Should Affirmative Action Be Completely Banned?

Is it reverse racial discrimination when a qualified white student is denied college admission because the space is taken by a less qualified minority?

A case that may affect affirmative action in college admissions is going to be heard at the Supreme Court. It all started when Abigail Fisher was turned down for admission to the University of Texas in 2008:

Texas provides admission for those in the top 10 percent of the state high schools. Fisher did not qualify and was put into a pool of applicants where race is considered along with other factors such as test scores, community service, leadership qualities and work experience.

She was competing for less than 20 percent of admission slots that remained. Fisher and another white female student denied admission sued, but the other applicant has already graduated from another college and has dropped out of the case.

Fisher said in the lawsuit that her academic credentials exceeded those of many minority students, but that she lost out because of a coding system in which race is used as a factor in admissions decisions to increase classroom diversity.

Needless to say, the case is generating quite the controversy:

A growing number of states are outlawing affirmative action in college admissions, suggesting the court will be taking on the subject amid growing distaste with the practice, said Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Falls Church, Virginia, nonprofit opposed to racial preferences.

"In a country with so many different racial and ethnic groups, it becomes more and more untenable for institutions to be sorting people based on their skin color and what countries their ancestors come from," Clegg said in an interview.

Supporters of affirmative action say the experiences in those states show the continuing need for the programs.

In California, which outlawed race-based admissions at state schools through a 1996 ballot initiative, black enrollment declined throughout the system, falling to 3 percent at the state's public law schools within five years, Bollinger said. Black enrollment has since rebounded, though not to pre-1996 levels, affirmative action advocates said.

"We are still living with the tragic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow," Bollinger said. "That's a very important fact that we have to address."

What do you think? Should Affirmative Action be banned?


As a white male who only achieved an associates degree, which was paid for by myself--at a community college, I would think that is where any person of any income should start---even if you're applying with a GED. How much affirm. act. counts in these institutions is unbeknownst to me however. I do know I saw everybody from every background and race in these classes. I have no idea how any of these people got there. It was none of my business.
Affirm. Act. should be stopped. Case in point: And my own personal experience, and no, I wasn't turned down for a promotion over someone of another background...read on...
I got the promotion but after six months it was readily apparent I was way in over my "league". It was mainly computer skills and trust me...you will be found out VERY SOON if you can't keep up. This goes back to Affirm Act. If someone is only 'passed' on background or skin color or unqualified---ME, to meet quotas for federal aid, then those too won't hold a job long..not biased here but entrenched in reality...
I'm still there but only from the support of a female CEO that saw my work ethic and shortcomings. Went back to night school and polished up the comp. skills.

respect to all,
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If you're going to keep AA then you must include the following dis-advantaged groups:

- Stupid people
- Short people
- Fat people
- Red headed people
- Socially inept
- Ugly people
- Lazy people
- People who wear socks with sandals
- People who require corrective lenses
- People who wear their shirt collars up
- Felons
- Excessive talkers
- Bald people
- Terrorists
- Etc

These people have had life-long disabilities that others haven't so they should get in regardless of their test scores too! They also have different points of view than the majorities so they should be given preferential treatments in business too!
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Affirmative action based upon median income, yes. Race, no. All it does is lead to a smoldering resentment. there are poor white people, too.
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In my opinion, Affirmative Action is one of the worst things that has happened to America. Look past college, where in work places will people get in JUST BECAUSE OF THEIR ETHNICITY?
Antonin Scalia, a Supreme Court Justice says that Affirmative Action is the "Worst Seed of a Bad Fruit".
If you think about it, Affirmative Action is bad for all parties involved. Minorities are treated almost as a statistic, and can get into better colleges with lower scores. Wait, back that up ... isn't this discrimination all over again? This is saying that they are WORSE than the majority. For the people who can do well on their own but are pushed out of their spot because of a person from a minority, well we can ALL CLEARLY see that that's not fair.
In summary, Affirmative Action is a pile of horse dung.
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Affirmative action should go.
So should other racist activities . Miss black America, the Alma awards, black history month, and anything else that excludes other races. It's absurd! The country would never tolerate Miss Caucasian America, the Caucasian awards, or Caucasian history month.
To deny inclusion to any other race is, obviously, racist.
Miss black America implies you aren't good enough to be Miss America. The Alma awards imply that you aren't good enough to win other competitive awards. And, black history is taught regularly in schools now.
Certainly we should celebrate our diversity. America is a land of diversity! And in many cases, we do celebrate diversity across racial lines. We all celebrate Martin Luthor King day, St. Patrick's Day, Cinco de Mayo, Oktoberfest , etc.
While I'm here, why am I an American if my husband's family is Irish American? Why must people identify their ancestors place of birth before their own? We would be a much more cohesive whole if we quit with the Arab-American, African-American, and all the rest.
Yes, be proud and respectful of your ancestors. But remember why you haven't gone back to the country of their birth.
YOU ARE AN AMERICAN! Isn't that good enough? I sure think it is.
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I think it was a good-hearted attempt to address some long-standing injustices that has run its course. If you'd told a white person in the 50's that there would be a black president, they would have laughed. So we've come a long way and maybe it's time we get back to judging applicants without factoring their race.
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I am the only one who's noticed that the author of the article quotes "Bollinger" as in Gratz v. Bollinger, the famous affirmative action Supreme Court case, instead of Clegg- the person who is supposed to be quoted? Humor on behalf of the author perhaps or simple mix-up?
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These are a whole lot of great arguments but only ONE fact that is 100% undeniably correct. AA is a way of assigning people advantages based solely on the color of their skin. I'm not entirely sure if its the wrong thing, or the right thing; but I AM entirely sure it racist!
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@RD> how racist. You're saying black people are to be pitted and treated specially because they're all retarded and live in the ghetto.

