Affirmative action, though once touted as the solution for all complaints of racism and discrimination, has not turned out as expected or even as hoped for those it was intended to benefit.

Even as defined now in current dictionaries, affirmative action is basically a plan designed as an active effort to improve employment and educational opportunities for minority groups and women.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Give those disadvantaged because of race, ethnicity or sex an equal chance to move ahead in the job market or in the competition for “the” colleges and make everyone happy. That was the basic plan, right?

What it sounds like is your kindergarten teacher reminding you to give everyone a chance to catch the ball or skip rope.

It is a marvelous idea, but one of the problems is that it isn’t always the best way to fill a position with the best qualified person.

Being best qualified just doesn’t mean meeting all the statistical requirements or passing all the necessary tests. Being best qualified also includes wanting to have the position.

Take, for, example the way a black student at Evanston Township High School said she felt while the recruiters were chasing after her to attend their schools.

All across the nation, college administrators have stepped up minority recruiting in an attempt to turn around the nation’s trend in declining black enrollments. This push for an upturn comes at a time when during the past two years when campuses across the country, like Columbia University, Penn State and the University of Michigan to name a few, have been disrupted and embarrassed by racial tensions.

For some people it would be an honor to have the likes of the nation’s top colleges and universities vying for their attention. But for Phylisina Vinson it wasn’t quite the honor she was looking for.

She told the Chicago Tribune the “underlying message” she read from the onslaught of recruiters was that they all “wanted to kill two birds with one stone—upgrade their academics and get a minority.”

Instead she chose a university which hadn’t contacted her. This way, she said, she was sure she was wanted for herself.

Maybe that’s the same way about 310 Hispanic FBI agents felt when they filed a class action suit in El Paso Tex., contending that the FBI had discriminated against them in the promotion, discipline and assignment of Hispanics. It’s possible isn’t it?

Or in another case involving the FBI, a black agent in the Philadelphia office filed racial harassment charges against the government. And many of his complaints, which stem from his tenure at the FBI’s Omaha office, have been upheld by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Sure, they got jobs which inturn filled the statistics column the FBI needed to fill, but statistics probably weren’t on their minds when they applied for the jobs. More than likely, they really were interested in working and wanted to be wanted for the positions.

Because attention has been brought to the federal agency as a result of these cases, FBI Director William Sessions says he has approved a new five-year affirmative-action program to hire and promote minority employees.

What about taking care of those that are already there before hiring more? How many new employees, minorities or otherwise, would like to work under conditions in which they don’t really feel wanted?

Think back again to those kindergarten days when someone didn’t want to allow you to play in the game or skip rope, but he did because someone told him he had to. That wasn’t much fun, was it?

It wasn’t much fun because you weren’t really wanted just because you were you. You were wanted because you were one of those kids that the grownups said had to be included. And when that’s the case, what’s the point of playing anyway? It just becomes something you no longer want to do.