Get Rid of Affirmative Action

Sorry I have taken such a long time to respond, I have a lot of exams this week so I'm very busy. In regards to your two comments below all of your links. The first is showing that while you the government put these policies to ensure race and gender do not play a role in hiring, they are doing the exact opposites and making offices making sure that women and minorities are included. This is so full of hypocrisy that its not even funny. The second point you made is also a tad slanted. I'm not inferring that minorities cant swim, I was a lifeguard with one. My problem was that if you read the article, is that the city is willing to get rid of trained white life-guards who know what they're doing to hire minorities who may not even know how to swim, but they'll train them up to it anyway. Is it fair that they are going to get rid of already trained life-guards who know the job just to include minorities who don't, even going as far to spend extra money on them to train them and certify them. I wish they did that for me the certification isn't cheap. If this seems fair to you I don't know what to say. "Over the past quarter of a century, Stanford has been discriminating in favor of racial minorities in admissions, hiring, tenure, contracting and financial aid. But only recently has the University been forced to rethink these policies in the face of an emerging public debate over affirmative action are beginning to see why. Originally conceived as a means to redress discrimination, racial preferences have instead promoted it. And rather than fostering harmony and integration, preferences have divided the campus. In no other area of public life is there a greater disparity between the rhetoric of preferences and the reality take, for instance, the claim that racial preferences help the "disadvantaged." In reality, as the Hoover Institution's Thomas Sowell has observed, preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. At the same time, because admissions are a zero-sum game, preferences hurt poor whites and even many Asians (who meet admissions standards in disproportionate numbers). If preferences were truly meant to remedy disadvantage, they would be given on the basis of disadvantage, not on the basis of race."(http://alumni.stanford.edu...) This is a great article that shows many flaws of Affirmative action. Again Ill put this here because it shows that the government obviously does take race into consideration. "The Obama Administration will make history by hiring the government"s first "Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity" to mastermind a multi-million-dollar effort that boosts the number of minorities in biomedical research and slashes discrimination in the federal grant process. The $500 million initiative to racially diversify medical research was launched last year after a government-sanctioned study uncovered a "disturbing and disheartening" lack of racial diversity in the field"To right the wrong the NIH created a $500 million plan to support minority students with scholarships, research experiences and even graduate loan repayment. The agency is also creating a new committee that makes "diversity a core consideration of NIH governance" and ensures fairness in the peer review system that erases "unconscious bias related to disparities in research awards." The plan also implements "implicit bias and diversity awareness training.". (http://www.judicialwatch.org......) All of these examples show that Affirmative Action is wrong and horribly outdated. perhaps the government wanted it to be something else when it was passed, as you have shown me with your definitions. But whatever it is now, it is a complete sham. Race and gender are included in government jobs. If they weren't you wouldn't need to fill out the race/gender part of the application. By even inferring these programs are color-blind to race is crazy. The proof is all around us in how it affects us and influences getting jobs, scholarships, and getting into school. A very recent development was the court case at the university of Michigan. "The U.S. Supreme Court takes up the issue of affirmative action again Tuesday, but this time the question is not whether race may be considered as a factor in college admissions. Instead, this case tests whether voters can ban affirmative action programs through a referendum.In 2003, the high court upheld the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action policy. The next day, opponents of affirmative action launched a referendum campaign to bar such programs, and in 2006, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative amending the state constitution to ban affirmative action programs in higher education.Michigan's state colleges and universities promptly abandoned any use of race or ethnicity to promote diversity, and minority enrollment plummeted. In 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that the referendum itself was discriminatory, and the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to decide the issue." (http://www.npr.org...) Now here we see what happens when race and ethnicity don't play a role, and what a surprise, Minority enrollment went down. Why did it go down, because race no longer played a role so if your a minority you don't get special treatment. If you continue reading the article and follow the link, you'll see that minorities are challenging the decision of Michigan calling it unfair treatment, but you saw and they did they took race out of the equation. That's not unfair that IS fair. And since the minority enrollment went down they are fighting to bring racial preferences back, now that sounds pretty silly to me, especially to the definitions you showed me. However the best part is it seems as if the Supreme Court will uphold the Universities decision and then allow state bans on racial programs based on state votes. If our Supreme Court sees something wrong with these programs, there obviously is something wrong. I almost missed the argument sorry for your wait, I thank Con for taking the up the debate and enjoyed the conversation.