Um.. Hello, not all black people live in Harlem, nor is everyone in the ghetto black.
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Wait a second. Isn't AA based on research findings that tests and examinations are more culturally suited to your middle class, Caucasian student? That is, white, middle class, Caucasian students are statistically significantly more likely to do better in these tests by a certain percentage due to environmental/cultural/societal differences in background? Maybe I'm thinking of something else.
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Just a note about terminology: There is no such thing as "reverse" racial discrimination. Racism is racism, discrimination is discrimination. There is nothing in either term that specifies toward whom it's directed. Therefore, it is meaningless to refer to it in any context as "reverse."
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I think the real issue that is totally getting overlooked is "higher education" itself. Society, companies, the government, etc... put too much emphasis into going to college. I graduated with a degree in statistics and frankly, if I had never gone to college, I could do my current job without blinking an eye. Practical experience, professional groups, and Google form the basis of my business acumen. Long term what did I get from college? Some friends and an alma mater whose sports teams I root for. For a vast majority, colleges are no more than big businesses sucking money from their students.

What would be much more beneficial to both companies and society? Mentor programs between businesses and high schools.
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I love how people are offended by modern affirmative action. But forget if not for the unofficial affirmative actions racial policies of the 19th and 20th Centuries that allowed millions of Europeans to come to American and live as equal to Native and ethnic Americans. And yes there are ethnic Americans. The people who forged the American identity in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Those Eastern Woodland cultures, slaves, and primarily peoples from the British isles. Remember if not for laws passed after slavery so many immigrants would not have had the opportunity to have their descendants be Americans. Imagine if the descendants of American slavery, ethnic Americans, were allowed to fully participate in the society their ancestors created. Would the poverty that exists today be a reality? It took over one hundred years for Americans whose ancestors were co-creators of the American identity to receive their rightful place as full citizens. It's lovely how people think being white makes them more American than people of color, especially the America's slave descendants. Race and ethnicity are two different things. As an ethnic American I'm tired of this bull.
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I've always defined Prejudice as "prejudging someone". One of the Merriam Webster definitions of Prejudice is
a (1) : preconceived judgment or opinion

By definition, is Affirmative Action in fact a prejudice? It is based on skin color, nothing more. It doesn't take into account how much money the person has in the bank. It doesn't take into account if the person has a 4.0 GPA or never graduated from elementary school. Personally, I am surprised minorities are not offended at the idea they are collectively grouped together as either poor and/or uneducated.

I think there are groups of people in the country that take advantage of this and they should be ashamed of themselves. Think of all of the people/refugees who have come to this country legally/invited in the past 30-40 years from war torn countries/political strife with nothing more than the clothes on their back, not a penny to their name and an entirely different language. Many are now business owners or have taken up a trade and made a name for themselves!
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Affirmative action and many other hot-button things can be dealt with by starting on an underlying layer. Pay more teachers in the real world and online; make college in the sciences and humanities free for everyone who can keep his grades up and there's no need for affirmative action in education. Make visits to a doctor or a nurse practitioner and basic medical care including reliable contraception (and morning-after methods) free to all and abortion rates will fall by themselves. Pay for all this by cutting military spending back to realistic peacetime levels, and make that possible by finding everyone who is a millionaire because of war, the executive and investor alike, and putting him in prison for war profiteering, by way of stopping treasury-busting military adventures before they start. Also buttress the social safety net and pay to develop renewable energy by nationalizing resources that are in the ground and under the sea. And if in the resulting health-secure and well-educated and sustainable U.S. a handful of old men still can buy designer medical procedures and a four-year Greek-letter-house alcohol party for their grandkids and an aircraft carrier to drive to the club in, and a few very poor people risk their lives to come here illegally and pick food and so make groceries astoundingly cheap and enliven the musical culture on their way to learning good Murrukan English, so what? But I think a lot of people, probably most of us, have been voting for exactly these perfectly reasonable reforms --free education, national health care, curing war, etcetera-- all our political lives, and the people who imply supporting them and actually sometimes outright promise them, when elected only pretend to deliver, taking us one step forward and two steps back, and that's the real problem to solve. Not whether some white kid who didn't make the cut in the first place feels not only cheated but especially cheated, because he is, you know, white.
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Sorry seschenberg ("Affirmative Action IS preference based on race and is, therefore, illegal based on itself.), but these days, racism IS acceptable depending on who it's against.

