Maxine Waters wrote:I think it's a real shame scholarship money can't be given out to the candidate that shows the most potential and who perhaps has the most pressing economic situation. Why does race have to be part of the criteria?
Most scholarships don't take race into account, so it can?
The justification for affirmative action goes something like this:
Society is rife with deeply-embedded prejudice and bigotry that feed tangible discriminatory actions at the public and private levels. Additionally, various institutions within the United States, governments, schools, businesses, long had laws and policies that sustained, fostered, enabled, and effectuated this discrimination. After hundreds years of such policy has helped create a society riven with dysfunction and prejudice, is it really justice for them to decide to simply wash its hands of the matter and adopt a laissez-faire attitude? In the sense that if you break something, you have a moral obligation to fix something. Even if we take as a given that a laissez-faire approach is ideal as an initial matter, any intellectually honest person would have to acknowledge that a situation created by hundred years of public and private policy pushing ideas, norms, and beliefs firmly in one direction creates a vastly different social environment than would prevail without that. People look at this and ask those institutions and individuals to counter-balance that with allowing preferential treatment of certain races to offset societal disadvantages created by this past and present situation.
I'm not an affirmative action supporter, but I don't think you actually understand the basis for it and I think it is intellectually dishonest or ignorant not to reckon with a strong case for it.
