by Unqualified author

Created on: May 14, 2009   Last Updated: May 20, 2009

For years, federal policy has rewarded corporations for hiring minority groups; the logic behind this is that those groups start off at a disadvantage and should therefore be given a boost in the competition for jobs and university admissions. However, this theory ignores the root cause of the disadvantages faced by these minority groups and rewards the wrong individuals. It is true that African Americans in the United States begin with a disadvantage. However, the root cause of this disadvantage is not racism; the root cause of this disadvantage is poverty.

According to the US census, one third of African Americans under the age of 18 are living in poverty. However, these are often not the African Americans that benefit from Affirmative Action. The African American children growing up in middle and upper class families are the ones that gaining advantages in the competition for jobs and admissions. This undercuts the entire logic of giving racial preference. The logic should be to give an advantage to those that are provided with fewer resources, regardless of ethnic background. For this reason, our affirmative action structure should be altered to be based on income rather than on historic discrimination.

In order to proceed with this idea, it is important to recognize why poverty provides an inherent disadvantage. First, it is important to recognize the impact that poverty has on education. The dominant means of school funding in the United States is through the use of local property taxes. However, the property taxes in poor communities should obviously be lower than the property taxes in wealthier areas. This leads to an immediate difference in the educational budget of the poor school and the wealthy school. The impact of this is that the poor school cannot draw the same quality of teachers, provide the same teacher to student ratio, or provide the same quality of resources. This immediately leads to the poor school being less competitive. Additionally, many schools are able to raise money for projects and extra-curricular activities by going out into the community. However, the community that is living in poverty cannot raise the same amount of money as the country club communities where the parents own businesses and have a greater amount of disposable income. This serves to reify the structure of inequality in education which in turn expands the inequality of opportunity in education. The student that attends the less competitive school does not

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