John F. Kennedy's Affirmative Action: Reverse Discrimination

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Evening Things Out Affirmative action in the eyes of some can be considered to be the compromise for reparations. To others it can be looked at as an opportunity for women to be looked at as equals in comparison to their male colleagues. But those who don’t fall into either of those categories look at affirmative action as reverse discrimination or racism. There is an argument that there is truth in all of those statements, but it is more prevalent in the first two than the latter. Minorities were never given the appropriate chance they deserve, and women still can’t get the respect they deserve in the workplace. On March 6, 1961 President John F. Kennedy started Affirmative Action by an order of anti-discrimination. This was created to…show more content…
There was a big number of unemployment among black teenagers, because discrimination was still a significant factor. The unemployment rate for black people who had attended college, was 27.2% and those who had graduated from high school was 23.6%. It was higher than the unemployment rate for white high school dropouts, which was 22.3%. It was obvious that the black students were being discriminated, because the white students that didn’t t even finished high school were getting more jobs opportunities than blacks. With the Affirmative Action program there was a dramatic increase in college attendance among blacks, yet there was still an astounding amount of unemployed blacks. In 1975, the overall black unemployment rate was 1.8 times higher than the white unemployment. Affirmative Action not only helps blacks it also helped women. In 1977 the percentage of full time female faculty was 10.6 percent, and it had grown to 21.7 percent by 1987. The present percentage of law school appointments that are women has reached 40…show more content…
The truth is that with or without Affirmative Action almost any high school graduate, who is able to read, write and do the multiplication tables, can go to college today. In another article by E.J. Dionner Jr., Clinton's opinion about Affirmative Action is revealed. Clinton realizes the debate about Affirmative Action is regarding to college admissions. One of the hottest topics is the SAT scores. Clinton said that the SAT is a good prediction of success in college, but they in fact are not perfects predictions. The debate about Affirmative Action is because the law is not applied fairly example where a couple years ago three minority students got accepted in Penn State University with paid tuition and they were not successful during the whole semester. Now this was a waist of money that other students could have used for their tuition. There is still a lot of discrimination in this society that we live today, specially towards blacks and latinos. It is still very hard for them to get a good jobs even with Affirmative Action, imagine what it would be like with out

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