Letter to the Editor
To the Editor:
Affirmative Action has been a controversial issue for years now. Should college administrators and job employers give poor minorities like African Americans and Hispanics an advantage over the better off majority? I say yes. Affirmative Action is a giant step towards promoting democracy and equality. In 2011, the unemployment rate for white Americans was 7.9%, while it was 16.1 for African Americans. (Americanprogress.org) There is also a significant difference in college admission and financial status too. This holds true for Hispanics as well. America owes minorities because of the discrimination they faced in the past and still face today. Since laws once closed doors of opportunities for these Americans, new laws must be passed to open up extra doors for them. To some may seem that Affirmative Action is unjust to the white and Asian population. This is not true. Affirmative action only gives the disadvantaged a push-a slight head start. And, in the end, Affirmative action benefits everyone by promoting diversity and combating racism.
For these reason, I encourage all Oklahomans to vote "no" to State Question 759 which bars affirmative action in Oklahoma.
For these reason, I encourage all Oklahomans to vote "no" to State Question 759 which bars affirmative action in Oklahoma.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Citizen
Citizen Websites' ImpactWhile researching affirmative action, I found more websites supporting it than against it. This was the same for blogs, YouTube videos, cartoons etc. If you just look at the media coverage and personal/citizen websites, it seems as though majority are in favor of affirmative action.
Since our government is based on what the public wants, many laws were passed in support of affirmative action. Personal groups/website etc. against affirmative action also affect government policy. Such websites, blogs, and groups probably play a great role in anti-affirmative action laws passed in different states
Date: 11-7-11
Websites, Blog, and Groups on Affirmative ActionDate: 11-7-11
Websites
Blogs
Groups
Date: 11-1-11
Media's Influence
The general public usually does not research for data on an issue. Rather, people tend to get most of their information from the news and computer articles.- Media is usually biased towards their own views.
- Government laws are based on what the people want.
- So, the formula is:
G = P
Government = of the people, by the people, for the people
= Government = what the people want
P = M
What the people want = what the media makes them think they want
= What the people want = what the media wants
So, using deductive reasoning and the property of substitution:
G = M
Government = what the media wants
11-1-11
11-1-11
News Coverage on Affirmative Action
Articles:
New York Times:
Affirmative Action
More than a half century since it began, affirmative action has produced a legacy of tangible successes, including a revolution in recruiting and hiring. But it has caused persistent resentment and failed to eliminate poverty or racism.The affirmative action program began with World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order barring discrimination in the federal government and by war industries. It was a tactic to thwart a planned march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The executive order outlawed discrimination against blacks by defense contractors; it also set up the first Fair Employment Practices Committee. Compliance, though, was imperfect; the programs lacked enforcement and funds.Affirmative action gained muscle in the 1960s with the rise of the civil rights movement. Explicitly, it has been about race and, to a lesser degree, gender -- a policy to make up for centuries of oppression and to ensure diversity. But there has always been a broader notion to affirmative action as well. It has been the most serious effort of any kind to ensure equality of opportunity in education and hiring, without regard to wealth or poverty. When all else failed -- the War on Poverty, welfare, public schools -- the system enabling preferential treatment would be there to help less-fortunate Americans overcome the circumstances of their origins.Executive order 10925, issued by President John F. Kennedy in March 6, 1961, established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, mandating that projects given federal funds take affirmative action to keep racial bias out of employment and hiring practices. But it was the Civil Right Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 that effectively outlawed discrimination and breathed life into the idea of equal opportunity.In 1965, Mr. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to take affirmative action in hiring employees without regard to race, religion and national origin. Three years later, gender was added to the protected categories.But still more muscle was required. This time President Richard M. Nixon provided it in 1969 in the most far-reaching federal expansion of affirmative action. His so-called "Philadelphia Order" went after the construction trades, an attempt to end their hidebound hiring practices. In 1970, an order was issued that broadened the plan to include non-construction federal contractors.Affirmative action, however, met staunch opposition from Jews, who assailed what they called a quota system. Some leaders feared that it would create polarization jeopardizing the economic and political status of Jews and white middle-class people -- that it was, in effect, reverse discrimination. Jews have long