Affirmative Action :: essays research papers

In its tumultuous, nearly 40-year history, affirmative action has been both praised and pilloried as an answer to racial inequality. The polity was introduced in 1965 by President Johnson as a method of redressing discrimination that had persisted in spite of civil rights laws and constitutional guarantees. "This is the next and more than profound layer of the battle for civil rights," Johnson asserted. "We seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a circumstance and as a result."Focusing in finicky on education and jobs, affirmative action policies required that active measures be taken to ensure that blacks and former(a) minorities enjoyed the same opportunities for promotions, salary increases, career advancement, school admissions, scholarships, and financial aid that had been the nearly exclusive province of whites. From the let onset, affirmative action was envisioned as a improvised remedy that would end once there was a "level playing field" for all Americans.By the late 70s, however, flaws in the policy began to show up amid its good intentions. Reverse discrimination became an issue, epitomized by the famous Bakke case in 1978. Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a course of instruction by a medical school that had accepted less qualified minority applicantsthe school had a separate admissions policy for minorities and reserved 16 out of 100 places for minority students. The Supreme Court outlawed inflexible quota systems in affirmative action programs, which in this case had unfairly discriminated against a white applicant. In the same ruling, however, the Court upheld the legality of affirmative action per se.Fueled by "angry white men," a backlash against affirmative action began to mount. To conservatives, the system was a zero-sum game that opened the door for jobs, promotions, or education to minorities while it shut the door on whites. In a country that prized t he values of self-reliance and draw oneself up by ones bootstraps, conservatives resented the idea that some unqualified minorities were getting a free ride on the American system. "Preferential treatment" and "quotas" became expressions of contempt. Even more contentious was the accusation that some minorities enjoyed playing the role of professional victim. Why could some minorities who had also experienced terrible adversity and racismJews and Asians, in particularmanage to make the American way work for them without government handouts?Liberals countered that "the land of opportunity" was a very different place for the European immigrants who landed on its shores than it was for those who arrived in the chains of slavery.