Action? Affirmative.

There have been a lot of good points raised already in the blog so this will be difficult to come up with something new to say, but I will try anyway. I agree with the overall idea that AA is a useful tool in providing women and minorities an equal chance to find employment in formerly off limit positions. If there was ever an end for AA I believed it would only need to provide equal opportunity based on merit but this assumes that as a society we have eliminated old prejudices and the notion of denying someone employment based on race or ethnicity would sound absurd. Obviously we haven't yet reached that point, so AA needs to continue to do more. This is why I do not have many problems with things like quotas because I think that a process needs to be started that begins to set future generations of families on track to achieve such things as attending college and obtaining desirable employment. Additionally, I feel that by including women and minority groups it sets new norms that anyone with the appropriate skills can preform a job instead of a select group and therefore influences new people to seek certain jobs. AA is not enough to fix all of the problems and reasons for discrimination though.

As far as the reasons I believe in AA boils down to fairness. I do not feel as if our current generations should use as it as an apology for the past instances of atrocities like slavery because I feel unconnected to those crimes but I do feel as if we owe the use of AA to ensure that every member gets an equal chance at the same happiness. So I take a stance similar to Gery's libertarian views. In just the immediate sense that I feel it works to end arbitrary exclusion and I like AA but I think that in conjunction with other anti-poverty measures it is a means to eventually end injustices that plague society. So I would have to agree that AA action alone does not do enough to end the existing problems years of discrimination has caused many to face so other programs need to be enacted in conjunction to truly be effective in fixing the problem.