ly qualifications and excellence should serve as criteria. The problem with affirmative action is that it is not fair to all, and the problem with the plan of the opponents is that it ignores the fact that minorities are starting from a point of great disadvantage.
One argument by opponents of affirmative action is that while affirmative action may have been a good idea and a necessary action to redress past grievances, it has accomplished its goal and should be abandoned because now it is becoming counter-productive. The belief is that thirty years of busing and other affirmative action efforts have either been successful and have eliminated the need for further redress or have been terrible failures that have done nothing to reduce discrimination and so should be abandoned in favor of a different approach. Generally, those offering this view believe that affirmative action has been unfair and that any argument holding that it is a redress for past grievances can be countered with the view that we have given this approach 30 years and that that is all the redress that is necessary. This view first ignores the degree to which blacks, say, have been excluded:
To put that into perspective, recall that the first black settlers arrived here as slaves in 1619. In the 376 years since, African-Americans have enjoyed two periods of relative normalcy, two periods of about thirty years each in which they were subject to neither involuntary servitude nor officially sanctioned second-class citizenship. And those two periods were separated by about seventy years (Wycliff 11).
Women, arguably, have only been competitive for the last 25 years or so, and neither the number of black or female success stories reflects anything like their proportion of the population.
The belief that affirmative action is in need of repair has become accepted by both political parties in some degree, but generally the Democrats would seek to retain t...