Affirmative action is arguably one of the most controversial pieces of administrative policy in the United States. Affirmative action is a policy states that a discriminated groups (i.e. minorities such as blacks and Latinos), are able to avoid discrimination when applying for placement roles, such as schools and jobs. The main criticism against this policy is that the process is bias and unfair; yeah because minorities in America have gotten it so good in the past three centuries. But one girl, who had way too much time, money, and ego on her hands, decided that this process, which is supposed to give a leg up to the discriminated, was not only unfair but unconstitutional.
Meet Abigail “Abby” Fisher. In 2008, Fisher applied to the University of Texas at Austin, a school she says she absolutely dreamed of going to. Unfortunately for her she was not accepted into the school of her dreams, but whereas any human being with common would simply apply to another school, she decided that it was the fault of affirmative action that she didn’t get in. She claims that she didn’t get into the school because she was white, despite the fact that UT is a predominantly white college with a 41 percent white population. But statistics apparently didn’t faze her because she took the case all the way to the Supreme Court…and lost.
At the time of writing this, Fisher lost the case in a 4-3 vote by the Supreme Court, which upholds affirmative action as constitutional. And what a happy day it is when you see someone, with enough privilege and free time to take a case this petty to the highest court in the land, lose. But in all seriousness this was a very close call for minorities. This woman almost single handedly would have made it more difficult for minorities to gets jobs or school admission than it already is. Let me ask you Abby, did you feel that you were so entitled to being admitted to a school, which you didn’t have the credentials to get into anyway, that you had to ruin it for students who worked for it? Her main argument seems to be that she worked hard to get to the school. Just working hard and pulling yourself up didn’t work? It seems like that classic argument to systemic racism has been debunked.
This goes so far beyond just an arbitrary court case for something that happened eight years ago; it further perpetuates how hated minorities are in an administrative setting. People like Fisher believe that, despite any pre-existing requirement from a business or college, their privilege should be enough to get in. Fisher has since graduated from Louisiana State University and works in finance, but the idea that she didn’t get into her dream school apparently has haunted her since she graduated in 2012. She believes that she would have gotten a better job had she been able to go to UT and in her eyes it’s the fault of affirmative action. This accusation is almost Donald Trump-like is its absurdity. But what Miss Fisher fails to realize is that affirmative action wasn’t made to deny her opportunity; it’s to help those to whom opportunity doesn’t come often. If she had done her research, she would have found that even with affirmative action, bias amongst minorities still exists, like the fact that a study showed that people with “white sounding names” were 50 percent more likely to get callbacks from jobs after interviews, as opposed to canidates with “black sounding names”. To top this mess, Fisher would have cheated her own demographic, seeing as white women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action; you really cannot make this stuff up. So stay mad Abby; if you had actually done your research, you could have paid for a good tutor instead of a lawyer.
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