An Argument Against Affirmative Action
“…a factory owner has a line position open on a rather dangerous machine. Two men apply for the job. One of them has worked on such a machine before, for several years at a competitor’s factory. The other has worked on factory lines for several years, but never on this particular machine. The second person has only one arm.
The business owner might choose to hire the first man. He has more experience with the equipment, and in the event of an emergency, this person has a physically superior ability to manipulate the safety controls involved with stopping the machine. This is safer not only for the line worker hired, but also others working in the vicinity. It’s a wiser business decision.
Now as I understand it, (by all means, someone please correct me if I’m wrong), if person #1 is hired and person #2 decides it’s discriminatory, person #2 can enlist the help of an AA attorney and sue the business owner. At that point, the business owner’s livelihood and reputation are in jeopardy for making a logical business decision involving the safety of the workers.” – Kelly Trainer
Where is it written that affirmative action requires a shop owner to hire an unqualified black person to operate a dangerous piece of equipment over a qualified white person? Do you know that this has happened? Or is this just the most extreme example that you could conjure up? Some people have this idea in their head that affirmative action somehow overrules common sense. If an unqualified person, a one armed man, is hired to operate dangerous equipment and someone is injured in the process then that company now has a serious lawsuit on its hands from the injured individual or his or her family.
This is just more of the affirmative action horror stories people with a white mindset who are so opposed to some kind of racially oriented social consciousness tell each other to justify their discrimination. This analogy ranks right up there with the company that had to hire the black person from the bus stop to be their new nuclear physicist because of affirmative action. The very suggestion of the thought is ridiculous.
Affirmative action is a program that tries to influence companies that have a history of avoiding the employment of minorities guidelines to do so. This doesn’t mean that they have to hire any and every black joe schmoe to fill their positions. The rules of employment remain in place. If a minority candidate is employed they must be qualified to do the job. A lot of people like to make the assumption that it is impossible for a company to find an educated black person for any professional position. It is virtually impossible for a black person to be a skilled machine operator unless he is flawed and has one arm. The assumption is that black people are always the inferior one.
Affirmative action is not the draconian social directive that forces employers to lose money. For some companies, affirmative action isn’t even an issue because the company has already demonstrated a willingness to be socially responsible and racially inclusive. But for the institutions that continue to operate as a white only club house, the company needs to find a minimum number of minority candidates for their positions. This doesn’t mean that a bank with an all white staff needs to go down to the park and find a black man feeding pigeons to fill their new vice president of marketing position.
The concept of saddling enterprising institutions with unqualified black people is a fantasy used to fuel white people’s angst against black people. There are black people who are very much qualified to be a machinist or a nuclear physicist or a bank vice president or whatever any company may need. Black people run the gamut from the unqualified to the seasoned, experience professional just like our white counterparts. Common sense should tell everyone that.
But instead, white people are happy to reinforce their superiority complex with ridiculous ideas that black people are intellectually, physically, and ethically inferior and incapable of handling the important jobs. The funny thing is that a racist employer who would want to confirm the inadequacy of black people would hire an unqualified black person out of spite just to show how affirmative action doesn’t work or how black people are not dependable.
Affirmative action is not oppressive. Affirmative action is not reverse discrimination. Affirmative action doesn’t go into a company and tells the management that they must find an unqualified minority candidate over the qualified white candidate. These are just stories of urban legend designed to frighten the white community and harden white people against any type of racial understanding. Affirmative action doesn’t take white people’s jobs. No one has ever lost their job because of affirmative action. This is just more of the racist hype people with a white mindset spread in order to undermine more black employment.
Why don’t white people ever tell the story of the company that was so racist that they chose to hire an unqualified white person for a job over the much more qualified black person? What about the story of the white business executive unqualified to run a corporation but instead ran the company into the ground? Or how about the horror story of an unqualified white man that managed to become President and ran an entire country into the ground? These aren’t urban legends. These are facts that we can all point to and confirm without exaggeration or without flat out lying. Stories of unqualified people are not regulated to any particular color.
Affirmative action is not the problem. It is the racism of people who refuse to give people from the black community an opportunity without some kind of external pressure. If we could rely on employers to honestly measure candidates by the content of their character then affirmative action would have never come into play in the first place. But somehow this is lost and replace with a concept that affirmative action wants white people to give up their livelihood for the first black person who walks through the door. If employers must always give preference to the black person why is it a fact that black unemployment is always significantly higher than white unemployment?
People who are against affirmative action are quick to only tell one side of the story. And in most cases, the side these people tell is something akin to an fairytale complete with an evil job stealing black person that stokes their fear of white people and harden their hearts to black people. The author of the quote above asked for correction if wrong. The author, and people who think like the author, are very wrong.
