od education, only to be denied entrance into the school of their chose because the first fifteen seats had to be DiLorenzo 7filled by minorities and by god they were. Affirmative action is about equal rights and equal opportunity not preferential treatment. Take the court case of Sarah Wessman a fifteen-year-old who had been denied admission to the prestigious Boston Latin school, one of Boston’s top public schools, because she was white. In the article, Does “Diversity Justify Quotas? The Courts Say No, by Terence J. Pell, Boston Latin had used a complicated admissions plan, developed in 1996 with the help of outside consultants and civil rights lawyers. The school fills its first forty-five seats without regard to race, evaluating applicants based on an exam score and grades. However, its remaining 45 seats are allocated according to a quota based on ethnic composition of the applicant pool. The year Sarah applied, the allocation was thirteen blacks, eighteen whites, nine Asians and five Hispanics. According to the article “the Boston Latin quota aimed to comply with the late Lewis Powell’s opinion in the landmark case of Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke. Powell had suggested that “intellectual diversity” was an acceptable rational for considering race in admissions, though “racial diversity” was not. Diversity is not a justification for the use of racial preferences. As long as the school has a certain amount of blacks, everything should be all right. Nevertheless, is it all right? Not when you have worked so hard your whole life to fulfill your dream to pursue your goals and it is snatched away from you because of a racial quota. Preferences no matter how well intended will breed resentment. Define affirmative action, I mean if it means a program that provides equal opportunity for all this who striving to better themselves and would no...
