The term “affirmative action” was first used by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 in an executive order. In this order he mandated “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” The mandate was created in order to address the continuing discrimination faced by African Americans in the 1960s.

Lyndon B. Johnson reiterated the importance of affirmative action in 1965 when he said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of the race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

There are plenty of opponents to affirmative action in the United States. In fact, it was banned in California, Washington, Michigan and Nebraska. Opponents claim that affirmative action ends up helping middle-class and high-class minorities at the expense of lower-class white Americans. They claim that affirmative action is exactly the type of discrimination that it aims to end. They say that choosing to hire someone on the basis of something like race, gender or disability is just as bad as choosing to not hire that person because of those same characteristics. They say that affirmative action causes unqualified people to get placed into jobs and positions they are not capable of handling, and that the bar for performance is lowered in the whole setting, whether that be at a job or a university.

But just as Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, you cannot expect that removing the hurtles for someone in a race when they are already five laps behind is going to help them. Without some sort of small boost, there is no way people could overcome this discriminatory gap. Affirmative action increases diversity in a workplace or university, which in turn increases tolerance in that setting, which increases societal tolerance overall.

In situations where two applicants for a job or admission to a university are identical besides a person’s race, for example, then the person of color should be given the job. He or she had to put up with so much racism to get his or her position in life that it deserves consideration.

Job applications for people with “black-sounding” names are 50 percent less likely to be reviewed, according to a study at the University of Chicago. Unemployment for racial minorities is consistently much higher than the national average.

There is even a huge unemployment disparity between black and white people with the same graduate degrees. This is all according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If you believe racism does not still exist in this great nation, open your eyes. Same for sexism, ableism, ageism and homophobia. All of these things are alive and well in the United States, and if you look around for about five seconds you will see it.

Even though it is a great policy, affirmative action does cause one major problem. Minorities who are accepted to positions at institutions are not seen as adequate by their colleagues. People whisper behind their backs, “We all know how HE got in…if I were black, things would be so much easier.”

It’s these sorts of attitudes that exemplify perfectly why we still need affirmative action in this country. Minorities are automatically assumed to be inferior without any evidence.

Once we finally achieve a perfect, prejudice-free world, then affirmative action will have no place. Until then, affirmative action is vital to the protection of justice and equal opportunity for minorities.

— Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected]