Is Affirmative Action Necessary to Achieve Racial Equality in the United States

Affirmative Action is a plan put in place for those who have been discriminated against to finally have an equal opportunity in areas such as employment, education, and business. It is an effort to level the playing field and achieve greater equality for those who need it like women and minorities. Affirmative Action is a controversial topic that is being debated and has been for years. There are those who believe that affirmative action is not necessary like Roger Clegg and those who feel as though it is still needed like Robert Staples.

Roger Clegg is President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) and a graduate of Yale University Law School. Being the president of the CEO he directs his attention to legal issues originating from civil right laws which includes affirmative action and the problems he claims it created in the business sector and tertiary education. Before becoming the president of CEO Clegg held high positions in the Civil Rights Division and the Environment and Natural Resources Division. He was also a Deputy Assistant Attorney General and held positions at the U.S. Justice Department. Clegg claims in his article "Faculty Hiring Preferences and the Law" that affirmative action should be abolished and it should be equal rights for everyone not just a particular group.

Clegg claims that affirmative action only puts one group (African Americans) ahead of another (whites). However, Clegg neglected the fact that affirmative action is on a bare minimum bases which means that companies do not have to give a high post like Vice President to an African American; some companies figured this out and started distributing positions like receptionist, janitor, security guards, etc. to African Americans. Clegg also neglected the fact that the whites got an unfair advantage from the beginning because of the Homestead Act and affirmative action only puts African Americans in a better position than they were already in to at least have a chance to make it in the corporate world. He forgot to mention the fact that college recruitment has been based on legacy for years, which is a type of preference given by educational institutions to certain applicants on the basis of their ancestral relationship to alumni of that institution. William G. Bowen, former Princeton University president, and Derek Bok, former Harvard University president, found the overall admission rate for legacies was almost twice that for all other candidates.

However, Clegg still feels as though Affirmative Action needs to be abolished. In his article he used sources like the Civil Rights Act which only states, in a nut shell, that discrimination in education, employment, businesses, etc. is illegal therefore he claims that affirmative action is illegal. This however seems bias that Clegg views affirmative action as breaking the law because it levels the playing field for African Americans to catch up to the whites but sees nothing wrong when affirmative action is not in place and whites discriminate against African Americans and put other whites of equal ability in the forefront just because of their race. Clegg uses court decisions in the past on the subject of affirmative action to justify that it should be abolished on a "they did it there so it should be done here" bases. Furthermore, He uses no statistics supporting his claim that whites are now being treated unfair in some way. He bases his argument on how he feels rather than examples and credible evidence which means he would naturally bend in the direction of what is advantageous to him rather than what benefits everyone. Even though Clegg appeals to an ethical approach because he is the president of CEO his argument is based on emotion which makes his argument blind-sided and bias.

On the other hand, Robert Staples, a sociologist who received his Bachelors degree in sociology from California State University, Masters from San Jose State University, and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota feels that affirmative action is still need today. He is a Professor Emeritus of the University of California in San Francisco where he taught sociology. He is also an author who writes on many aspects of the black family and wrote fourteen books and hundreds of articles that are used in universities over the world as texts. Staples believes that even though affirmative action benefits white women more than it benefits any other group it still needs to be enforced to assist the African Americans in any way that it can.

Staples claims that people who oppose affirmative action only do so because they think that African Americans are the main beneficiaries, when in actuality white woman make up more than three quarters of the beneficiaries. Staples uses government documents and evidence like statistics which clearly shows what he is arguing. It would be fair to say that Staples argument is bias because he is Afrian American. However, Staples is a retired sociologist professor who taught at the University of California, therefore affirmative action does not affect him as much as it would affect a white man arguing against affirmative action because he does not think African Americans should take part of the 75 percent that whites hold for occupying the top white collar jobs.

In Staples argument he also uses his own experience since he lived in the most diverse and densely inhabited state, California. Experience would be one of the best examples here because it lets the reader know that the argument is not based on hear say or propaganda but real life experiences that the author encountered while in an environment relevant to