argued against the quotas of elite universities and colleges that were used to exclude them, regardless of academic merit. Jewish groups saw minority admissions programs as the reworking of the old, disreputable system.Courts have tended to rule against colleges and universities that use strict numerical solutions to remedy racial imbalances. The Bakke case would become a famous salvo galvanizing both sides of the affirmative action debate.Allan P. Bakke, a white man, challenged a special admission program at the University of California's medical school at Davis. Mr. Bakke said the special program had discriminated against him on the basis of race, and the California State Supreme Court agreed.The case, which went to the United States Supreme Court, was seen by many as the most important race relations lawsuit since the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision on school desegregation.In its 1978 landmark Regents v. Bakke decision, the court ruled 5-4 that it was unconstitutional for a state school to reserve a limited number of places for qualified minority applicants. It said, however, that race could be taken into consideration in deciding admission -- that race could be a "plus factor." The decision meant that the great majority of affirmative action programs, both public and private, could continue -- along with the escalating debates and lawsuits over what constitutes racial balance.In the early 1990s, elite campuses began to pull back from their aggressive affirmative-action policies. And in 1996, California voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. After that, race could no longer be a factor in government hiring or public-university admissions. The number of black students at both Berkeley and U.C.L.A. plummeted, and at U.C.L.A. the declines continued throughout the next decade.The reasons weren't entirely clear, but they seemed to include some combination of the admissions office taking Proposition 209 to heart and black students falling further behind in the academic arms race. The changes on U.C.L.A.'s campus were hard to miss. In 1997, the freshman class included 221 black students; in 2006, it had only 100. In the region with easily the largest black population west of the Mississippi River, the top public university had a freshman class in which barely 1 in 50 students was black.While foes of the referendums were rushing to the courts, supporters of such initiatives announced the formation of the American Civil Rights Institute to overturn affirmative action programs elsewhere. While two white male scholars had begun the movement, a black businessman and former university regent, Ward Connerly, successfully led the charge for Prop 5-209. He became the head of the new institute."Every citizen should have an equal chance at the starting line of life's race," Mr. Connerly said in a statement. "But there should not be a guaranteed outcome in the race. If you discriminate for someone, you discriminate again someone else."More than a quarter century after Bakke, the high court ruled again in favor of affirmative action, but with qualifications. In a 6-3 vote, it struck down the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program, in which students were evaluated on a 150-point scale that awarded 20 points for being a member of an underrepresented minority group. However, in a 4th ruling, the court upheld Michigan's law school program in which decisions were made by an admissions committee without a numerical scale.Entering a new century, affirmative action policies of university admissions offices continue to come under legal and political assault. Occasionally, the courts sided with preferences. In 2000, a federal court ruling upholding the approach of the University of Michigan, mirroring an earlier decision about the University of Washington Law School, gave such programs new life. Both courts accepted a key contention of affirmative action advocates: that racial preferences in admissions enhance the educational experience not only of minority students but of whites, too.That amplified an argument made by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. in Regents v. Bakke: that mixing races in an educational environment is a compelling interest of the state, and thus constitutional.Much of the justification for affirmative action in other arenas has concerned the righting of past wrongs, and thus faces a time limit: when the playing field has been leveled, such policies will no longer be needed. But if a mixed campus is considered in the state's interest because it improves everyone's education, then racial preferences would be defensible for years to come.In May 2009, the selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court promises to open a new battle in the fight over affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for patterns of inequality, with each side invoking the election of the first black president in support of its cause.Judge Sotomayor, who would be the first Hispanic justice appointed to the high court, has championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career -- as a student activist at Princeton and at Yale Law School, as a board member of left-leaning Hispanic advocacy groups and as a federal judge arguing for diversity on the bench.Conservatives say her strong identification with such race-based approaches to the law is perhaps the strongest argument against her confirmation, contending that her views put her outside an evolving consensus that such race-conscious public policy is growing obsolete.
