred groups (such as whites) would be given more jobs, this is obviously not due to some kind of inherent qualification or intellectual excellence within members of the white population." So, if affirmative action was in place, minority or preferred groups (such as blacks) would be given more jobs; this is obviously not due to some kind of inherent qualification or intellectual excellence within members of the black population. There. Your quote is applied equally against itself. We should all flip coins. "Due decades of financial and social inequality, minorities have been offered less opportunities, and have naturally been retarded in their development as a group in society. For example, the black population of American has higher unemployment and less education than the white population. This is not because they are 'lazier' or more 'inefficient' than whites, but because they've been deprived of economic and educational rights in society to such an extent that their community has been held back socially, despite the fact they are legal equals of whites." However, in this case, both the white man and the black man are supposedly equally qualified. In that case, what if the white guy came from a family of Irish immigrants who fled the Great Irish Famine (http://en.wikipedia.org...) and struggled to get a living? What if the black guy is really a mulatto who came from a fairly wealthy family? The only blacks that benefit from affirmative action are the ones who lived in the North, where slavery and segregation ended sooner (http://en.wikipedia.org...). Furthermore, if a black guy and a white guy both have equal qualifications for a job, why should family history matter? The black guy has to have had a family that was more successful than the average black family, or the white guy has to have had a family that was less successful than the average white family. Family history should play no part in employment. What should matter is what the family history did to your qualifications. Obviously, the family histories had the same effect, if they're equally qualified, so why favor the black guy? "Affirmative action is an method to reverse this social inequality and balance the economic and educational gap between racial and/or other social groups." You see, if every black man were the average black man, and every white man were the average white man, then the white man would always be more qualified than the black man. Therefore, only the upper blacks compete with the average whites for jobs. The upper blacks are the ones who weren't hit strongly by racial segregation in the past, and managed to succeed anyway, so why should their being black matter? Also, only the lower whites compete with the average blacks. They may have been born out in the country, working a small farm, where they didn't adapt well to industrialization and didn't do too well since then. The two groups still apparently have identical family histories as far as affirmative action should be concerned, because they both ended up in the same economic bracket. Why should the black group be benefited over the white group? There is no correct answer. "Affirmative action is an method to reverse this social inequality and balance the economic and educational gap between racial and/or other social groups." Why does it really matter that there is an economic/educational gap among different races? If a white man and a black man are of equal qualification for a job, they presumably had family histories with similar effects on these qualifications. Just because more blacks had these disadvantageous family histories, doesn't mean we should assume that all whites are better off than blacks, and all blacks are worse off than whites. There are some black families and some white families in the same economic bracket. It isn't necessarily because the black family rose up from poverty and the white family fell down from elitism. It probably is that the black family did fairly well, and the white family did fairly well. The point is, two guys whose family histories both gave them the same qualifications should be equal, regardless of race. Why does race even matter? Flip a coin. Or think of some other tiebreaker that determines who's more qualified, like a competition to see who can stack cans the fastest. Race isn't important. Affirmative action thinks that it is. But as long as they're equally qualified, it isn't. Thus, affirmative action is wrong. Thus, vote CON. Thank you for reading.