Our managment class briefly discussed the issue of Equal Opportunity.
I found the argument that our teacher presented a bit out of whack. The story goes that there was a man named Jerry Rivers who applied to Brooklyn Law School with excellent test scores, but they did not admit him until he checked the box on his application making him as hispanic. Do you know the name Jerry Rivers? ...pause... His stage name is Geraldo Rivera.
The story leads us to the conclusion that Geraldo Rivera wouldn't be the big name in showbusiness he is today if not for his choice to make use of equal opportunity policies in place at the college.
Well there's a load of bunk.
Problem number 1: Geraldo Rivera's name was never Jerry Rivers. That's a myth. Curiosities surround the name on Geraldo's birth certificate, but never whether it was "Rivers". His name has always been Gerald, and his father's Puerto Rican side of the family has always called him Geraldo. His mother added an extra "i" (Rivera -> Riviera) because of ethnic concerns, but no one disputes that his father's name was Rivera.
This combats the idea that his admittance to law school was contingent on his name did not triggering some ethnic alarm that the school had required.
Problem number 2: A few logical fallacies apply to this story. It's a post hoc argument, for one thing. Assuming that Geraldo got into law school only after he checked the ethnicity box isn't a valid argument. No one presented causal proof that his final admittance was a direct result of his specification of ethnicity. Had he applied to the college again without checking that box, they might have accepted him - who knows?
Also it seems that there is a bit of an appeal to authority in this story. Does invoking the name of Geraldo Rivera make the story's premise stronger? If the story concerned someone of no note, would it have made any difference?
Problem number 3: The premise of the story breaks down when you wonder what Rivera's stint at law school had to do with his TV career. Maybe his education helped prepare him for TV by making him more inquisitive or more investigative.
But he had already completed college before he had been admitted to law school, a specialized school for learning law. Rivera himself admits that he had no experience in broadcasting prior to starting on TV, and the network had to send him on a crash course to learn the intricacies of broadcasting.
While it's possible that law school might have put Rivera in the right place to be selected for the TV job, it wasn't a prerequisite for it.
To the topic of equal opportunity in general, I think it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's completely unfair that employers or admissions offices deny entry to qualified applicants simply because a business/school has to fulfill an artificial need to employ/enroll minorities. If all majority candidates are better qualified than applying minority candidates, then why choose the inferior worker? This would be the case even in localized sectors where caucasian workers are the minority and might not be the better candidates for a job, but would be selected to support diversity.
On the other hand, it seems true that minority applicants would have a harder time becoming qualified in the first place. The idea here (and this is the fertilizer in which equal opportunity blooms) is that minorities don't have equal access to quality education in employment fields as do the majorities.
For instance, inner city black students aren't getting as good of an education as suburban white students. The theory here is that good teachers will earn more money and seek out jobs that will pay that money, and so end up in the suburban areas where the "clientele" is more affluent. The inner city kids get stuck with the lower echelon of teachers, thus a lesser-quality education. As a result, they can't get the high-paying jobs because their skills aren't on par with the suburban kids. Witness the vicious cycle of the white man always putting a brother down.
Equal Opportunity is in place to enable those who had potential but no possibility for a better life a chance to bring themselves into the cycle. It's not an issue of racial integration, it's an attempt to acheive socioeconomical balance.
And it's crap.
I posit that we move to a complete meritocracy. At the same time, rather than enforcing equal opportunity (and other race, gender, and age biases) in education and employment, we figure out how to level the educational level so that it is as attractive for teachers to teach underprivileged kids from the projects as it is for teachers to teach the wealthy kids from the country club.
What might be obvious is that I'm calling for drastic economic change, since we'll have to afford better teaching across all schools, probably funneling tax money from suburbia to better fund the inner cities. What isn't obvious is the social reform. Underprivileged kids and their families are going to have to embrace school as a way to better themselves, and thereby be more accomodating to good teachers so that there is less risk for them while teaching at these currently high-risk schools.
For me, school is the pivotal core of our ability to address problems. If we want to address gun violence, we need to teach our kids those principals in school when they're young so that when they have kids, it will be a matter of fact. If we want to address the environment, we need to instill in our children an appreciation for nature and provide them the knowledge to affect their world in a way that is parallel to their beliefs.
If we want political reform, we can't address it in our stagnant voting-age group, since we're all already stingy self-interested politicians. The only thing we might agree on is that we can't speak for our children, only give them the power to speak for themselves.
[Today I have achieved World Benchmark status in Civil Rights on NationStates for ruling my country. I'm sure it won't last long, but it's been an interesting ride. Right now, the description of my country includes, "Citizens are allowed to rise or fall based on their own merits, leather-clad individuals can be seen walking their slaves in public parks, the alarmingly racist TV show 'Bigtopians Say the Darndest Things' is a hit, and the government's religious works are headed by a New Age guru." So be wary of what wish for when you look for a government of complete freedom and basis in merit.]
