Affirmative Action Essay -- Race Racism

Affirmative Action The Webster dictionary defines affirmative action as an â€Å"active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups†¦Ã¢â‚¬  This paper will discuss the history of affirmative action and its effects on education and the work force in our society. I will argue why affirmative action is necessary for minorities to gain equal opportunities educationally and economically and how affirmative action is morally required as reparation for past discrimination. I will also discuss why many people believe that affirmative action is a step in the wrong direction and point out several arguments as to why we should get rid of affirmative action and try to validate their claims. Affirmative action requires that supervisors in charge of economic and educational opportunities take into consideration a candidate’s sex, disabilities, and ethnic background when accepting positions, especially if the candidate’s ethnic affiliation has had a history of racial discrimination. These minority groups are entitled to special considerations, typically viewed as payments made by the government to settle past discrimination. The effects of affirmative action have been well seen in economic and educational systems where educators and employers have long been pressured into giving preference to minorities even if they lesser qualifications, to help write off past discrimination. Affirmative action was established on the basis that because of the past discrimination of races, our nation was unable to flourish into what it should have become- a nation which provided equal opportunity regardless of a person’s race. It is in my opinion that had our country n ever oppressed colored people to such a great exten... ...nathan. Long Way to Go: Black and White in America. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998. Thomas D. Boston, Affirmative Action and Black Entrepreneurship. New York: Routledge, 1999. Geiger, H Jack. "Race and Health Care-An American Dilemma?" New England Journal of Medicine 335(11):815-816 (1996) Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton & Co., 1981. Curry, George. The Affirmative Action Debate. Massachusetts: Addison Wesley, 1996. Wise, A.E., Darling-Hammond. Effective teacher selection: From recruitment to retention. R-3462-NIE/CSTP, Washington, DC: RAND Corporation., 1987 Rosenfeld, Michel. Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Rothman, Stanley; Lipset, Seymour Martin & Nevitte, Neil, "Racial Diversity Reconsidered," The Public Interest Spring 2003.

Analysis †Mein Kampf Essay

Hitler’s contemporaries – Baldwin, Chamberlain, Herbert Hoover – seem pathetically fusty figures, with their frock coats and wing collars, closer to the world of Edison, Carnegie and the hansom cab than to the first fully evolved modern societies over which they presided, areas of national consciousness formed by mass-produced newspapers and consumer goods, advertising and tele-communications. By comparison Hitler is completely up-to-date, and would be equally at home in the sixties (and probably even more so in the seventies) as in the twenties. The whole apparatus of the Nazi super-state, its nightmare uniforms and propaganda, seems weirdly turned-on, providing just that element of manifest insanity to which we all respond in the H-Bomb or Viet Nam – perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programmes have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing. Certainly, Nazi society seems strangely prophetic of our own – the same maximising of violence and sensation, the same alphabets of unreason and the fictionalising of experience. Goebbels in his diaries remarks that he and the Nazi leaders had merely done in the realm of reality what Dostoevski had done in fiction. Interestingly, both Goebbels and Mussolini had written novels, in the days before they were able to get to grips with their real subject matter – one wonders if they would have bothered now, with the fiction waiting to be manipulated all around them. Hitler’s ‘novel’, Mein Kampf (Hutchinson, 1939) was written in 1924, nearly a decade before he came to power, but is a remarkably accurate prospectus of his intentions, not so much in terms of finite political and social aims as of the precise psychology he intended to impose on the German people and its European vassals. For this reason alone it is one of the most important books of the 20th century, and well worth reprinting, despite the grisly pleasures its anti-semitic ravings will give to the present generation of racists. How far does Hitler the man come through the pages of this book? In the newsreels Hitler tends to appear in two roles – one, the demagogic orator, ranting away in a state apparently close to neurotic hysteria, and two, a benevolent and slightly eccentric kapellmeister sentimentally reviewing