The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.
But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?
I don't mean this as a hihi actually sneaky anti-affirmative-action post, I don't understand the subject matter well enough (nor America in general). I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race?
Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether people who had been legally discriminated against all their lives should be compensated, as if they had been wronged in a tort sense. This would obviously be extremely expensive, and anyway impossible to quantify, so it never happened.
Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. Can it balance exactly against the disadvantages of discrimination? No.
> I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
(It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both.
And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?
> America is not in the least social-democratic,
It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get sentiments like "Muslims did 9/11 and they must pay" without considering that the tendency-towards-9/11-ness might not carry over to the entire set of "Muslims". Less than half of Americans were even alive in 1971 and no one is alive from the days of US slavery.
Thinking "those who have inherited benefits due to negative treatment of African Americans should transfer wealth to the descendents of those African Americans" is a separate idea to race based affirmative action. Race based AA would see the children of a pair of Ukrainian immigrants put below the children of a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even though neither group has anything to do with slavery.
I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.
Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.
> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done.
I don't think people realize how dangerous trying to "repair" or "correct" history can actually be. It could literally go on for thousands of years, look at the Israeli's and Palestinians. While I'm fine if people who committed discriminatory acts are held accountable in the law, it's a period of time we should be ashamed of and need to stop revisiting.
In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.
The current Israel-Palestine conflict is actually less than 100 years old. The Israelis and Palestinians weren't fighting under the Ottomans, which lasted over 400 years.
Mutual dislike and occasional violence was already there under the Ottomans, once substantial Jewish immigration to Palestine began in late 19th century.
Palestine’s stolen land is from only the 20th century. Not thousands of years.
No I don’t think people getting their land stolen in the past 100 years is okay to let go. Same sort of people usually think Taiwan stealing the island from indigenous or America stealing Puerto Rico or Hawai’i is okay too.
> In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go.
Let what go ?
If someone was wronged by a corporation should they let it go ?
Even forgetting slavery, black people were wronged for generations by the state, municipalities, armed forces, banks, schools, restaurants, law enforcement, sports teams - and these were not random one off situations but discrimination by a system of racists.
A whole race collectively screwed over.
They wouldn’t let people into restaurants based on skin color alone - no one considered the individual
You are reintroducing group guilt concepts, discussed higher in this thread. Groups do not have guilt, individuals do. When someone is wronged by a corporation, that is an individual.
If you remain attracted to group guilt as being valid, some thought games. Does someone white who migrates to america thereby adopt guilt for wrongs? Does that person become liable due to the move? What about someone black who migrates? What about their child? Should the child be guilty or half guilty? Should the tax system be adjusted to compensate? What about descendants of former slave owners who are not american citizens? What if their parent was disinherited along the way? How about for gender issues? Does a man inherit responsibility for past wrongs done to women?
If you accept group guilt or intergenerational guilt you are constructing a cast society, where people are defined by their lineage and physical characteristics, rather their actions as an individual. This entrenches social divisions and undermines individual agency and freedom. Western culture, nations and law are grounded in individual responsibility not group identity and are the better for it.
Only those that have proxies to accountable individuals, as in the example of the corporation, and with its exceptions such as with limited liability. Or an association, which has a board and a charter.
> Consider the opposing argument - groups have no responsibility for anything. Does that seem like a reasonable position?
Apart from formal corporations/associations, that is the reasonable position. In the context of the case, "Asian Americans" have no moral or legal responsibility to give up opportunities to "African Americans".
So, as an extreme case, should we jail Asian Americans because of the crimes of Unit 731? They're part of the same group, no?
One quibble with the word 'group' there, too: Ethnic groups are reference categories, not groups in the sense it'd make sense to think of groups as eg. decisionmaking entities that can be responsible for something.
If groups have responsibility as you say, then Blacks as a group would have tremendous culpability for excess ratio of interracial murder committed by that group.
That of course, is a racist idea, because it assigns group responsibility to the murders committed by individuals.
