I have never been a big fan of affirmative action. In a country where opportunity is something that is bragged upon, why do we have to give preferential treatment to minorities or women? Having come from a family of fourteen children, poor, and underprivileged in my opinion, should I not have deserved special treatment when applying for jobs or college scholarships after graduating high school? There is nothing ethical about giving preferential treatment to a certain race because we feel that that they are still oppressed from something that happened decades ago. All we are doing is oppressing that race even more by affording them a crutch to lean on when they encounter something that has proven to be tough on every American: applying to get into school and obtaining a promising job.
Some of the arguments for affirmative action include having the government assist with something that they may have messed up earlier, drawing certain races to industries of work that they may not have been interested in before, and allowing minorities a boost because they are disadvantaged. I do not think that many of these arguments for affirmative action are credible. What happened a long time ago by our ancestors should not be something that we are currently paying for. I understand fully that the way we operated during this time when black Americans were oppressed was not right, but what more can we do without hindering them from being responsible adults and overcoming challenges that many other Americans face? Shelby Steele, a black American, opposes affirmative action for several reasons and I agree with most of them. He states that in a blog that "affirmative action is cheap, but good education in the inner city is expensive.....so we have a system perfectly designed to keep the people who were always oppressed still oppressed, still backwards." It's not that we as a country are discriminating against black people, but we may be focusing our attention on the wrong things, with affirmative action being one of them. The more support we give minorities the more dependent they become on these programs, so what are we teaching them? Is it acceptable to rely on the government for education and jobs in a country where opportunity seems to be endless?
I think that affirmative action is an unethical approach on our government's behalf to right a wrong that occurred a long time ago when no one today was involved with it. We are creating a society that makes it acceptable to give preference to minorities for jobs and education, almost as if it were a form of racism against white Americans. Having felt like I was a minority due to my background and approaching the real world after I graduated high school, it never once crossed my mind to give up and rely on someone else to help me through life. I did what I had to do to get my education, serve my country, and obtain a job that supports my family.
References:
The Ethics of Affirmative Action (n.d.). Santa Clara University. Retrieved from http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v5n2/action.html
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