his SS bodyguard, or beaming down at a picked chorus of blond-haired German infants. Both these strands are present in Mein Kampf – the hectoring, rhetorical style, shaking with hate and violence, interspersed with passages of deep sentimentality as the author rhapsodises to himself about the mystical beauty of the German landscape and its noble, simple-hearted peoples. Apart from its autobiographical sections, the discovery by a small Austrian boy of his ‘Germanism’, Mein Kampf contains three principal elements, the foundation stones, walls and pediment of a remarkably strong paranoid structure. First, there are Hitler’s views on history and race, a quasi-biological system which under-pins the whole basis of his political thought and explains almost every action he ever committed. Second, there are his views on the strict practicalities of politics and the seizure of power, methods of political organisation and propaganda. Third, there are his views on the political future of the united Germanies, its expansionist foreign policy and general attitude to the world around it. The overall tone of Mein Kampf can be seen from Hitler’s original title for the testament: A Four and a Half Years Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice: A Reckoning with the Destroyers of the Nazi Party Movement. It was the publisher, Max Amann, who suggested the shorter and far less revealing Mein Kampf, and what a sigh he must have breathed when Hitler agreed. Hitler’s own title would have been far too much of a giveaway, reminding the readers of the real sources of Hitler’s anti-semitic and racialist notions. Reading Hitler’s paranoid rantings against the Jews, one is constantly struck by the biological rather than political basis of his entire thought and personality. His revulsion against the Jews was physical, like his reaction against any peoples, such as the Slavs and Negroes, whose physique, posture, morphology and pigmentation alerted some screaming switchboard of insecurity within his own mind. What is interesting is the language in which he chose to describe these obsessions – primarily faecal, one assumes, from his endless preoccupa-tion with ‘cleanliness’. Rather than use economic, social or political arguments against the Jews, Hitler concentrated almost solely on this inflated biological rhetoric. By dispensing with any need to rationalise his prejudices, he was able to tap an area of far deeper unease and uncertainty, and one more-over which his followers would never care to expose too fully to the light of day. In the unanswerable logic of psychopathology, the Jews became the scapegoats for all the terrors of toilet-training and weaning. The constant repetition of the words ‘filth’, ‘vileness’, ‘abscess’, ‘hostile’, ‘shudder’, endlessly reinforce these long- repressed feelings of guilt and desire. In passing, it is curious to notice that Hitler’s biological interpretations of history have a number of striking resemblances to those of Desmond Morris. In both writers one finds the same reliance on the analogy of the lower mammals, on a few basic formulas of behaviour such as ‘struggle’, ‘competition’, ‘defence of territory’. There is the same simple schematic view of social relationships, the same highly generalised assertions about human behaviour that are presented as proven facts. Hitler talks without definition of ‘lower races’ in the same way that Morris refers to ‘primitive societies’ and ‘simple communities’. Both are writing for half-educated people whose ideas about biology and history come from popular newspaper and encyclopaedia articles, and whose interest in these subjects is a barely transparent cover for uneasy fantasies about their own bodies and emotions. In this preface, the translator of Mein Kampf describes it as written in the style of a self-educated modern South German with a talent for oratory. In this respect Hitler was one of the rightful inheritors of the 20th century – the epitome of the half-educated man. Wandering about the streets of Vienna shortly before the first World War, his head full of vague artistic yearnings and clap-trap picked up from popular magazines, whom does he most closely resemble? Above all, Leopold Bloom, his ostensible arch-enemy, wandering around Joyce’s Dublin at about the same time, his head filled with the same clap-trap and the same yearnings. Both are the children of the reference library and the self-improvement manual, of mass newspapers creating a new vocabulary of violence and sensation. Hitler was the half-educated psychopath inheriting the lavish communications systems of the 20th century. Forty years after his first abortive seizure of power he was followed by another unhappy misfit, Lee Harvey Oswald, in whose Historic Diary we see the same attempt by the half-educated to grapple with the information overflow that threatened to drown him.