With due respect, you've made a very poor argument here. The harms caused by many historical actions have significant, ongoing consequences to this day. You've stated that taking actions to "repair or correct" those harms can be "dangerous" without actually presenting any evidence for it. The idea of "letting it go" feels vey much like it's coming from a position of privilege. I'd be happy to discuss these ideas further if you would like to.
You're conflating pragmatism with "position of privilege". You're free to disagree whether "let it go" is ideal or not. However, assuming "privilege" here is just bad faith and discriminatory; you're making an unsubstantiated character judgement on the basis of someone's race or class.
Clearly, people, regardless of their race or class, have the ability to observe, to evaluate evidence, and to think critically. This is not a quality that's exclusive to "sacred victims". Surely it's possible that someone's race and class could introduce blindspots to their perspective (which extends to "scared victims" as well), but assuming that to be the default flaw in someone's position as opposed to actually finding that flaw in that person's position is intellectually dishonest.
Conversations about race breakdown because ideologues are more interested in enforcing their views as opposed to finding out the truth. Smear tactics like accusing someone of being blindsided by "privilege" is the modern day equivalent of writing off your opponents without actually addressing their actual points.
> In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.
Many people alive today in the USA were directly harmed by legal discrimination against black people. Explicit legal discrimination stopped in 1971, not in the history books. And of course, significant administrative discrimination continued long after, probably persisting today in some places.
The Ottoman Empire controlled the region until about 1922. The British came in at that time and arbitrarily drew a line dividing the region into “Mandatory Palestine” and “Transjordan”. This lasted until 1948 and the creation of the modern state of Israel.
For thousands of years people of several religions and cultures (Jewish, Muslim, Roman, Druze, Armenian) lived together in that area; like most such arrangements there weren’t clear lines that differentiated cultural groups.
The lines on the map are and were always arbitrary. Same every time and every where the west has tried to draw lines on maps.
Lots of people also say that from the not-advantaged side. Most Indians aren’t sitting around insisting on reparations for the $41 trillion Britain took from them. They understand that it’s futile to do so, and making that the goal will only leave them in poverty long term.
FWIW, when reparations are discussed, it is usually a reference to the fact that after the civil War, the government somehow found a way to scrape down in its pockets and compensate the slave owners for their "loss of property."
One can I think reasonably ask how this government was able to find the resources to pay people for losing their slaves and not the resources to compensate slaves for the years of freedom stolen. Although it is almost certainly too late to reconcile that particular wrong directly as those slaves are now all dead.
Perhaps the payments were to appease the powerful slave owners so that another civil war does not happen. It was not done for some sort of moral duty or obligation.
The slaves had no power, and this would not pose threat of civil unrest.
This is a train of thought that appears to pull into the station of using civil unrest to balance the scales. After all, if the government only responds to power then power is the coin of the realm to purchase the justice one wants.
Interesting, and worth considering the next time there's a riot.
I think this is flawed thinking. For one thing it benefits everyone to help those who have been systematically disadvantaged. Also, respecting people = giving them needed material benefits not saying “I respect you”
We need to keep revisiting the shameful times lest they are forgotten instead of forgetting about them and moving on.
I'm sure I'm the descendant of people that at some point were treated brutally by someone else, but it's far back enough that the memory has been lost.
I'm all for fixing THE EFFECTS of racial discrimination in the US, but it can't be achieved by sclerotizing that incorrect view of life and dragging it into the future in perpetuity.
Most white Americans today did not “benefit from discrimination” against black Americans. Most white Americans come from families who weren’t even here during the time of slavery. And slavery hurt the vast majority of white Americans who were not slave owners, by driving down the market value of free farm labor. Slavery made a handful of landowners rich, but impoverished the south as a whole. At the turn of the 20th century, the median income in the south was half of what it was in the Midwest.
It's sadly ironic and self defeating that they claim they don't benefit from discrimination (even though they do but delusionally refuse to acknowledge it), yet they keep on systematically and purposefully discriminating, and idiotically voting against their own best interests, like single payer health care, forgiving student loans, funding education, raising taxes on the wealthy, and ending corporate welfare.
