The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

The Online Edition of the Annandale High School Newspaper.

The A-Blast

Affirmative Action is racist

America is the land of the free. We are a nation comprised of cultures that come from every corner of the earth. We are people who believe that every man is created equal, and therefore should be treated and judged as such. At least, that’s what they say.

The United States is a land that has always had a sensitive relationship with racial tension and racism. With so many diverse groups of people and mixes of cultures all living together, there is bound to be dissagreement.

Affirmative Action is the policy that takes gender, race or ethnicity into account in an attempt to help create equal opportunities among different races. Affirmative Action has long been one of the more heated debates in politics. The program helps people of races or ethnicities that were the victims of past oppression.

In America’s past, Affirmative Action was useful and effective in helping to eliminate discrimination in schools and places of work. It allowed for minorities such as Native Americans and African-Americans, who were generally the victims of prejudice, to be able to have equal opportunities over the then dominant white majority.

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However, I believe that Affirmative Action has now run its course. Inexplicably, sometimes good things turn into bad ones and that is the stance I take on affirmative action now. It has morphed from a beneficial program that helped to ensure diversity in workplaces and places of education, into something prejudice in itself. It has created a the idea that says it is ok to discriminate again based on gender and race.

This fact is shown to us subtly, every time we have to fill out our ethnicity and gender on a standardized test. The section in which they ask the student to fill out whether he or she is an African American, Asian American, American Indian, Hispanic or White. Choosing anything but that last option puts you higher in the barrel of applicants hoping to get into college.

I don’t believe in the term, “reverse racism” (racism towards white people) which is a phrase coined by opponents to affirmative action, but rather just racism.

Imagine this just for a moment; an African American student has gained a 3.5 GPA over the course of his high school career, and so has his best friend who is a Caucasian student. Both were involved in after school sports and honor societies. The two friends have applied to the same college and apart from their name difference there is very little that sets either one out in front of the other for a college acceptance. However there is one thing and it is that little section where they ask you for your ethnicity; it is here where it affirmative action comes into play.

The African American student would likely get the college acceptance over his Caucasian counterpart, solely because of the fact that he is an African American. If that isn’t racist, then I don’t know what is.

In a nation where we now have a biracial president, this policy of affirmative action cannot be allowed to continue.

The issue here at AHS is split, with some believing affirmative action creates and unfair advantage and with others believing that it is still necessary in order to avoid racism towards minorities.

Senior Seth Ellingson disagrees with affirmative action and says “it gives people who are not white better opportunities than a white person regardless of whether or not the white person has the same qualifications. That is unfair.”

It is blatantly prejudice to award someone with a job or an acceptance to a college due to their ethnicity, and I believe that publicly funded organizations (organizations that currently must abide by affirmative action), or at the very least public colleges, should not have any knowledge of an applicant’s race or gender.

I propose that we completely remove the section about ethnicity from all of our standardized tests in order to ensure equality. Colleges and workplaces should be colorblind.

Equality does not work simply in one way because equal means fair, and the affirmative action policies in place now unfairly give an advantage to students who are minorities simply because they are not white. We should be building a country of young adults who believe in awarding people based on merit, solely off of accomplishments and not off of race or gender or any other factor that has nothing to do with ones ability to learn and succeed.

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Affirmative Action is racist