Affirmative action policies should be justified in the US

Thanks for your opening arguments. As a reminder, since you are new to the site, you should cite your sources with links/citations at the end of your argument. This allows us to check the validity of the sources and what you have said. If you want to post your sources in the next round, that'd be appreciated. I will begin my arguments with an example. Let's imagine I am starting a bake shop and I need 100 employees to start my business off the right way. It should be known that I am in a city with an affirmative action ordinance which says that at least 15% of employees should be from diverse backgrounds. I send out an ad in the paper looking for people that are qualified for this job. I receive 200 applications, and I sort them into two groups; desirable and undesirable, both of which have 100 people in (desirable and undesirable are based on applications, not race, they are just categorised into race when looking if I am meeting affirmative action guidelines). The numbers for each are as follows: Desirable: 94 white 4 black 2 latino (1:1 male to female ratio) Undesirable: 89 white 5 black 6 latino (1:1 male to female ratio) This presents a real problem. If I hire all of the people in the desirable category, I am breaking the ordinance about affirmative action and I am not meeting diverse guidelines. But these are the people that are qualified and that I deem good enough to be in my place of work... I have to turn away 9 completely qualified white people, simply based on the fact that they are white - and I have to go through the unqualified applicants and hire 9 unqualified minorities simply based on the fact that they are minorities.My opponent says that they are arguing that affirmative action is great, because they are basing their "first argument ... on the equality from affirmative action". I ask you, reader: is turning away someone based on race, not merit, something that we should encourage in the workplace? The very thing that affirmative action is meant to get rid of - racial discrimination - is exactly what it is creating. Not only this, either: affirmative action leads to less personal accountability.I ask the reader, if a black student can get admitted into an Ivy League school with a low GPA, what incentive would they have to get a 4.0? They can get into an Ivy League school with a mediocre SAT and ACT score, why would they study to improve their scores to a level that is truly noteworthy?What this leads to is a disconnect from work and reward in the real life, and ultimately if you are rewarded immensely for work on a mediocre level, then you are not as likely to truly succeed in the workplace since you are used to having your hand held and not having to work for yourself for anything that you have acheived in life. This is just a side effect of favoring a low-scoring minority to a high-scoring majority just based on the fact that someone is part of the majority - not because they are high scoring.My opponent claims "African American women earned 63 cents to dollar for the jobs that men do", which sounds terrible: but if we think about the implications of that we can deduce that it simply isn't true. If employers can get away with paying black women just 63 cents to the dollar of a man, then why aren't there corporations in the US simply employing black women? The profit margain would increase substantially, and workplaces are based around profit! As Christina Hoff Sommers explains [1], the real reason that women are seen to make less money than men is because there are different life goals and hours worked for the sexes - it isn't based around a deep-rooted patriarchy. We can take this idea and apply it to black women as well - there is no deep-rooted discrimination against black women based simply on their sex or race.Next, my opponent claims that affirmative actions are increasing greater oppurtunities to people - and this is true. However, it doesn't look at the big picture, which actually shows that it harms exactly as much as it helps. It harms white people as much as it benefits those of different races - overall it is a net neutral. Because the harm is such as present as the benefit that is made, and they are exactly the same weighted, we can say that this entire point holds no weight at all. We can't consider an argument that literally harms as much as it benefits - but the argument only looks at the benefits as a deceitful way to avoid the real issues.[1].