It's sad that schools are treated like zoos ('come see the minority'; 'I bet he/she has a unique viewpoint'). Plus, the sense of scrutiny only encourages exaggerated behavior according to stereotypes to conform to expectations that...(surprise!) furthers racism among those observing it.
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I love the canard that someone threw out earlier: "Equal opportunity NOT equal outcomes." That's so off the mark that it isn't even wrong. If you want to play the victim, Affirmative Action is as good an excuse as any, I suppose. We don't yet have equal opportunity in this great land of ours. We're heading there, and it certainly is not the abjectly racist and sexist world I was born into 58 years ago. I'm a moderate individual who has yet to ever hear anyone espouse equal outcomes regardless of effort. And I hang with a decidedly liberal (more accurately progressive) crowd. The 'waves of pi$$ed off people' would still exist even if there had never been affirmative action. They would just find another excuse for their indignation.
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Affirmantive action is not just about skin color it is about trying to encourage all minorities. Larger populations of similar people will always yield a higher number of top students. I am sure those that have made their mind up about race minorities will not be swayed by anything I say, but…

What about women? When I was in engineering school, there were 3 women out of hundreds of men. Should the university encourage more women in their programs? What if there were to be no women at all in my engineering school, because there was always a plentiful supply of men with slightly better grades?

What about affirmative action on the job site? I know- “The job should go to the most qualified”. However, what happens when a company is truly prejudice? They absolutely, will never higher any minority. It doesn’t matter what their grades are, or the university they attended or how good their personality is. Then what do you do?

What about a company not paying women or minorities the same salary for the same experience and job?

I don’t know what the answer is to all this. It is easy to say “Life isn’t fair.” but for a white male like me, it sure is a lot more fair.
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Not sure this is neat...

I was annoyed going to uni that a fellow student with a hispanic grandmother paid less for all four years than I did (white as white-out) for a single semester. And I had academic scholarships, too.

You can't make up for a rubbish early childhood education at college. Efforts closing the very real achievement gaps between Asian and Black students are better targeted to 0-16 than 17-21 -- the results are better and more lasting.
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I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character
The above is slightly out of context but AA is directly based on racial lines. Exactly what Dr. King was trying to blur and someday erase.
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All that AA does is to perpetuate waves of pi$$ed off people that were unfairly passed over due to no fault of their own. This doesn't help the situation. This is just a stupid bandaid. Equal opportunity NOT equal outcomes. As soon as we realize this fact the better off we all will be.
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I believe wholeheartedly in Affirmative Action, which is giving the nod to a certain number of disadvantaged applicants with roughly equivalent records of effort and achievement. It isn't quotas; it isn't denying well qualified applicants anything. Schools have a right, yea an obligation, to create, foster, and enhance diversity at their institutions. The assertion that Affirmative Action is bigotry is ludicrous. The complete and ultimate solution is, of course, to give everyone the opportunity for quality educations starting at pre-K. Then we can try that 'color-blind' thing.
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Affirmative Action should be ended. It was a knee-jerk reaction that failed and it only perpetuates the original problem.

No one should be discriminated against because of their color or race and those people who do that should be prosecuted.

People should be rewarded based on their efforts and skills. It's the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

If someone needs help or training, then fine. Let's help them.

But it's time for this policy of reverse discrimination to end.
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Marcus, people still have to pass their classes. My perception when I see a professional who is a member of a historically oppressed minority is that they had to work harder to get where they were.
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If a Caucasian should openly espouse that people not of Caucasian heritage are naturally lesser intelligent than Caucasians (ie: ‘evolutionally challenged’), you’d practically be tarred and feathered as a racist bigot. After all, we are ‘all equal’ and no one ethnicity is ‘superior’ to any other ethnicity be it intelligence or any other human factor. Right? Right.

Yet, that is Affirmative Action defined in the raw. Special considerations and acquiescence rewarded to skin color and ethnicity apparently to make up for their inherent lack of ability to make the grade by their own honest efforts, hard work, self-discipline, and personal responsibility to the direct detriment, disqualification, and exclusion of a separate skin color and ethnicity which is apparently more inclined to be honest, work hard, stay the course, and take responsibility for their actions.