And for all their shrill protests about reverse discrimination and communist Democrats handing out welfare to black people for votes to keep them "on the plantation", the red states are MUCH more reliant on federal government handouts that the blue states have to pay for, BECAUSE of their "conservative" policy choices.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders have spent months promoting the myth that red low-tax states are subsidizing blue high-tax states because of the deduction for state and local taxes.
An Associated Press Fact Check finds it’s actually the other way around. High-tax, traditionally Democratic states (blue), subsidize low-tax, traditionally Republican states (red) — in a big way.
> the red states are MUCH more reliant on federal government handouts that the blue states have to pay for, BECAUSE of their "conservative" policy choices.
Do you have any economics paper indicating that? The much more likely explanation is that red states are more rural and blue states are more urban (so have higher income). Florida and Texas' economies are doing great. Notice even California had a Republican governor until 2011.
Not only you are wrong, you are wrong and arrogant.
California was deep red when Silicon Valley was being built. And most “red states” voted Democrat until the 1990s (with the exception of Reagan). The richest ones, like Virginia, started voted Republican before the others. And richer areas, like the Atlanta suburbs in Georgia, started voting republican before the rest of the state.
Not with respect to “single payer health care, forgiving student loans, funding education, raising taxes on the wealthy, and ending corporate welfare.” Or taxes or regulation. The GOP has gotten more liberal with respect to the “policy choices” that OP claims causes red states to be “more reliant on federal government.”
> Not only you are wrong, you are wrong and arrogant.
Facing facts ≠ arrogance.
> Notice even California had a Republican governor until 2011.
And? California has long been a leading indicator of societal trends. (And 2011 was a dozen years ago.)
"Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy." [0]
How would you feel on the other side of this? Given how recently discrimination was still legal, is it really great that you can shrug and say "well, tough tits I guess"?
I wasn’t admitted into better colleges while minority friends with worse grades and general resumes were. It upsets me that I was discriminated against. Should I pursue some reparations? How do you factor this in?
> Discrimination against Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, Mexican, Native American and more are not "imaginary harms".
Never implied they were. I implied that the harm felt by one’s “minority friends” being helped is a figment of one’s imagination… you then replied with a list of other minorities who will also be harmed by this absurdly idiotic ruling.
> Are we in favor of reparations for every group? Or is it just this one?
We can safely start with the victims of chattel slavery — at the very least those who signed up to fight and die for a government that promised 40
acres and a mule and then reneged on that (extremely minimal) token — and then widen the net to those who also can make a legitimate call for reparation.
> Reparation talk is a way to buy votes - nothing more. It's a total non-starter if you dig into how you'd go about it...
It’s really not… if reparation had been made in a timely fashion it wouldn’t be nearly so difficult now, and even today just the very doable token of 40 literal acres and a morally equivalent mule (with interest, and a sincere apology) to the descendants of those for whom clear records exist would be a welcome token step in the right direction. Truth and reconciliation don’t mean wiping out all harm in a single reparatory act, they mean proactively working to an acknowledge and repair… the abominable corruption that is the Supreme Court just abandoned the proactive part entirely.
> We can't pretend like handing people a pile of cash will suddenly solve all the issues the community endures today.
Only those who aren’t part of the community can possibly pretend that a pile of cash wouldn’t solve (or at least substantially help) an extremely significant number of those issues.
I definitely agree that historical discrimination against European immigrants to the US is bad and shouldn't have happened.
However, what happened to Africans brought to the US and held in chattel slavery seems much worse, as does everything that happened to the Native Americans.
Nothing is a non starter unless you want to love the status quo and pretend things are good enough. Also…a lot of the nationalities you’re talking about aren’t that big of a deal in the USA.
Native American is so bad it’s weird to see people still use it but of course people who don’t get it, won’t get it.
You can't attack others this aggressively on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are.
Your comments in this thread were so egregious that I briefly banned your account - but your earlier contributions to HN have been fine, so I don't want to do that. If you could please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and comment in the intended spirit in the future, though, that would be good.
