According to about.com, affirmative action is a federal agenda initiated in the 1960’s that’s designed to counteract historic discrimination faced by ethnic minorities, women and other underrepresented groups.

Affirmative action set guidelines on how diverse a body of people, such as a student body, need to be. During the segregation of races and gender in the past, many jobs, programs, sports teams, schools, and many other groups chose a male Anglo-Saxon stereo type because they believed that minorities could not work as fast, think as smart, or play as hard as white Aryan stereotypes. In order to give rights back to those underrepresented, the U.S. government set quotas on how ‘equal’ and ‘fair’ every U.S. citizen should be.

Because of all the unequal treatment of different genders and races that an act should have been put in place, the California government put in place Civil Rights Acts to protect new rights and to enforce equal opportunity. In 1964, California passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to establish a commission on equal employment opportunity. Thirty two years later, California legislation passed proposition 209 which amended the state constitution to prohibit state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, in areas of employment, public contracting, and public education. Nine other states have taken measures to stop affirmative action and eight have prevailed in court. Colorado’s proposition 46 was an unsuccessful bill proposed by the people, for the people. It is in almost every single way, exactly the same as proposition 209 in California.

The individual, the human being, the personality that has been shaped today should be whats on an application and not the preferences on that outside that defines the individual. If diversity were really what the colleges and employers were looking for, then shouldn’t they pick applicants based on ranges of accomplishments such as team and individual sports, service groups, music, student government, ASB, and many others? People shouldn’t even be regarded as ‘different’ on an application because under all the history and differences, we are all human and its what we do who defines us, not what we look like.