#3 “New Sources of Diversity Critical to Our Future” Article

“New Sources of Diversity Critical to Our Future” can be found at http://0-proquest.umi.com.maurice.bgsu.edu/pqdweb?index=17&did=1343427981&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1191840865&clientId=3340.

The next piece that I chose for my media portfolio is an article I found on the Ethnic NewsWatch database. The anonymously written article is titled “New Sources of Diversity Critical to Our Future” and it appeared in the Jacksonville Free Press between August 9 and August 15. It details the slow abolishment of affirmative action in the admissions processes of secondary schools around the nation. How universities are choosing to attempt to create diverse campuses without directly looking at race at any point in the acceptance process. I chose this article because I had heard early this fall about how admissions in Michigan had changed in recent years and having this project seemed like a reason to look into it a little more.

This article can be explored using a lot of the ideas presented by Johnson in his chapters involving privilege and oppression. Because of the oppressive cycle, affirmative action was created in order to give qualified people better opportunities to get positions that they deserve in life over people that may not be quite as qualified but belong to a privileged group. For example, there was a time when women were not seen to belong in the workplace, so as women started working there was a backlash from men who still felt that they should be a home. The male bosses in charge of hiring would purposefully and sometimes overtly discriminate against the hiring of women for certain positions deemed “man’s jobs.” In an attempt to end the cycle of privilege and oppression, affirmative action made it illegal to discriminate on almost any term other than qualification and it also require certain numbers of employees to be of a minority group. In the case of these schools, they feel that due to affirmative action’s constraints, students who deserve to attend are unable to get in because they have to allot certain numbers of acceptances for different groups.

I think it’s good that some schools that are noticing that the policies meant to keep admissions boards from discriminating against racial groups are, in turn, causing discrimination against other students and they are now trying to correct the problem. The only downfall to their plan may be that in abolishing affirmative action, they may fall back into old habits and begin discriminating (maybe not based on race, but maybe financial status) against those who were originally oppressed. Like Johnson said, it is the social system and all the individuals that participate in it that cause privilege to exist, which leads me to believe that affirmative action laws may be the only thing keeping certain numbers of those individuals fair about their admission choices. I’m not saying that no progress has been made in recent years and I’m sure that thanks to affirmative action college admission boards are more diverse now, meaning that they would be less likely to lean toward one subset of people, however like I said earlier students could still be oppressed based on social status or financial status or even a poor high school education that resulted from parents not being able to get good jobs which could perpetuate through their child. You can deny all you want but I first learned in my sociology class last semester and have thought about more as I’ve typed this response, oppression/poor living conditions really are perpetuated by society. You have to have money to get out of a low social class, but the conditions and opportunities of a low social class usually prevent the next generation from making more money and therefore moving up in the world. Affirmative action helps fix this problem.