Does affirmative action help against or promote discrimination? I would have to say the question is not so easily answered by a yes or no. The answer is more along the lines of both. When affirmative action was first coined by president Kennedy, there was a need for it. We were in the middle of an equal rights movement by African Americans and women and there was retaliation. African Americans and women both wanted the same rights as white males had, this prompted marches and tear gas and senseless beatings with assassinations on both black and white sides. We lost both Kennedy and King.

With Kennedy gone and our country at war with itself, president Johnson saw the need to implement affirmative action. This meant for many segregated communities that they were going to have to learn to play nice. To put it simply, if your school or workplace did not include African Americans, It soon would even if the supreme court had to get involved. This meant that a certain percentage of workers and students had to be something other than white, even if they were less qualified than someone else.

Affirmative action in the 60’s and 70’s was a much needed thing to get our country out of it’s redneck way of thinking. A lot of minority families benefited from it. Now though, there is no need for affirmative action. Now it is harder for a white guy who is more qualified than some minorities to get a job. There is very little discrimination in the workplace today when you think of it in the sense that it was in the sixties, but try getting a job at a place who knows they need to fill a certain job with a minority to get the government off it’s back.

So you see, at one point and time affirmative action helped more people than it hurt. Now it is just the opposite, it promotes mediocre employees who feel a sense of entitlement to their job. There is no competition for jobs because they are handed out by an out dated system that no longer serves a purpose. Now is the time to make our own decisions of who we will hire without a dictating government policy breathing down our necks. Affirmative action discriminates against those most qualified. Any way you look at it we are still discriminating, so what exactly did we fix?