The following video is an excerpt from an interview with Thomas Sowell, a Havard graduate who has, throughout the decades, studied and commented on the effects of different actions taken by the government, especially those of feminism, affirmative action and racialism.
The rest of this post is a paper that I wrote in my freshman English class at Southern Virginia University. I don't remember what grade I got on it, but I do feel that it brings up some excellent points. Sowell discusses several of these points in the video, though he talks mostly about how affirmative actions affects the workplace. The focus of my paper was that of college admission and scholarships.
http://youtu.be/JENCxjbARFM
A Negated Affirmative
by Clark Lindsey
Duct tape offers a temporary, superficial and sometimes damaging solution for holding things together. Likewise, affirmative action as applied in the college application process not only sidesteps the underlying issue of equal opportunity, it injures society on a deeper level through a cruel irony; this attempt to defend the rights of minorities has in a twisted, yet predictable way become the driving force of reverse discrimination by diminishing the value of hard work through unwarranted handouts.
Affirmative action is defined as action taken to prevent discrimination (be it against race, gender, religion, etc). At the time of the issue of Executive Order 10925, in which affirmative action is first defined and introduced, the circumstances were rather dire for the minority population, with Jim Crow laws and prejudice saturating the system. This order promised minorities better job security, better prospects of being admitted to state-funded colleges, and more superior career possibilities than previously available. But a hidden, then subtle issue arose: how far should we assist the minorities before it has become too much?
Garret Hardin sheds a little light on the subject in his “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”. He submits a dilemma in which there are fifty people in a lifeboat with room for sixty total and one hundred more people tread the water around the boat. His query follows as thus: “[W]hich 10 do we let in?” (359) Naturally [according to current attitudes towards affirmative action], the minorities deserve our attention and undying devotion, above love of self and the good of society. As today’s connotation of affirmative action asserts, the part-black, part-Native American woman should be among the first admitted, the others being the Atheist homosexual and the illegal immigrant, regardless of the collective importance of their well being. Furthermore, the children of any Congressmen, former or present should be high in consideration because of the status of their parent. Basically, whether or not they have a family, a job, or prior demonstration of academic and/or societal propensities merits little to no significance in comparison to their other, uncontrollable factors like parental status in society, race or gender. Faulty logic clearly grounds that conclusion.
Admission to higher education deserves no more interchangeability between rights and privileges as the lifeboat quandary. Why should minority students be given a leg up over the stereotypical white male unless they have exhibited a finer proclivity in scholastic abilities? Now, before I delve further into this subject, the reader should understand that I represent what I imagine to be one of the smallest minority groups in existence: Cherokee blood runs through my veins, the Mormon religion characterizes my morals, and my parents adopted me from birth. Yet no monies from schools or random institutions, let alone the government pay for my college education based on any of these aspects because I don’t find it ethically correct to accept such funds. I worked long hours at Wal-mart and the local pool to pay for my college, and I find such subsidies non-compliant with affirmative action, seeing as they discriminate recipients based on the very facets that affirmative action forbids. I mention this because hypocrisy doesn’t bode well in academia, and hard work compensates for shortcomings in faculty.
The fact that we have the works of Frederick Douglass proves the latter statement. He worked diligently to achieve his goals, and despite dismal circumstances, he succeeded. He was enslaved and sold as live wares for ill-earned gain, yet he reads and writes. Listen to the heartlessness demonstrated by his master and eventually his mistress:
I lived in Master Hugh’s family about seven years. During this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. My mistress, who had kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct, but had set her face against my being instructed by anyone else. It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of action immediately. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute. (Douglass)
Now, I do not contend that slavery rests among even the remotest of viable methods for teaching the value of being proactive, but it induced his “various stratagems” which exemplify hard work and resolve. He worked in a “ship-yard”, utilizing the other boys to learn how to read by challenging their knowledge, contesting that he knew how to read and write better than they, understanding full well that the four letters he had picked up from the labeled boards he worked with didn’t even hold a candle to the skills possessed by those he confronted. This effort epitomizes how people should move up in society; networking logically yields positive results, and humans have a tendency to work harder in adversity.
For example, my peoples, the Mormons and the Cherokee, by this nation alone were murdered and driven from their homes because they were different and in the way. Both established new homes, built new lives and moved on, making their plight a part of their tale and vigor—like Douglass, except on a grander scale. Myself, I am adopted, and I jokingly say that my parents picked me off of the clearance rack, and got a handful to deal with, but I still endeavored to become self-sustaining. On a much more serious note, let us not forget the bombings of Hiroshima and the legitimately hellish environment that ensued. Counter-intuitively, “[e]ven while the smoke still rose from the wasteland of total destruction, human goodwill began to go into action as people made their first moves toward recovery and restoration” (289). People push through and become stronger individuals after tribulation, and many different cultures have developed through hardship; therefore, by eliminating financial hardship because of culture you risk redefining the culture as well as encouraging slothfulness. Affirmative actors, as I call those who hypocritically purport to uphold Executive Order 10925, may not realize that giving true handouts to members of minority groups supports laziness—it removes obstacles, and therefore determination and perseverance. The anecdote about giving a man a fish rather than teaching how to fish illustrates my point nicely because of the implication that if we simply give someone in need money to get to college, they have missed the lesson of how to provide for themselves. They will not only expect more in the future, they will become dependent on their supply of fish, and complain loudly and obnoxiously upon its eradication.
To conclude, I have always been bamboozled by the legality of questions on college applications that ask for race, nationality, and religion. It makes sense to gather information on gender for housing and social reasons under the names of dating and marriage, but if the others are denied permission to exist in selective policies, why can admissions officials ask these statistics prior to admission? This information should be gathered ad hoc only.
Construe with me an experiment, undertaken by colleges across the nation, in which the same applicants as years previous are reevaluated, minus the controversial information aforementioned. Should one demographic dominate the acceptance rates, the others can then be offered extra help before admittance to college, meaning that they are denied initially, so that the elite of the academic field can compete with the other top scholars and advance society at a faster rate. “It’s ludicrous to say that a student who has not been given the advanced preparation… should expect to be on a ‘level playing field’ and to expect them to do as well as someone who has had the training and support” (qtd. in Dennis).
Apart from the moral reasons for equality, the issue of fairness surfaces as well. Equality is not a direct synonym of fairness or logic, though they often coincide. The government should not make blanket statements concerning fairness because they can only be judged on a case-by-case basis. The title of this essay refers to how the government has nullified its own law by allowing affirmative action to transform into the mishmash it is today. In context, equality means that students should be admitted on both academic and personal merit alone, not on any factor out of their control.
Works Cited:
Dennis, Raoul. “Supreme Court Decision Turning Down Affirmative Action Case Only a Small Victory.” New York Amsterdam News 92.23(2001): 42. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. 12 Oct. 2011.
Doulgass, Frederick. “Learning to Read.” Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. 2nd Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2010. 46-50. Print
Hardin, Garret. “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. 2nd Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2010. 357-67. Print
Oe, Kenzaburo. “The Unsurrendered People.” Reading the World: Ideas That Matter. 2nd Ed. Michael Austin. New York: Norton, 2010. 288-91. Print"
