Quote:
Originally Posted by looneycat
hmmm, let's see, my father couldn't get a job because his name was too ethnic (Jewish), he changed his name and had a job within a week, because jewish isn't a color. I went to college on both my and my father's hard work. There were black people in my classes then.
I held a bunch of miserable jobs until I re-educated myself in the 'new' (well at that time) world of computers and never looked back from there. If affirmative action was to succeed then by now those people helped would have instilled a respect for education and job skills in their children and the problem would have solved itself, but freebies don't create workers they create takers who don't connect financial gains with work or careers but rather just putting their hands out and saying pity poor me.affirmative action? screw affirmative action, what truly works is work itself.
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I actually think that you've made my point. Your Dad couldn't get a job because his name was too ethnic, so he changed his name and had a job within a week. He experienced terrible discrimination and was denied employment he was qualified for because of his ethnicity. But he changed his name and got a job within a week. Now imagine if you will that your Dad was black. Changing his name wouldn't have helped, would it? He would have been denied employment and that just might have had a negative impact on the way your life turned out. According to historian David Oshinsky, on writing about Jonas Salk, "Most of the surrounding medical schools (Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had rigid quotas in place. In 1935 Yale accepted 76 applicants from a pool of 501. About 200 of those applicants were Jewish and only five got in." He notes that the dean's instructions were remarkably precise: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all." Jews and Catholics could hide their religion or change their names, but Blacks couldn't change anything. But to return to my original premise, I don't believe that the argument should be whether affirmative action should have ever existed to correct centuries of racial discrimination, but should be whether or not it has accomplished its goal and should now be ended. As I said before, I have seen no metrics that can measure its effectiveness, and I think its time for it to end.