Summarise discussions on the main challenges and consequent changes in policy and ideology over 60 years of the NHS. The WritePass Journal

Summarise discussions on the main challenges and consequent changes in policy and ideology over 60 years of the NHS. Introduction Summarise discussions on the main challenges and consequent changes in policy and ideology over 60 years of the NHS. IntroductionScenario 4: Health Trainers.Scenario 5: Sure Start. ReferencesRelated Introduction In the 1940s new legislation aimed to remove Beveridge’s five ‘giant evils’ of Want, Disease, Idleness, Ignorance and Squalor (NICE 2010). This was due to a shift in political ideology from the individualistic to the collective because the Labour government at this time believed in ‘democratic socialism’ partly as a result of societal change due to the Second World War. Another key example of this shift was the NHS which was established by Aneurin Bevan in 1948. The NHS had three key principles of the service being free at the point of delivery, being comprehensive in covering all individuals in Britain and that access would be based on need (NHS 2009). In 1951 Labour pioneered the dental and eye service charge and prescription charges were only just avoided. However the Conservatives increased dental and eye charges and also introduced the prescription charge in 1952 which had two increases in 1956 and in 1961 which was the biggest policy change in the financing of the NHS (Webster, 1998:39). This shifted the political ideology away from collectivism because prescription charges meant that health care was no longer free for all. Thatcherism was another shift away from collectivism as the government needed to meet the challenge of saving money due to a global recession and the NHS’s budget was a major use of resources. According to Taylor-Gooby (1988:2), In the early and mid-1980s existing social divisions deepened: provision aimed specifically at poor minorities was tightly constrained, whereas services used by the mass of the population were little affected by spending cut-backs. This was linked to the new policy where managers of NHS Trusts were given limited budgets and had to ensure that they remained within them which meant that some services had to be cut in order to ensure that they could balance the books at the end of the financial year (Walsh et al., 2000). This was a clear of example of health and social care managers needing to interpret government legislation and policies in order to ensure that they could meet targets needed to gain funding for the next financial year. This was carried out through the use of internal markets which were created by Thatcher’s government in order to streamline the NHS’s use of services and ensure that prices were competitive. The next challenge to the NHS was New Labour’s election in 1997. According to Driver and Martell (1998) this led to a post-Thatcherite shift in political and social ideology where collectivism and the Welfare State began to be rebuilt. Their approach was to offer a diverse range of services, because of the wide diversity in individuals living in modern Britain. Who now had a longer life expectancy and to promote freedom of choice, with an emphasis placed on meeting the needs of their service users which was similar to the original NHS mandate (Driver and Martell, 1998). For example, in 2002, Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) were created to improve administration and delivery of healthcare services at the local level (NHS Choices, 2008). According to NHS Choices (2008), PCTs control over eighty percent of the budget and contract out services but that because they are local they can best understand the needs of their community. PCTs moved away from Thatcherite management which had led to too many priorities being set, challenging the NHS’s ability to provide a healthcare service (West, 1997). PCTS were created with a â€Å"single management structure†, which meant that budgets and equipment was shared to provide an integrated service without wasting money, for the reason being that management was no longer spread among multiple people (Clouston, 2005:9). Social policy and political ideology is once again challenging the NHS from 2010, as another global recession has led to the need to cut public services. This also shows a shift back towards the individualistic ideology of Thatcher. The White Paper Liberating the NHS (2011:3) aims to â€Å"putting patients at the heart of the NHS, focusing on improving outcomes† and â€Å"empowering local organisations and professionals†. This will be done by giving managerial power to GPs and those who are in direct contact with patients on a local level, which is similar to Blair’s plans although there will be a Central Commissioning Board in charge of ensuring financial targets are met. However, health inequalities revealed in the Black Report (1980), the Acheson Report (1998) and the Marmot Report (2010) show that the NHS is still being challenged by Beveridge’s giants today. Scenario 4: Health Trainers. Choosing Health (2004) was put in place to help tackle health inequalities and to improve health by providing a new service that could help individuals to achieve a healthier lifestyle. The latest Department of Health (DoH) White Paper, Our Health, Our Care, Our Say (2006) mentioned the health trainers in the latest NHS ‘Life Checks’ and that the service’s ethos was to provide ‘support from next door’ (DoH, 2006:236). This new service brought in individuals who had experience in health inequalities and were from the local community (DoH, 2006).   