While serving to redress historical discriminations, affirmative action has, inherently, built reverse discrimination against Asian and white males. Due to a limited number of accepted applicants in high-level institutions, the preference that affirmative action gives to minorities have had dramatic effects in the acceptance rates based on race, with the Asians and whites face much harder competition amongst themselves. Consequently, as Ron Unz points out, affirmative action serves as quotas on Asian Americans, and that “Asian American representation at Ivy League colleges has not increased between 1992 and 2011, despite the doubling of their college-age population. This restriction … has had a larger impact than Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota”
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A young Californian, salutatorian of his class, with a perfect ACT score, top 150 in math competition, 3rd place in national piano contest, sang at Obama’s inauguration, national debate finals, Michael was denied by six of the seven Ivy League schools to which he applied. He wrote letters to the universities, asking if it was because of race, and received vague responses. He wrote to the Department of Education, and nothing came out of it (). Just like Michael, thousands of high-achieving Asian American students are reversely discriminated through affirmative action, their achievements and merits unrecognized, although Asian-Americans have been a minority group just like blacks and Latinos, and have faced discrimination historically such as the Japanese Exclusion Act in 1924. The principles of affirmative action destroy the fundamental idea of institutions admitting students based on meritocracy, resulting in institutions to exercise race-based discrimination against whites and Asians, just to create a student body that shares similarity with the nation’s demography. In its attempt to correct past racial injustices, affirmative action has created more discrimination and more social injustice by giving race-specific advantages and preferential treatment, and by restricting the amount of majority
A young Californian, salutatorian of his class, with a perfect ACT score, top 150 in math competition, 3rd place in national piano contest, sang at Obama’s inauguration, national debate finals, Michael was denied by six of the seven Ivy League schools to which he applied. He wrote letters to the universities, asking if it was because of race, and received vague responses. He wrote to the Department of Education, and nothing came out of it (). Just like Michael, thousands of high-achieving Asian American students are reversely discriminated through affirmative action, their achievements and merits unrecognized, although Asian-Americans have been a minority group just like blacks and Latinos, and have faced discrimination historically such as the Japanese Exclusion Act in 1924. The principles of affirmative action destroy the fundamental idea of institutions admitting students based on meritocracy, resulting in institutions to exercise race-based discrimination against whites and Asians, just to create a student body that shares similarity with the nation’s demography. In its attempt to correct past racial injustices, affirmative action has created more discrimination and more social injustice by giving race-specific advantages and preferential treatment, and by restricting the amount of majority