Recently, the legitimacy of Affirmative Action's fairness in giving students of all races an equal chance has come under fire. There is actually going to be a ruling by the Supreme Court that will determine if University of Michigan's (and most likely the whole nation) application of Affirmative Action is constitutionally correct or not. Notice that I said, "application" and not Affirmative Action itself. I believe that the way Affirmative Action is used contradicts one of our constitutions main points, the equality of all human beings. Being a black female myself, I believe that students should be accepted based on merit of their performance and not their sex or race. I am sure that minorities, like myself, would rather be accepted because of our own academic accomplishments. The idea of lower standards is racism in and of itself. .
The principle of Affirmative Action is a very good one. Many inner city schools suffer from depleting funds and mediocre teachers. It is harder for students from such schools to get into a good college. The idea of ensuring minorities an opportunity for higher education is vital to our country, which is made up of about half minorities. It will help people with fewer prospects to become educated so that they can contribute more to society. All of this sounds perfect and I am absolutely positive that nobody would oppose such a program; in fact, nobody does. The problems arise in the application of this Utopian program. Like unto communism, on paper it is perfect but once put into action, all kinds of problems arise, problems that take away from the good aspects of it and cause much debate. One such problem is that of quotas. Quotas are used in some schools to get a certain number of minorities in their school to receive more government support, regardless of more qualified applicants. Quotas themselves are a conflict within a conflict; they have no real definition and everybody has their own interpretations on how they should be used.