Former Senator Bob Dole once said of affirmative action, "Our country is no longer the land of opportunity but a pie chart, where jobs and other benefits are often awarded not because of hard work or merit, but because of someone's biology" (www.washingtonpost.com). Why should we oppress a new generation, and risk planting the seed of racism, to correct the mistakes of our forefathers? There are many problems with affirmative action: including effectiveness, being misconceptions of its original intentions, and being the moral issues.
             Statistics from the University of California Berkeley show that black dropout rates are more than 50% higher than whites or Asians dropout rates. (www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dltcl/badgerlink/). Are we trying to encourage failure by placing many unqualified students where they cannot possibly succeed? The brilliant idea of affirmative action took place by giving minorities jobs over whites. However, there is an old adage that holds very true in the case of affirmative action. The phrase is "two wrongs never make a right." Counteracting racial prejudice in the work place by simply reversing the roles never did and never will resolve the problem it simply changed the group of people that prejudice was aimed at from the minority to the majority.
             The second problem with affirmative action is misconceptions of its original intentions. Affirmative action was first created in an effort to help minorities leap the discriminative barriers present when the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 first took action. However, since that time affirmative action has evolved into many different misconceptions among not only the people it was designed to open the doors for but also the school systems, employers and others who ended up implementing a quota system. The reason that affirmative action was started was that white people were getting opportunities that colored people weren't based solely on w
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