According to Tivnan, affirmative action tries to "wipe out an injustice with another injustice- (195). While "reverse discrimination- may benefit one class or race, it truly hinders another (Tivnan 195). The policy tends to contradict widely held convictions that state that employers should hire based on qualifications and individual merit rather than race. Also, by supporting superior preference towards a particular group, affirmative action contradicts its original intentions of equality: it allows job opportunities to be stripped from one individual and to be handed on a silver platter to another, more privileged individual. The supporters of affirmative action irrationally fail to notice the racial injustices it produces as well as the burdens it creates within society. .
Additionally, affirmative action demoralizes society--a burden often overlooked. The original intentions of affirmative action have given way to an amorphous system in which, instead of everybody being equal, certain people are more equal than others. Consequently, the "American ideal of merit gets lost in the shuffle- (Woods 100). Today, affirmative action categorizes particular races as non-preferential, denying the concept of "equal opportunity [that] requires that people be judged on the basis of their qualifications as individuals, regardless of race [and] sex -(Tivnan 197). Affirmative action has now ricocheted to fight an "inequality with an inequality,"" the very problem Johnson designed it to solve, which results in "the ambitions and aspirations, the hopes and dreams of individual Americans being trampled- on so the government can counterbalance past injustices (Tivnan 195) (Grapes 43). Furthermore, it instills the thought that one can obtain a job without "hard work and personal achievement- (Williams 33). Thus, minority individuals work less strenuously and competitively to obtain a job or scholarship.