However Marmot (2009) states that inequalities exist because of â€Å"social inequalities in society, not simply because of inequalities in healthcare†, and that the solutions to those inequalities should reflect their causes and covers the â€Å"social, economic, cultural and political† (DoH, 2009:2).    A General Practitioner (GP) can encourage individuals that would seem unlikely to take part in any other health support schemes, to engage in this service as health trainers support individuals in Healthy Eating and Physical Activity, Diet Weight Loss, Drugs Alcohol, Sexual Health, Smoking Cessation, Smoking during pregnancy, Mental Health, Depression and Anxiety, Cancer Screening and Health Checks (DoH, 2004). Health trainers aim to inspire individuals in the community to change their lives which in return would help the individuals to have higher self-esteem, help them to become fitter and fulfil the primary objective- to lower costs for the NHS by reducing their burden on services due to an unhealthy lifestyle. The Yorkshire and the Humber Primary Care Trust (YHPCT) (2009) suggested that clients that used this service, 99% changed their lifestyle and improved their health by effectively helping them to control their existing conditions. This was mainly because they felt that the health trainers were local individuals, and could communicate with the community on their level, by empowering clients to think of solutions and helping them to maintain their choices (YHPCT, 2009). However in some cases individuals would be signposted to other organisations to help them with their lifestyle choices like Slimming World, where they would receive free vouchers every week, explaining how to access services where they would get extra help. This is just one of many ideas, which would also help with the equal allocation of health care equity. However the NHS geographical plan for health equity resource allocation is being denied with a wide range of variables in socio-demographic and socio-economic health care utilisation known as the postcode lottery (DoH, 2005b). Policies need to evolve each year for the health trainers otherwise this could have an impact on the programmes. Health trainers should also be put into place in all health centres at a national level, which would support all individuals with inequality in their communities. According to the DoH (2011), their vision is for the financial strain on the NHS to be significantly reduced by the distribution of health promotion funds. In 2005 there were twelve sites for health trainers with each allocated  £200,000 to empower clients to transform their health and the DoH suggested there will be funding nationally until 2011 (NHS 2009). This is a significant shift in direction of public health policy from treating ill-health towards prevention by reducing inequalities as focused on by The Black Report (1980), the Acheson Report (1998), the Darzi Review (2008) and the Marmot Report (2010). Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that individuals who want to improve their lifestyle have to make the decision themselves and that the government â€Å"cannot and should not pretend it can make the population healthy† but instead offer them the support necessary for them to do so (DoH, 2004:207). The health trainers program was a key tool for this strategy, although it took five years to put into practice and is still not present in all areas. As a result, Tony Blair said small changes can make a big difference to people’s lives this service is not yet available as â€Å"support from next door† to all individuals (DoH, 2004). Scenario 5: Sure Start. The Government has introduced detailed policies to tackle social determinants of health inequalities; which included the ten-year health inequalities targets and community-based initiatives including Health Action Zones, Sure Start and Healthy Towns. Health Action Zones (HAZs) were the New Labour government’s first important policy, using a multi-agency group to try to diminish health inequalities. Acheson stressed how important the quality of life is in a child’s early years. (Acheson et al 1998). The New Labour government suggested that they want to radically reduce child poverty by 2010 and eliminate it by 2020. However these targets were missed in 2004-5, furthermore they are not on target for 2010-2011(Parliamentary Business, 2009). The New Labour Government poured three billion pounds into Sure Start when it was introduced in 1998, to try to provide help to disadvantaged families in the fundamental early years of a childs life (Wilce, 2008). This would be done by trying to attain enhanced results for families and the community by increasing childcare, improving a childs health and emotional growth and also supporting the child’s parents and encouraging