Ending Affirmative Action Analysis

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Losing Sight of Affirmative Action Terry Eastland’s essay, Ending Affirmative Action, makes a compelling yet distasteful argument about the proposal of putting an end to affirmative action due to the negative experiences encountered. In a positive effort to support this proposal, he explains how preferential treatment is now being given to minorities and because of this preference and how generalizations are made about minority achievement based on the misconception that affirmative action allows “lower standards” with the accompaniment of underrepresented ethnicity in order to fill a race appropriate quota. Thus, harming the image of today’s minority community by the mere suggestion that a person received a…show more content…
This order declared that federal contractors should “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during their employment, without regard to race, creed, color or national origin.” Thus, the original goal of the civil rights movement had been 'color-blind' laws. However, many people believed that simply ending a long-standing policy of discrimination did not go far enough and more proactive measures to increase equality were necessary. As President Lyndon B. Johnson stated in a 1965 speech, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” I suppose this is what Eastland meant by finding the constraints of colorblind law inconvenient and the spread of preferential treatment. Yet his choice of words when describing these events in history leads one to believe that the founders he so contrarily speaks of had a personal motive in establishing affirmative action, when in fact, both “founders” were white political figures who had nothing to gain from the enactment but to try to…show more content…
Nonetheless, I share a similar disapproval of the case primarily used within Marshall and Katzenbach’s essay in which a white teacher was fired by a school board instead of a black teacher when faced with budget cutbacks, the Piscataway, NJ school board had to let go of one teacher with the least seniority.   Sharon Taxman, white, and Debra Williams, black, were essentially tied for "least seniority".  Both had exemplary employment records and both were equally qualified. The Piscataway school board however, decided that it was perfectly logical to fire Taxman because she was white, and because the board wanted to preserve diversity. It was therefore the use of this premise as the final deciding factor which resulted in Taxman’s layoff and led to the Taxman v. Piscataway case. At one point during the many years of litigation, President Clinton, did in fact publicly stated that firing Taxman was the right thing to do in order to preserve diversity. Yet in the face of legislative outrage and negative public opinion polls, Clinton later quietly backed off that position and pretended he never said

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