RE: President Obama has made affirmative action irrelevant

Today we had an interesting discussion about the resolution that states that Barack Obama's inauguration has made affirmative action irrelevant. However, I strongly disagree.

First off, let's define what affirmative action is, because it is always important to know what we are arguing about. Affirmative action means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. (taken from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy)

Before I go on, I just like to point out one thing. Clearly, as Mr. Basinger said, the resolution was about whether Obama's electio has made affirmative action irrelevant or not. However, we ended up debating about the IDEA of affirmative action, whether it is justified or not, and not about the core issue of the resolution.

With this said, I strongly believe that Obama's climb to the top executive in our country did not prove a bit that makes affirmative action irrelevant. We have to take a look into the fact that he is just one person, as brought up in the debate, and his rise to success does not mean that we should overthrow this idea. America is a country founded upon equal opportunities for all, and we have to have this policy instituted in our government to continue to expand on our works. Just because we have a handful of minority who rose from literally nothing to their positions today (i.e. Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Collin Powell) should not be a motive to take this issue out of our consideration, because matter of factly, there are still too many minorities suffering from harsh circumstances that needs opportunities available for them to at least be able to have a chance of becoming successful and have a taste of the American Dream.

Now, going back to the idea of Affirmative Action, one of the most heavily regarded argument against the idea of Affirmative Action is that they pick less qualified individuals to a certain position over others who are well qualified just for the sake of filling the status quo of certain race, usually minority. However, for me personally, this is just a fact we have to accept and move on. To begin with, it's the people who do not get what they want that complains about how affirmative action has put them in a shithole. We can't have a school with just one dominant race or else much of the minority will not be able to get accepted to colleges, becasue many of them had not lived in the same circumstances as the non-minorities who had the educational background and the support that the minority kids did not receive. It is through affirmative action that we can promote racial equality for all. Even from the school's perspective, they can't accept all asians because Asians tend to be smart, although they might accept more Asian kids relatively compared to the Asian population in America. If we accpet kids solely based on performace, then chances are, schools will not be able to have racial diversity in school, as non-minorities who have had extra support from their parents and other places make them better qualified when applying for a university.

The problem with performance based accpetance is that academics is not he only asset in our world. There was a famous Supreme Court case known as Bakke vs. the University of California - Davis, where this one white student did not receive admittance from UC Davis because the school was trying to promote racial equality. Now imagine if Mr. Bakke had been accepted, would he have truly complained about affirmative action? Probably not. This proves that what the opponents of affirmative action are not disagreeing with its function, but rather because affirmative action has put them at a disadvantage. Nothing in this world is perfect, as everything has multiple viewpoints. Furthermore, taking things statistically, in the USA reports as of 2008, 5% of American population are Asian while 12% are Black and 15% are Hispanic. So, theoretically, schools should only admit Asian kids that would fill up 5% of the school's student body. However, because of the general occurence that Asian kids work hard, most schools accept more Asian kids relatively compared to their racial percentage in the United States, where schools like UC Berkeley have 45% Asians and other prestigious schools with Asian students that take up more than 10% of the school's student body. However, at the same time, while Asian kids tend to be smarter, there has to come a limit on how the number of kids from one ethnic background. And we have to understand that the minority to do get into colleges did well relatively compared to people of their race. I read other people's blogs and many of them gave out hypothetical statistics. However, what they fail to recognize is that the minority kid who might have a worse academic profile still did better compared to kids of their race while the non-minority kid who has the better profile but didn't get in probably scored lower relatively compared with people of their own race. The bottom line is this, if a student gets rejected, then there is a reason why they are rejected. The reason may be rational or irrational, but thats not up to the students to judge. After all, the school is admitting kids as a GROUP, not individually. They look at all the kids they accept as one class, not of hundreds of individuals, and therefore, racial equality is a significant matter. The schools take kids based on their needs, not whether we are qualified or not.

Therefore, I sincerely believe in affirmative action.