It Is Time To Reaffirm Our Actions Essays - Social Inequality

It Is Time to Reaffirm Our Actions On Equal Opportunity The history of this Nation is being carved with the chisels of our incessant struggle towards freedom and equality. Evidently, that struggle has continually propelled us scores of years away from slavery and flagrant bigotry. Yes, we can not deny to ourselves that our odyssey to the realms of crystal-clear equality has not yet ended. Though, attempting to surpass the craters of injustice with fabricated bridges of unequal treatment will merely make our journey that much more treacherous and insurmountable. No matter how benevolently intended, practicing preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, and gender ultimately results in great social discomfort to everyone involved. Initially, in the mid 1960s, Affirmative Action programs were intended to protect minorities from racial and gender discrimination. Today, we need to demonstrate to ourselves that we have truly progressed towards a gender and color-blind society, since the inception of Affirmative Action. To materialize that goal, we must start adopting feasible alternatives that may allow us to value and select the most suitable individuals, among ourselves, based solely on the merit of our abilities and actions, and Not on our God-given skin-pigment and/or gender. Affirmative Action Programs have ingrained and extended into a very wide array of social programs and minority groups in the United States. Therefore, It would be impossible to fit every Affirmative Action issue within the length and scope of this research assignment. As a result, I will confine the discussion in this paper to the general philosophical ideology that serves as the core of Affirmative Action. That is preferential treatment based solely on race and gender, in the workplace. For instance, the following issue is commonplace in today's workplace: Two business education teachers --one black, one white-- were hired on the same day by the Piscaway School Board. When the board was forced to fire one eight years later, it dismissed the white teacher rather than her black colleague, who was at the time the only black teacher in the 10-member department. In the past, the decision would have been settled by a coin-toss. Sharon Taxman, the white teacher, filed a reverse discrimination suit with the support of the Bush administration Justice Department. But under president Clinton, the Department switched sides and argued that the school district could take race into account in this instance (United States, Courts Establish Boundaries 1). Clearly, that was an example of how the American society has lost the notion of plain common-sense, as it has striven to maintain racial and gender balance. Instead of making decisions based on our people's merits and abilities, it has chosen to do it in a way that would supposedly foster race and gender harmony. Unfortunately, it has achieved quite the opposite: Abrogating social perception and uneasiness about race and gender. How did America drift from the ideal of a color blind society into the current environment of quotas, goals, timetables, set-asides, diversity training, and the like?. Affirmative Action Programs, --Like other Federal Government Programs, for instance, Welfare, Social Security and Bilingual Education.-- were started as under-funded pilot-programs, or small reform-initiatives. As decades went by, many U.S. Presidents and Congresses had their opportunity to enhance those programs with larger funds and non-sense intricacies, so they grew --slowly. Until one day, these small, underfed initiatives, developed into colossal, unmanageable, dollar-guzzler, mindless programs. Today, those nonsensical federal programs need to be drastically trimmed and re-programmed, or even, terminated. Initially the effort came from The White House and Congress, as a result of flagrant and despicable acts of race discrimination, prevalent for many decades. In 1964, Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically, Title VII of the Act, Marked a huge advance for the principle of non-discrimination based on race, ethnicity and gender in the workplace (United States, A 30 year Experiment 1). However, since Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is very vague and broad in its language, many proposals con or pro Affirmative Action are ultimately challenged in court. For instance, In November 1996, the majority of people of the State of California voted YES on Proposition-209. That Proposition effectively banned Affirmative Action Programs mandated by the State. The initiative for that Proposition was undertaken by two white, male, and politically