Aff*rmative Act*on

     One of the most provocative topics for highschoolers and parents, especially in a place like troy is affirmative action. This complicated matter confuses me at times and I've come across a wide range of opinions on it but I think I've developed my main concerns, and those concerns are for my fellow students who are not exactly misinformed about the practice of affirmative action but rather unmindful of its purpose and results.

     While I don't think any decisions should be made based purely on race, I cannot get myself to say "race should not play a factor in decisions" because if you think about it, how else do companies consciously become inclusive and how do employers transition from an evident lack of diversity, to accurate representation? The consciousness of racial prioritization has to be there to change those situations. And when it comes to schools- while it could have been done in different ways- affirmative action was there to include minorities in a time of great misrepresentation. 

     Now we live in a more "woke" time, but the disparities are still so obvious. Just looking at what we talked about in class about neighborhoods and living situations proves that the effects of segregated practices still linger.

     For this reason, I do not think it's fair to take away affirmative action completely, and this is where many of my peer's opinions come in. I think affirmative action should switch to a socioeconomic scale rather than racial, and it seems like most people can get behind that.

    But like I said, my issue is less with the policy itself but with students, and I've noticed particularly Asian American student's outrage. I understand that it feels bad to meet the qualifications for your favorite college and beyond, and find that someone got in with a less impressive resume. My question is if race was "out of the question" and we switched to economic background, wouldn't these cases still happen? Because many of us Asian Americans are sitting pretty in our wide range of... lower to upper-middle-class households so it's not like we would be catered to in a newer version of affirmative action. 

     I am going to put my last concern blatantly and it is my concern for growth of resentment towards Black students who not only aren't the ones instating this policy but are starting to face a new hatred that I fear will make my peers participate in societal racism.