Fox News:
The Affirmative Action Myth
T.V ClipsThe Supreme Court decided one year ago that racial preferences at public universities are legal, as long as they aren’t too mechanically applied.But this has proved cold comfort to affirmative action supporters besieged by evidence that preferences can’t deliver the results desired. With the constitutional issue resolved, Americans are asking whether affirmative action helps students in the first place.Just what is affirmative action supposed to do? Educators trumpet the virtues of “diverse” campuses, but their enthusiasm dates suspiciously to a 1972 court decision suggesting diversity as a legal justification for preferences.Ordinary Americans are more practical. Those sympathetic to affirmative action assume that it offers concrete benefits to disadvantaged students. They hope that preferences will narrow our nation’s painful racial divide along such metrics as income, literacy, home ownership and health.But affirmative action in this sense is a myth. Admissions preferences do not offer practical empowerment to struggling citizens. They do not bridge society’s racial chasms. They do not address real social problems.For one thing, affirmative action does not send more minorities to college. Most four-year colleges and universities in America are not selective; they take anyone with a standard high school education and a Pell grant . This means that race-based preferences are relevant only to the 20-30 percent of American colleges that enjoy substantially more applicants than places. Students attending these schools have many other college options.The reason that more minority students don’t get college degrees has nothing to do with competitive admissions policies. The truth is that most minority students leave high school without the minimum credentials necessary to attend any four-year school, selective or not.Freshmen must be “college ready” at virtually all four-year colleges. This means that students must be literate, must have a high school diploma, and must have taken certain minimum coursework. Overwhelmingly, minority students are not college ready. Dr. Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute found that only 20 percent of black students and 16 percent of Hispanic students leave high school with these basic requirements.Minority under-representation in college is the direct result of the public schools’ failure to prepare minority students. It is a failure that affirmative action does not remedy – college-ready minorities already attend college just as often as their white counterparts.Affirmative action thus does not send more minority students to college. But it does redistribute college-bound minorities from less academically selective schools to more selective ones. Affirmative action supporters assume that this is helpful to preferred students: that moving a student from the University of Colorado to Cornell will enhance that student’s earning potential.But economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found that name-brand colleges are the modern equivalent of the Dutch tulip craze. Prices go up and up, but elite colleges offer no financial benefit that less selective schools do not.Dale and Krueger compared students rejected by selective colleges with students who attended those schools. They discovered that when students’ entering credentials, such as high school grades and test scores, were the same, the rejected students made just as much money as those who attended “top tier” universities.Students know something about themselves that admissions committees do not. If you think you are Cornell material, you are – even if Cornell doesn’t notice – and statistics show that you are just as likely as Cornell grads to succeed in the game of life. This means that preferences don’t raise minority incomes.Racial preferences can’t send more minority students to college and don’t raise the incomes of those they move around, but they do reinforce a harmful myth: the myth that credentials, not skills, are the key to success. Students of all backgrounds suffer because elite schools perpetuate this myth.Ivy league institutions maintain their status by rejecting far more applicants than they accept. To keep applications coming – and parents paying tuition – they practically claim to have bottled success. Anyone can rub elbows with the brilliant and powerful, they imply, and be set for life.But studies show that skills, not name-brand diplomas, determine advancement in the real world. Harvard grads do well, but they do well because they are skilled and driven, not because they have Harvard degrees.People hope that preferences will assist minority students whose tested proficiency in English and math lags behind their peers. But instead of addressing the critical skills gap, preferences reinforce the notion that skills aren’t important: that it matters who you know, not what you know. This untrue, self-serving message from the elite academy is among affirmative action’s heavy costs.
Fox News
CNN News
