Understanding Affirmative Action from APIDA Perspective by Jeremy Gu

Before coming to IAC, I hadn’t known much about affirmative action except for the fact that as a policy that seemed to help minority groups was being opposed by minority groups as well. So it was a mess that seemed to be impossibly difficult to understand. And after we had a debate about affirmative action, I still think its an impossibly difficult situation because it is in fact a policy that is both beneficial and harmful to minority groups. But at least now I know what it is: Affirmative action are policies that are put in place by institutions such as a quota or more guidelines in order to give certain minorities an advantage in the process.

After all of the For group’s quotes and actual arguments, they were declared the winner of the debate. We learned from them that affirmative action was that it helps disadvantaged individuals and promotes diversity. Affirmative action was put in place by some schools in order to help disadvantaged individuals that may have suffered from discrimination in the past. Thus, it makes sense that it does in fact do this and does it well. When affirmative action was dropped in some states, there was a major decrease in businesses that were owned by minority groups and women. Also, schools that had affirmative action were, on average, much more diverse in the student population. Hence, with affirmative action, it would be a win win situation for the school and certain minority groups.

Being in the Against group, the more creative group, we created a presentation populated with many many gifs and images that highlighted meritocracy, diversity of opinion, and the cookie cutter problem. First off, affirmative action seems to give rise to a race as an admission or hiring factor rather than actual merit and work ethic. Along this vein, the cookie cutter problem, which is when people have to go out of their way to not fulfill stereotypes, also takes away from actual accomplishments. Students in minority groups must stand out in their group which means to not do activities, even if you were to enjoy them, if that activity fulfills a stereotype its probably best to not do that activity if you wanted to get into a competitive school. Then, the last problem is that racial diversity doesn’t equal diversity of ideas and opinions so although racial diversity helps a college “look good”, it doesn’t actually bring as much benefit as diversity of opinions does to a campus.

Both sides of our debate made a ton of sense and at the end, I came to the realization that affirmative action will always be a questionable topic since both sides have their point. This made me think, maybe the best way to make colleges more fair is to keep colleges merit based and then tackle the problem way earlier in a student’s educational career. Passing legislation to give every kid equal opportunities to learn what they want to learn so that when they get to college admissions and the workforce, the selections can actually match merit and work ethic and all the other characteristics that actually matter.