“Affirmative Action simply means that you take a person’s whole life experience when judging his/her qualifications.”
No, it doesn’t. Affirmative action means taking affirmative steps to hire/promote/enroll people of particular backgrounds. The only way to do that is at the expense of more qualified persons.
Taking into account all of a person’s history is common sense, but it is not affirmative action.
If we want more black people, for instance, to be doctors, we can’t start with setting quotas for blacks at medical school. Or undergrad school. Or anywhere else. We have to start at the very beginning. We have to make quality education available to all children (no child left behind in no way accomplishes this). More importantly, we have to address the cultural issues that prevent people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds from becoming well educated. To deny that certain cultures, in general, emphasize education less than others is to turn a blind eye to reality. Until that lack of emphasis on education is changed, people from those backgrounds will continue to lag behind the rest of us. And for us to “help” them by hiring them regardless of their lack of qualifications does nobody any good. If we want to help them, we need to figure out a way for them to want to get educated. If that ever changes, then the number of qualified applicants will be much more evenly spread out among all backgrounds, and we won’t need affirmative action.
