Reference no: EM133811520

Assignment:

Gina: Gruttner got a raw deal. She should've gotten in.

Ed: Maybe. But diversity is important. I believe in affirmative action.

Ethan: I guess some people do get into college more easily. But that includes guys like me whose father went here. Barbara Gruttner, who is white, charged that the University of Michigan Law School had unfairly rejected her while admitting many less qualified African American applicants. She claimed that Michigan, a state university, accepted just 9 percent of white students with her grade point average and law school aptitude test scores but admitted 100 percent of African American applicants with comparable scores.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Gruttner, stating that the University of Michigan Law School could use a policy of affirmative action that takes account of the race of applicants in the interest of creating a socially diverse student body. The Court, however, struck down the university's undergraduate admissions policy, which awarded points for grades, for college board scores, and also for being a member of a minority. A point system, the Court ruled, is too close to the rigid quota systems rejected by the Court in the past.

With this ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed the importance of racial diversity on campus. Thus, colleges and universities can take account of race in order to increase the number of traditionally underrepresented students as long as race is treated as just one variable in a process that evaluates each applicant as an individual (Stout, 2003).

How did the controversial policy of affirmative action begin? At the end of World War II, the U.S. government's GI Bill funded higher education for veterans of all races. By 1960, government funding helped 350,000 black men and women attend college. However, these individuals were not finding the kinds of jobs for which they were qualified. So the Kennedy administration devised "affirmative action." Employers were required to monitor hiring, promotion, and admissions policies to eliminate discrimination against minorities, even if unintended.

Defenders of affirmative action see it, first, as a sensible response to our nation's racial and ethnic history. African Americans suffered through two centuries of slavery and a century of segregation under Jim Crow laws. Throughout our history, being white gave people a big advantage. They see minority preference today as a step toward fair compensation for unfair majority preference in the past.

Second, many analysts doubt that we will ever become a color-blind society. Because prejudice and discrimination are rooted deep in U.S. culture, simply saying that we are color-blind does not mean that everyone will be treated fairly.

Third, supporters ask, where would minorities be if the government had not enacted this policy in the 1960s? Major employers, such as fire and police departments in large cities, began hiring minorities, including women, only because of affirmative action. This program expanded the black middle class and increased racial diversity in the workplace.

Only about 17 percent of white people, and 40 percent of African Americans, say they support racial preferences for African Americans (Smith et al., 2018). Critics point out, first of all, that affirmative action began as a temporary remedy to ensure fair competition but soon became a system of group preferences and quotas-in short, a form of reverse discrimination, favoring people not because of performance but because of race, ethnicity, or sex.

Second, critics say, if racial preferences were wrong in the past, they are wrong now. Why should whites today, many of whom are far from privileged, be penalized for past discrimination that was in no way their fault? Giving entire categories of people special treatment compromises standards of excellence.

A third counterargument is that any policy that lowers standards for a category of people may set them up for disappointment later on. Researchers have found that students who benefit from "group preferences" (whether based on race or having alumni parents) are more likely to struggle academically.

A final argument against affirmative action is that it benefits people who are already relatively privileged. Affirmative action does little for the African American underclass.

In the last few years, there has been some reduction in affirmative action. The Trump administration has not been openly supportive of this policy and, on the contrary, has supported a suit filed against Harvard University claiming that race has been used to hold Asian American applicants to higher standards for admission. More significantly, the share of African American students on campus has declined in some states. In Florida, for example, African Americans represent 17 percent of the state population; in 2000, when affirmative action was stronger, African Americans represented 12 percent of students on the state's campuses. By 2017, that share had fallen to just 6 percent. There are good arguments for and against affirmative action, and people who want our society to have more racial and ethnic equality fall on both sides of the debate. The disagreement is not whether people of all colors should have equal opportunity but whether the current policy of affirmative action is part of the solution or part of the problem.

SOURCES: Kantrowitz and Wingert (2003), Flynn (2008), Sander and Taylor, Jr. (2012), Anderson (2017), and Smith et al. (2019).

Questions:

1. What do you think - is affirmative action part of the problem or part of the solution?

2. Why do you think this? Support your answer!