SOC 350 Global Social Change

Please read the following speech and provide a 250-word count response. References and citations are optional. No plagiarism, please. Must use correct grammar.

 

Affirmative action has been heavily debated throughout the years and it’s a policy that is often misunderstood. As individuals with great influence and power, I would like to talk to you about the changes and opportunities you as leaders can create in school diversity.

 

We are a diverse nation that lacks inclusion. Affirmative action has helped us move past segregation, but it has caused some issues. Some students have sued their schools, such as when Abigail Fisher.

 

Fisher believed that the school had admitted less qualified students than her based upon her race (Liptak, 2016). The purpose of Affirmative Action was to include individuals, not exclude them. Still, Affirmative Action does succeed in including students that would have otherwise prevented them from attending certain universities due to racial bias.

 

I believe it is better to immediately implement social programs that would aid impoverished communities, and remove all barriers to higher education, I challenge you to help by funding full tuition for all students. Poverty has a tremendous toll on people’s mental health and often causes them to perform poorly in school.

 

By attacking poverty through universal pre-k, continued investment, and social programs, we can begin to undo the vicious cycles that have been placed upon people of color through redlining and systemic racism.

 

Also, leaving education to the private sector has often allowed white individuals to determine a students’ future based upon their race. This is why we still see schools segregated today, Nikole Hannah Jones is an investigative reporter, at The New York Times, stated that she found “this one thing that really worked, that cut the achievement gap between black and white students by half.” This thing that really worked was integrated schools (This American Life, 2018).

 

Having people of color in positions like yours will help avoid prejudice and help with integration. By extending the education pipeline to include post-high school education, we can give all people the opportunity to attend a university and receive an education regardless of skin color.