Reasons Why Affirmative Action Is Wrong

Long past are the days when people could be denied employment, service or education just for being a minority. Nowadays, the college acceptance of many majority (white) individuals is at risk because they aren’t minorities, due to a group of policies known as “affirmative action”(United). These practices are implemented by colleges, mostly during the acceptance process of student applications, so as to increase the percentage of minorities in the student body. People often incorrectly label this as “reverse racism,” when in reality, it’s just racism.
An online dictionary defines racism as both “(1)The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others,” and “(2)Discrimination
or prejudice based on race”(Racism). For clarity’s sake, the term “racial discrimination” will be used to denote the latter of these definitions hereafter. However, it is important to remember that racial discrimination is just a specific type of action which falls under the wide umbrella of racism.
Most people who encounter affirmative action don’t grasp its full implications; they regard it as ordinary and even necessary.
One of the reasons it goes largely ignored is that the justifications for it are so pleasant sounding. Affirmative action is a form of racial discrimination that goes unnoticed by the majority of the population, and when one follows the reasons for implementing affirmative action to their core, they will find not a heart, but a tumor called racism. They will find that in fact, perhaps unbeknownst to those who argue for this practice, this method of “avoiding racism” (often promoted as “promoting diversity”) implies racist beliefs
itself.
One of the most commonly known purposes behind affirmative action is “ to rectify a long period of racial discrimination”(Affirmative Action).
In other words, giving an extra opportunity to minorities is a way of “paying it back” for the decades of abuse and discrimination that came before the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement. The flaw in the reasoning behind this solution is that it groups people who were involved in the situation with those who weren’t, just because of their race, rather than treating them as individuals. From the viewpoint of this solution, white people used to treat minorities horribly, so they should make up for it by giving them special treatment. Except the situation doesn’t only concern “white people” and “minorities.” Individuals, who were black, were enslaved and discriminated against by individuals, who were white. All that is true. However, none of those individuals are college students today. Most of the victims of serious racism, oppression and American slavery died long ago. The bottom line is this: redress cannot made for injustices against minorities in the past by compensating minorities today, because they are different people. To think that this is an appropriate way to make remittance is the very definition of racist. Those individuals are more than just their race. Furthermore, to think that whites today have the responsibility to make remittance for those injustices is equally racist because they are not the ones
who perpetrated the crimes. It cannot be thought of as “race vs. race.” It has to be about people and individuals if a change is to be made.
Also prominent within affirmative action is the idea that not all races are equal, again the very definition of racism. The process of affirmative action involves giving extra ‘points’ to minorities on college applications. These points are often the deciding factor between equally or even better qualified majority applicants. These “extra points” are supposed to level the playing field between white and minority students, but isn't thinking that the playing field needs leveling at all exactly the same as “The belief that race accounts for differences in human... ability and that a particular race is superior to others”?(Free). Roger Clegg, Head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, has called the allowal of these affirmative action policies “a setback”(Liptak). Frankly, this reasoning implies white supremacy by promoting the idea that other races are slower, and need need a head start, rather than the egalitarian belief that “all men are created equal.”
The Supreme Court has made vague rulings in the past that allowing affirmative action as long as it is in order to “[obtain] the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body”(Affirmative). They will soon have to take a more definite position. Race has no place determining the academic worthiness of an individual. To think otherwise is incongruent with the egalitarian ideals of the Constitution and is racism just as much as the infamous “separate but equal” schooling.