Affirmative Action is Racist

The world is never straightforward. Nothing is intuitive. Take gravity, for instance. Gravity causes things to fall straight down, right? No, it makes them fall toward the center of the Earth, because "down" is relative.

How about this, it would be logical to say that heavy things fall faster than lighter things, right? Wrong. They fall at the same speed, despite what our intuition would tell us.

You see a hyperlink to a website for a Vegas casino online, and intuition tells you not to click it. Well, the world is not so straight forward.

This is doubly true in the world of politics and economics. Policies that are designed with specific intent can often have unintended and disastrous consequences. This is why communism sounds excellent on paper and then fails in execution everywhere it has been implemented. And this line of reasoning is why I believe that Affirmative Action is racist.

What is Affirmative Action?

Affirmative Action is a fancy political title for a policy designed to get underrepresented minorities into the workplace. If the percentage of black people in the United States of America is approximately 13%, then a company or a school needs to have at least 13% of its population to be black. Sounds fair, right?

The Inherent Racism of Affirmative Action

The problem is that, let's use Universities as an example, Universities have limited quantities of students that it can handle, whether it's because of a lack of teachers to handle the load or even just the physical size of the buildings.

Regardless, there is a finite number of students a given university can handle that has to be divided between its applicants. So how does the University decide who gets to go in and who has to stay out?

Ideally, all students submit all the relevant documents pertaining to their grades, letters of recommendation, whatever else, and the University decides if the student meets the standards they expect of their applicants.

With Affirmative Action, however, an advantage is given to "oppressed" minorities (not ALL minorities, I'll get back to that) so that the number of applicants of X racial group meets the quota. And because there are limited spots, this means denying someone else based on nothing but race alone!

Let's say a white student and a black student both qualify for a university that only has one spot remaining. They both meet the minimum requirements, but the white student has a higher grade for whatever reason. Instead of picking the most qualified student, they pick the black student because of his race. In other words, they racially discriminated against the white student!

Think that's farfetched? It happened.

Harvard Law is currently under the process of being sued over their "holistic admissions process," which judges students on their personality traits, race, gender, geographic origin, and other immutable characteristics that really shouldn't be relevant. The lawsuit has revealed that Harvard, in fact, discriminates against Asians because they're too successful!

To get into Harvard, Asian students need HIGHER scores than white students, who need HIGHER scores than black students. Harvard is literally making it harder for Asian students on the basis of their race alone.

If that's not racism, I don't know what is.

Unintended Consequences

In my opening paragraph, I talked about how good ideas can have unintended consequences. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," and all that.

I'm not just talking about the minor things, either, like people in the corridor saying, "Oh, he's just the diversity hire" or "she's just here because she's a woman".

No, Affirmative Action has increased the rate of dropouts from higher education and businesses. How? Because, as it turns out, if you put underqualified students/workers in classes/environments that they are not prepared to handle, they'll drop out!

So the whole big Affirmative Action scheme to help minorities has not only undermined race relations, inadvertently become racist itself, it has also hurt the people it’s supposed to help and has done nothing but waste everyone's time and money!