Affirmative Action

In this blog post, I'm going to be talking about affirmative action and if it should be used when doing college admissions. Affirmative action was put into place to help get rid of the discrimination that was present. All affirmative action is doing is creating even more discrimination. Discrimination is the act of favoring one group of people over another group. All affirmative action is is favoring a certain persons skin color when deciding if they should be accepted into a certain school. By using someones race to help decide if they should be admitted into a college is flat out racism. A person's race is not something that you have control over so it should be used in favor or against anyone. Not only is it racist, but it's not in the best interest of the schools. When a school is decided who to accept into their school, they look for the most qualified students. When using affirmativve action, it makes it easier for under qualified students to get accepted over students who are more qualified. After looking over all the different pro's and con's for affirmative action, the cons have outweighed the pro's. Overall, I think that affirmative action should be banned in all universities.

"White Like Me"

        After reading the chapter "Denial", I agreed with what Wise was saying. One big part that he talked about was about the denial regarding the privileges of white people. They're main reasoning behind this is the classic quote, "What about Oprah?". I agree with the author when he says that that is a ridiculous reason to prove that there isn't any white privilege in this world. There are obviously going to be some black people that "make it" but looking at a few individual success stories isn't going to give you a good or realistic picture of the larger social realities. Another interesting point he brought up was when he talked about the problems a "no whites" policy in hospital rooms would occur and the not so many problems a "no blacks" policy would have. He goes on to discuss the imbalance of whites and blacks in the medical profession and how whites have received more opportunities that are needed for the profession. He tells a story of a white man who went around to different hospitals trying to get a place where they would let it be a black free operating room. I was very shocked that he found a place that would do this. If it was the other way around, I feel like it would have been a completely different story all together.

Hidden Bias

Last week in class we took a test to see if we had any hidden bias towards blacks. It said that I had a slight preference towards whites. I wasn't that shocked by the results from the test. I'm not a racist person but I understand that its not that out of the ordinary to have a slight preference towards your race. Most people feel more comfortable around people that are like them. I also didn't really think that the test could be that accurate. I mean all you had to do in the test was say if a person was black or white and if the words were good and bad. I don't know how this could be a good indicator to find out if you have any bias towards a certain race. I know I messed up a bunch of times but that was mostly due to the fact that I was trying to go as fast as I could and not because I feel a certain way towards black people. Overall, I guess the test was pretty accurate with its results of me but I feel that they could have came to that conclusion after I checked off that I was white.