Intellectual Free For All: Affirmative Action

Nov 05, 2008 22:46

Time for a long-awaited...

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Re: Affirmative Discrimination 2 nighthawkal November 6 2008, 08:37:15 UTC
I will give you a personal story about a conversation I had with a teacher in high school about Affirmative Action. I had this really liberal teacher in high school who was pro-Affirmative Action Discrimination. I was applying for colleges and it was the first year when Gov. Jeb Bush passed that Executive Order stating that state schools could not use race as a factor for accepting or denying someone acceptance into the university. I was aiming to get accepted into the Univeristy of Florida because it is the best school in the state. I finished in the Top 7% in my class and my SAT score was something like 1190. This liberal teacher, and I know she was well-meaning, said to me one day after school, "Oh no! Did you hear that JEB Bush is going to end affirmative action. You're not going to be able to get into a good school now because of that..." I know that she was well-meaning but I thought that was offensive because its basically a guilty white liberal saying, "Oh no! You're a minority. You're too stupid to get into college without the gov't forcing the school to lower their standards for you..." I am glad that I got accepted into the University of Florida, one of the highest ranking schools in the country, the first year when race was NOT a factor, so when I move up and succeed later on in life, people won't say, "you only got there because of Affirmative Action". I don't want that hanging over my head. I want to get accepted based on my grades and qualifications, and not because someone lowered the standards for me.

If I was ever going to support any sort of "Affirmative Action" program, I think, instead of basing it off of race, they should instead base it off of socioeconomic status. I think, these days, that race may not be so much an obstacle in things like getting accepted into good colleges, as socioeconomic status is. If you're poor and from a poor area, regardless of race, chances are that you are going to have sub par schools and you won't have the opportunities that people in upper class areas have.

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Re: Affirmative Discrimination 2 nighthawkal November 8 2008, 09:48:38 UTC
Yup. There are rich minority groups out there like Cubans or like Asians where they don't have problems getting into the right schools and paying for them, but there are poor white people out there who may not have as good of a chance because they are poor or live in a poor area. If you want to 'even the playing field', I think its better to do it based on socioeconomic status and at the same time work on improving the schools in those areas. I think that education is the key to all of this and to making sure that we have a color-blind soceity.

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