Race-Based Affirmative Action Research

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Race can be a controversial topic, especially with the history of racial discrimination in the United States. In many Supreme Court cases, the following question has been posed: In what circumstance is the use of a race-based policy justified? One such policy is affirmative action, which favors members of disadvantaged groups in the college admissions and job application process. It began in the 1960s as a way to promote equal opportunity between the races (Sander & Taylor Jr., 2012). Nowadays, some say that affirmative action is still needed and that we haven’t yet sufficiently counterbalanced the racial discrimination in the past (Higginbotham, 2014). Moreover, experts state that affirmative action based on racial preference is the most …show more content…
An example of one such support is FIRSTNAME Higginbotham, a University of Baltimore professor of law, who believes that race-based AA is, “vital in the United States given the country’s history of […] pervasive racial discrimination” and another advocate stating in a similar fashion, “The affirmative action policies promoted by Stanford recognize that […] African Americans were treated differently because of their race. The important efforts over the years […] have gone a considerable distance in facing up to this history” (Ogletree, 2011). This argument may seem justified as affirmative action is inherently a reverse of racist preferences which seeks to provide disadvantaged groups with equal opportunity. However, large racial preferences implemented through the use of race-based AA have been shown to place minority college applicants in schools where they cannot effectively learn, perform or compete with their counterparts (Sander & Taylor, 2012). The significance of this effect is that due to their inability to perform in the environments where AA places them, their drop-out rates appear much higher than those of non-minorities. This, in turn, perpetuates some of the negative stereotypes which were used as a justification for racial discrimination in the past; specifically, providing reason for questions to be raised about the intelligence and competence of historically disadvantaged groups. Moreover, the California Proposition 209 ban on racial preferences caused a drop in the percentage of minority drop-outs in the schools impacted. Interestingly, the amount of minorities receiving Bachelor’s degrees in those schools didn’t change along with the drop-out rate (Sander & Taylor, 2012). Therefore, the absence of affirmative action does not correlate with a
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