> imagine if my mom was raped repeatedly, my dad whipped and hung from a bough
Mom and dad is one thing, but no one alive today had that happen to their parents, so this is just emotional manipulation. For people alive today it was more like great great great grandparents. There are awful things that were done to blacks at scale in living memory, but nothing like what you're talking about.
> Lifting one group up is almost always at the expense of other groups, which is isomorphic to punishment.
Not necessarily. Life is not a zero sum game.
Who is hurt by better funding for schools in poor neighbourhoods? Who is hurt by training cops to not shoot first and ask questions later? Who is hurt by encouraging home ownership by black people?
> Who is hurt by better funding for schools in poor neighbourhoods?
Whatever that money would otherwise have been spent on is harming the recipient of that now foregone benefit. If you raise taxes to do it, taxpayers are harmed.
> Who is hurt by encouraging home ownership by black people?
If home ownership is a good thing, whoever would have otherwise bought those marginal houses is harmed.
You missed the part where it’s not a zero-sum game. If you’re interested in the economic concepts behind why an economy is a positive-sum game in an open system, look up: production possibilities frontier (PPF) and comparative advantage.
An economy would become zero-sum if we ran up against the limits of the universe. Until then, rest assured that opportunity can grow for both sides in a transaction.
The whole economy is indeed nonzero sum, but the topic is not the entire economy, but allocation of limited dollars between different groups. It is zero sum here in this limited context.
Investing in education has a very high ROI. Investing in better education in poor neighbourhoods will actually save you money in the long run. The fact that that is not happening is what's really hurting people.
>Whatever that money would otherwise have been spent on is harming the recipient of that now foregone benefit.
This would only make sense if the amount of welfare for rich people weren't outrageously high in the form of regressive income taxation, non meaningful wealth taxation, corporate tax breaks and subsidies, loan forgiveness programs for business owners etc etc all that on top of a nearly trillion dollar budget for military kit that sees what 40% usage?
That’s strange because the 2022 deficit alone exceeds defense spending by a factor of ~2. DoD spending was up ~10% since 2012, which social security spending was up ~50%.
> Social Security spending is from a dedicated levy, which generates more income than it costs
Your information is out of date. Costs have exceeded tax income since 2010 and have exceeded total income (tax plus interest) since 2021.
The OASI trust fund that pays social security retirement benefits is projected to have a $53B (3.8%) actuarial shortfall this year, up from $40B last year. The trustees project this shortfall will increase every year thereafter until the fund is completely depleted ten years from now (assuming no change in law)
To become solvent over 75 years the SS tax rate would need to be increased by 27.7%, from 12.4% today to 15.84%. Eliminating the payroll cap (currently $160K) would buy 25 years, but only if the corresponding benefit cap was not also raised.
Yes, those numbers are all from the document I linked, the most recent annual report released in March.
Social Security (OASDI) is not very sensitive to inflation since the salary cap on contributions is indexed to average wages and adjusts yearly. The benefits paid out are also adjusted by periodic cost of living adjustments. So when inflation goes up both contributions and withdrawals rise by roughly equal amounts.
The US national debt has risen because of extreme tax cuts. It was pretty low until Reagan, who cut a lot of taxes and had the debt start spiralling out of control, yet most social programs started way before Reagan.
The military spending that really added to the debt were primarily the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is a very similar argument to "piracy is a moral ill because it deprives corporations and artists of money that would otherwise be spent on them." And it falls apart for similar reasons.
When more people are capable of buying houses, more houses are built to meet the demand.
> If you raise taxes to do it, taxpayers are harmed.
This is not true. If I, a taxpayer, want my taxes raised for the sake of extending equality to a historically and currently oppressed group, then I am not harmed.
If you, a taxpayer, disagree with the notion of restorative justice, I posit that your overall happiness would be helped more by empathy and less by "lower taxes".
> This is not true. If I, a taxpayer, want my taxes raised for the sake of extending equality to a historically and currently oppressed group, then I am not harmed.
