by Brittany B

Created on: September 13, 2007

When the civil rights movement occurred in the sixties, it was seen as a huge step forward for not only racial minorities, but women as well. However, looking at the past forty odd years of "achievement" shows that it has actually accomplished very little, and in some cases has even caused dramatic backsliding in social status, responsibility, and stereotypical thinking. Setting aside the feminine aspect of the Civil Rights Movement, as it does not pertain to this particular discussion, a close examination of the racial minorities following their integration into the formerly whites only public schools. This examination will prove that the racial minority, particularly blacks, have suffered lowered social status on a massive scale, lowered responsible actions and complete failure of racial morality.

Before the onset of the Civil Rights Movement, racial minorities were denied many jobs based on skin color alone. Therefore the jobs the minorities were able to obtain became extremely important in showing worth and proper work ethic. However, since minorities, particularly blacks were allowed into the public school systems, they were able to obtain "better", IE higher paying jobs, which were granted to them on basis of skin color alone through Affirmative action programs. Therefore they did not have to earn their positions and no longer respected the fruits of labor that effort and hard work bring. This caused a near complete collapse of responsibility which was fully completed with the introduction of welfare. With blacks and other minorities no longer being taught pride in a job well done, they had no qualms obtaining government assistance, when just a generation before them, such actions would not have been just reprehensible but an outright impossibility due to the level of pride they had in themselves. Now, with Affirmative action, "equality" in schools and the overabundance of government assistance, they have no training to respect themselves and no proper model of what they should strive for in terms of respectability, responsibility, and reliability.
Due to this newfound independence resulting from the break with effort and hard work, as well as the similarly acquired taste for overuse and abuse of governmental assistance programs, many of the racial majority has come to completely disregard racial minorities as worthwhile human beings. Even before the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent integration of public school systems, the opinion of racial minorities

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