standards from underrepresented groups over students, particularly white, that may be more qualified. In all, the real issue is, can universities use race as an admission factor? On a larger scale, can employers use race as a deciding factor in hiring or promoting workers? Can the government legally set position aside for minorities?If the opponents of affirmative action could, they would have us turn our heads and forget the past. After 250 years of slavery, 100 years of apartheid, and 40 years of discrimination, we cannot just turn the other cheek and start a new at this point by establishing a color-blind society. The foundation of race and gender programs was laid when individuals were discriminated against not just in the past, but also presently because of their race and gender. The unbroken trend of race and gender discrimination called for a remedy. Our legal history is replete with the malignancy of racism, from the 1957 Dred Scott case, where blacks were counted as three-fifths humans, to the Plessy vs. Ferguson case where “separate but equal mandated apartheid. This remedy for the dreaded disease came in 1961, when John F. Kennedy signed the executive order, which proclaimed that institutions receiving federal funds develop plans enabling them to go beyond the “norm” and search for qualified people. Affirmative action was not meant to force people into positions that they are unqualified for, but to promote institutions to expand their enterprise into a qualified racially diverse environment. Without this requirement many business would do what they have done for many years, and say that they could not “find” any qualified blacks or Hispanics and hire the “supreme white guy” that they wanted to hire in the first place. What makes affirmative action such as difficult issue is the fact that it fuses blacks and whites exactly at a point where they differ the most. However, if ...
