Affirmative action was has been used by businesses and universities to diversify the student body and the workplace since the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy was the first to use the term and President Lyndon B. Johnson heavily endorsed the idea. Liberals throughout the decades have hailed affirmative action as the panacea to racial homogeneity and the number one method to breaking the glass ceiling for minorities. However, those who perpetuate affirmative action are actually perpetuating the racist attitudes that necessitated the program in the first place.

Affirmative action is not affirmative. It promotes forced diversity in the place of eased racial relations. To elaborate, universities and businesses set a quota for themselves when it comes to accepting minorities. The emphasis is shifted from the quality of a black or Hispanic individual’s work to meeting that quota. Affirmative action, for the most part, applies only to quantity, not quality when it comes to groups underrepresented in certain careers, businesses and schools.

The majority of die-hard liberals refuse to look at affirmative action from different angles and perspectives. They dismiss “reverse discrimination” against whites but do not realize that affirmative action reinforces racism against minorities. Affirmative action is based on two premises: 1) the attitudes of the majority are automatically racist and 2) the stereotype that minorities need a pick-me-up or else they will be unable to gain access to beneficial opportunities. These premises encourage minorities to victimize themselves and encourages the majority to continue to resent minorities and their automatic “preferred” status. Instead of healing racial tensions, affirmative action exacerbates them.

Perpetuating affirmative action may diversify campuses and workplaces but it also perpetuates the idea that minorities can not make it on their own. The program undervalues the achievements of successful blacks and Hispanics and constantly forces minorities to be seen at a disadvantage. Affirmative action may have been beneficial as a jump-start for minorities in the 1960s but as an ongoing program, it prevents society from progressing beyond it’s extremely racist past. Racism still exists in the present, but affirmative action has become just another instrument of pity.

Many liberals can be blind to the ills of affirmative action. They assume that only disgruntled whites and Asians oppose the program. They also assume that all minorities accept affirmative action in the same way that they assume that all blacks should be Democrats. Minorities who go against affirmative action are seen as biting the hand that feeds them instead of taking every advantage thrown at them. Have minorities no dignity? Why do they need a hand to feed them? Can’t they take care of themselves? Such complaints against affirmative action are dismissed as racism, when the program itself is inherently racist.

If minorities are ever to be taken seriously in this society then pick-me-ups such as affirmative action must be removed. In this day and age, minorities should be able to gain opportunities through their own merit not through the hand-outs of the majority. As human beings, minorities have the potential and ability to succeed just like everybody else. Their achievements should mean more than a business or a school just trying to fill a minority quota or trying to appear diverse.

Liberals who support affirmative action need to wake up and move forward in their approach to solving racial disparities. Instead of being given a free ride, minorities should be encouraged to work hard and should be discouraged from victimizing and limiting themselves according to all the stereotypes out there. Affirmative action has forced employers and admission officers to constantly look at color, when the true solution to society’s ongoing race problem is to become progressively color blind. True liberals will look towards the future without affirmative action and the new wrongs it has wrought. They will work to dismantle this obsolete program.