The Supreme Court heard arguments last Wednesday over the propriety and legality of employing affirmative action in the college admissions process. Abigail Fisher, a white female rejected from the University of Texas at Austin, brought suit against UT claiming that she was denied admission while the university admitted less qualified minority students in furtherance of its desire to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students on campus.

I oppose the use of affirmative action in college admissions, the workplace and essentially any other setting. I am pleased that Fisher had the courage to revive this discussion, given the almost certainty that our hypersensitive, obsessively-politically-correct society would be quick to brand any white person willing to challenge this biased system of admissions as racist. In its effort to remedy the lingering effects of a more racially segregated past where one skin color was preferred over another, affirmative action has become its own insidious form of discrimination where the preference is not for one skin color over another, but for skin color over merit. And merit be damned as the country continues to self-medicate with affirmative action to relieve its guilt over a history of which most living today were not even a part. Yet we of merit, affirmative action’s victims, are now the ones who feel pressured to be silent for fear of accusations of racism. It is this unfairly presumed racism that supports a false, warped argument in the policy’s favor that has enabled affirmative action to continue for as long as it has.

The presumed racism of upper-middle-class white people is drastically misaligned. In fact, today, in terms of direct statements of discrimination and disdain, one is more likely to hear disapproving sneers about “rich white people” than anything derogatory about minorities. There certainly is no shortage of people who identify Mitt Romney and “his people” as disgusting, horrible people who deserve no respect but rather a plethora of unflattering associations. For fear of being cloaked socially with the “RWP” mantle, many seem to hastily make apologetic claims of empathy with other groups and to desperately reject this likely-fitting title by scoffing disdainfully at “RWP” somewhere in their disclaimer.

Affirmative action is disrespectful to its beneficiaries and should be offensive. One’s race should not be the determining factor to what makes them acceptable, in the college admissions process or otherwise. Who wants his or her entire range of hobbies, skills, talents and ambitions to take a backseat to his or her race, check marks on an application, irreparably skewing admissions officers’ attentions? The dream of the Civil Rights Movement was that all people be judged by who they are rather than by the color of their skin. Removing skin color as a barrier to the otherwise qualified is not the same as allowing it to trump the otherwise more qualified. Affirmative action is no less an ill than the ones Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought to cure.

While race is the target of most affirmative action programs, there are numerous small differences or disadvantaged affiliations that could benefit from such a preference if the desire is to compensate for all types of discrimination rather than race alone. Proponents argue that affirmative action is necessary to make up for centuries of slavery and segregation, in which virtually none of us living today were participants. Yet women, LGBT individuals, people of certain religious affiliations and others suffer presently in a society that remains as charged by differences today as in the past. The answer is not to award special preference to all of these individuals; it is to abolish affirmative action and to advance this country as the meritocracy that it must be for our future. We cannot afford to spend another generation, even another year, trying to make each other feel better about the past. In particular, youth-filled colleges are hardly appropriate environments to materialize such history-driven guilt trips.

UT rejected Abigail Fisher based on merit, but she says merit that was racialized – that is, merit categorized by racially motivated academic skews in a way that rejected Abigail in favor of lesser-qualified minority applicants with lower standards to meet. Sound familiar? I guess we only thought we had eliminated such discrimination nearly 50 years ago.

This column was published as part of a point-counterpart series. Read Jan Jaro’s column, “On campuses and in workplaces, affirmative action still vital.”

Sydney Zink is a Communication freshman. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, email a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].

Editor’s Note: Due to technical difficulties, a previous version of this column was briefly removed from The Daily’s website during the first week of November. The Daily has restored the original column with the first 284 comments replicated below.

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