them to strive towards employment (ET, 2007). However this vision for helping deprived families was an optimistic one as the government said that out of the 14 outcomes measured that related to health and chil d development, Sure Start only impacted on five; there was no positive impact taking place within language development, accidents, father’s involvement, maternal Body Mass Index, maternal smoking or childrens immunisations (Parliament UK, 2009). In 2007 Education Today (ET) reported that Hull University conducted research about Sure Start which suggested that even though Sure Start was aimed at underprivileged areas, underprivileged and marginalised people were not gaining any benefits. The report also argued that Sure Start were generally taken up by middle-class families, and was not creating contact with minority groups such as travellers, vagrant workers and families of Bangladeshi origin and Sure Start was criticised for not employing any translators or staff from ethnic and minority communities (Bagley and Ackerley, 2006). There was also some apprehension over the deliverance and performance of a Third Way multi-agency programme (ET, 2007). It has been suggested that Sure Start has moved away from its first focal point on disadvantaged children and become a universal choice. Burkard (2010) argues that the government should fund disadvantaged children instead of the Sure Start centres, and that any nursery involvement that has money thrown into it, is more than unlikely to improve the life chances of children from deprived areas. The centres could be beneficial in other areas for mothers and children because children could have early gains in acquiring knowledge and social development, but they seem to almost immediately fade when children enter into full- time education (Burkard, 2010). New Labour tried to implement strategies to prevent health inequalities through the early years of a childs life with Sure Start, and national assessments have shown that Sure Start has been successful in some parts of eradicating health inequalities but only achieving five out of the fourteen assessments (Education Today, 2007). There needs to be a considerable amount of improvement when it comes to reaching minority groups and getting better health results for parents and their children. Furthermore, there are some fears that broadening this policy through children’s centres nationally would divert their main goal of helping reduce inequalities for the underprivileged families that need the support most. References Acheson, D., Barker, D., Chambers, J., Graham, H., and Marmot, M. (1998). Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health: Report. London: The Stationery Office. Acheson, D. (2008). Independent Inquiry into Inequalities in Health. London: The Stationery Office. Bagley, C. and Ackerley, C.L. (2006). I am much more than just a mum. Social capital, empowerment and Sure Start. Journal of Education Policy. Vol. 21. Issue 6: 717-734. Black, D. (1980). Inequalities in Health: Report of a Research Group. London: DHSS. Burkard, T. (2010). Analysis: Can only literacy guarantee a Sure Start. [Online] Available at nurseryworld.co.uk/news/1012960/Analysis-literacy-guarantee-Sure-Start/[Accessed 13/04/2011]. Clouston, T.J. (2005). The Context of Health and Social Care. In T.J. Clouston and L. West (Eds). Working in Health and Social Care: an introduction for allied health professionals. London: Churchill Livingstone. Department of Health (2005a). Briefing Paper 1 Health Trainers, Department of Health. Department of Health. (2005b). Written Ministerial Statement on Health Trainers, House of Commons. Department of Health. (2006). Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services. London: Department of Health. Department of Health. (2011). Liberating the NHS: Legislative framework and next steps – Executive Summary. Available at dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/documents/digitalasset/dh_123853.pdf. [Accessed 24/03/2011]. Driver, S. and Martell, L. (1998). New Labour- Politics After Thatcher. Cambridge: Polity Press. Education Today. (2007). Lifeline or waste of money? [Online] Available at educationtoday.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/461/Sure_Start:_lifeline_or_waste_of_money_.html   [Accessed 15/04/2011]. Marmot, M., Allen, J., Goldblatt, P., Boyce, T., McNeish, D., Grady, M. and Geddes, I. (2010). Fair Society, Healthy Lives. London: The Stationery Office. NHS Choices. (2008). 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Available at: yhtphn.co.uk/assets/files/Health%20Trainers/1%20Final%20HT%20story%20300910.pdf. [Accessed 04/04/2011]. Walsh, M., Stephens, P. and Moore, S. (2000). Social Policy Welfare. Cheltenham: Stanley Thornes. Webster, C. (1998). The National Health Service: A Political History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, P. A. (1997). Understanding the National Health Service Reforms: The Creation of Incentives?. Buckingham: Open University Press. Wilce, H. (2008). A bit of a mess: why the Governments plans to end child poverty were botched. [Online] Available at hilarywilce.com/feature_articles_view.php?cid=180   [Accessed 12/04/11].