Kennedy's Arguments Against Affirmative Action

One concept that continues to be a hot-button issue throughout America's history, as well as in present-day is affirmative action. Affirmative action, at its root base, is defined as the favoring of a group of people based on previous discrimination and disenfranchisement throughout history. Specifically, affirmative action plays an integral role in the admission of disadvantaged minorities into a vast number of schools, organizations, and occupations. Moreover, a new conflict has arisen regarding affirmative action: whether or not the criteria should shift from race, gender, and ethnicity, to class and poverty. From a non-minority's perspective on the controversial issue of affirmative action, one could make the argument that affirmative
Kennedy's ideology on the view of affirmative action is seen as objective and unbiased rather than subjective, in my opinion. Through his stating of past occurrences and grievances as well as advocacy by politicians on the issue of affirmative action implementation in his book, Kennedy is able to inform his audience on whether or not affirmative action is beneficial without overtly pleading his case for either side. Furthermore, Kennedy states, “President Bill Clinton was conspicuously friendly to affirmative action, insisting upon a cabinet 'that looked like America.' He was the first president to devote an entire speech to justifying affirmative action. Addressing the subject in 1995, he maintained that affirmative action remains a useful tool for widening economic and educational opportunity” (Kennedy,
In his article titled: Why Labor Should Support Class-Based Affirmative Action Kahlenburg provides insight as to why this change in affirmative action is necessary. On the topic of why this view is a more progressive option today, Kahlenburg states, “Forty-five years later, Americans are still fighting over affirmative action, and the policy of racial preferences in higher education remains a fundamentally conservative practice. An ideal admissions system would consider merit in the broadest sense: not just grades and test scores and leadership, but all of those things in the context of what obstacles a student has had to overcome in life. Research suggests that today, those obstacles are primarily economic in nature. Anthony Carnevale at Georgetown University finds that a child growing up with socioeconomic disadvantages—in families where parents have little formal education, income, and wealth, in neighborhoods with concentrations of poverty and the like—is expected to score 399 points lower on the math and verbal sections of the SAT than the most socioeconomically advantaged children”