Affirmative Action is racially bigoted in and of itself and it perpetuates racism. The exclusions and disqualifications of people in one ethnic group which is done to the detriment of the people in that specific ethnic group in order to solely and directly benefit and advance another ethnicity simply because of ethnicity and nothing more than ethnicity, which is what Affirmative Action implicitly does do, is totally and completely without question — full blown racism.

In fact, Affirmative Action is fully tantamount to making a person sit at the back of the bus simply because of their ethnicity. Abolish racism? Okay then… Abolish Affirmative Action.

Let hard work, personal effort, self-discipline, and personal responsibility be the foundation of individual people’s success. Not skin color. That’s racist.
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Okay, so here it is, the Real Problem with affirmative action, race based or otherwise. It simply diminishes the accomplishments of everyone of the "benefited class" regardless of their true merit. Go ahead and disagree, but when a Supreme Court justice proclaims herself to ba an "affirmative action baby" and credits her success squarely on that basis, it dilutes the perception of her abilities. When you look at a doctor who is an affirmative action beneficiaiary, who wouldn't prefer to have the one who got there on merit instead of skin color, gender, whatever. Call it what you want, but given the choice between the one who earned it through hard work and ability the one who "earned" it simply through being a minority I want the better of the two. And that perception is the real problem with affirmative action.
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I think there should be no income based scholarships. The money should go to the best and the brightest and not the poorest who obviously aren't as smart or they would be rich. It is only fair to treat everyone equally.
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If a Caucasian should openly espouse that people not of Caucasian heritage are naturally lesser intelligent than Caucasians (ie: 'evolutionally challenged'), you'd be tarred and feathered as a racist bigot lowlife scumbag. After all, we are 'all equal' and no one ethnicity is 'superior' to any other ethnicity be it intelligence or any other human factor. Right?

Yet, that is Affirmative Action defined in the raw. Special considerations and acquiescence rewarded to skin color and ethnicity apparently to make up for their inherent lack of ability to make the grade by their own honest efforts, hard work, self-discipline, and personal responsibility to the direct detriment, disqualification, and exclusion of a separate skin color and ethnicity which is apparently more inclined to be honest, work hard, stay the course, and take responsibility for their actions.

Affirmative Action is racially bigoted in and of itself and it perpetuates racism. The exclusions and disqualifications of people in one ethnic group which is done to the detriment of the people in that specific ethnic group in order to solely and directly benefit and advance another ethnicity simply because of ethnicity and nothing more than ethnicity, which is what Affirmative Action implicitly does do, is totally and completely without question -- full blown racism.

In fact, Affirmative Action is fully tantamount to making a person sit at the back of the bus simply because of their ethnicity. Abolish racism? Okay then... Abolish Affirmative Action.

Let hard work, personal effort, self-discipline, and personal responsibility be the foundation of individual people's success. Not skin color. That's racist.
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Anecdotal stories aside, people are people. Base acceptance on a hard line criteria. Stop whining, work hard, no one promised happiness only the pursuit of happiness.
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RD,

My mother has a high school degree and my father only completed the 11th grade. I am white. I worked hard in school, got all of my test prep books at the PUBLIC LIBRARY, and was accepted (on my own merits and not on my race) into college.

Neither income nor family history is an excuse not to educate yourself.

And Bruce: even depressed urban schools have libraries with free test prep books.
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Bruce,

You write "I’d like to see a score that reflects your gpa over the average gpa of those in your school as one possible factor in an application."

That's what the University of Texas already does. They automatically accept the top 10% of each public high school. So students in bad schools who perform well compared to their peers in terms of GPA are automatically admitted.
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Is it a racist stereotype, or do black people make less money and therefore can not spend the money on extra curricular activities and practice tests that their supposedly more affluent white counterparts can afford? I wonder if, in non affirmative action states, the family income level is the, or perhaps just a large, indicator of whether you will get enrolled or not.

But... if income is the root, how does one break the cycle and move to the next salary level without an education? It seems pretty circular, at least in my small scope. I don't know if it's a point of racism, or that it's just really difficult to make this a fair situation for anyone. BUT, who should be concerned with fair when one candidate is, in fact, more qualified vs the other?
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Unfortunately Stephanie, in these schools it often also is "Daddy went here/gives a lot of money to the school = get in."

Also try and pass those tests if your high school is in a depressed urban area and doesn't offer AP classes.

To pretend that all students coming into the test have had equal opportunities is just that. Pretend.

That said, race is no longer convenient shorthand for correcting for missing opportunity.

I'd like to see a score that reflects your gpa over the average gpa of those in your school as one possible factor in an application.
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I think it should be based on testing scores, period. Whoever works the hardest, gets the spot. Everything else should be blind. If it comes down to 5 or 6 students with the same score, have a lottery type scenario. "Living with the tragic legacy of slavery?" Give me a break. Just study and pass the tests, no matter who you are. Do good = get in.
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