If you want your money used to pay for reparations you can donate to a charity with aims aligned with that desire. No one is arguing about what you do with your money.
> If you, a taxpayer, disagree with the notion of restorative justice, I posit that your overall happiness would be helped more by empathy and less by "lower taxes".
A functioning society requires accepting other people have different priorities and values from yours.
> If you want your money used to pay for reparations you can donate to a charity with aims aligned with that desire. No one is arguing about what you do with your money.
I can also advocate for the state to do it on my behalf. I prefer that solution, because a larger amount of resources can be allocated.
> A functioning society requires accepting other people have different priorities and values from yours.
I accept this, but the values expressed disturb me.
> I can also advocate for the state to do it on my behalf. I prefer that solution, because a larger amount of resources can be allocated.
The only reason a larger amount of resources can be allocated is because you are advocating for using state violence to force people who don’t agree with you to also pay for your ideas. That’s what taxes are, fundamentally.
> A functioning society requires accepting other people have different priorities and values from yours
a functioning democracy requires accepting that, in the event that your values conflict with those of the majority, your values lose and theirs win
we saw on January 6th in the US what happens when a loud minority can't accept that
unfortunately, some are under the misunderstanding that democracy means all ideas are equal and have equal value, or indeed universally have positive value
To tune this a bit: our society operates under a rule of law with checks and balances (and some bedrock law in the Constitution that is significantly harder to modify than the rest of it) because a system as simple as "in the event that your values conflict with those of the majority, your values lose and theirs win" is known as a "tyranny of the majority" and is not particularly desirable.
If the majority says, for example, some race is inferior, that's not sufficient to anchor the law and we have a 14th Amendment to protect against such abuse.
to elaborate: our society does indeed consist of checks and balances, and part of that is ensuring that, in the event that the values of the minority conflict with the values of the majority, we don't have a "tyranny of the minority", or minority rule
if the minority says, for example, some race is inferior, that's even less sufficient to anchor the law, and insufficient to overrule the majority saying it isn't
I completely agree and I cannot think of a single instance of that happening in the history of the United States, with a possible exception of the nation's ongoing collapse into oligarchy and rule by that minority.
This is the trouble. If one believes that material leveling is tantamount to justice, then it doesn't really matter whether one group is lifted up or the other is reduced.
Your argument (A) implies that by raising one group another is lowered. Another poster here (B) states that if we can't raise one group, we must lower the other.
These are both Manichaean positions that obfuscate the mutual gains added to economic society when one group is raised and the mutual losses sustained when one group is reduced. [The counterpoint to both positions is "A rising tide lifts all boats".] I'd argue they both arise from a sense of group identity that is anathema to both universal identity and individual liberty; at root they are the pathologies behind (A) fascism wherein the group identity is based on a threatened victim race and (B) communism where group identity is based on a threatened victim class. That's why switching from one to the other is so easy; they're both simply material grievances, elevated through propaganda into mythic group struggles.
"Expense of other groups" is not at all isomorphic to punishment. In 1866 Southern America it would be strange to talk about how the poor plantation owners were punished by losing their slave labor force. Yes, they were materially worse off, but it was hardly a punishment. Even if those plantations had been broken up and given to the freed black people as reparations, it wouldn't have been punishment. It would have been backpay.
That just goes to show that we can't rely on people's feelings to judge the world accurately, doesn't it? Or do you suggest we should take it seriously and give slave owners recompense when slavery ends?
At the time it was neccesary otherwise British involvement in slavery would not have ended.
What would have made it much better was additional compensation to those enslaved.
What was a good outcome for society, other than the obvious end of slavery of course, was the relatively vast amount of money freed up to reinvest in other massive capital projects, rail, canals, free colonies (no prisoner labour | slaves) for agriculture, wool, timber, etc.
What was a poor outcome for broader society was that ownership of and direct benefits from all these new projects were largely concentrated in a small group of former slaveholders.
Such is the ebb and flow of reality which rarely examples purely black and white expressions of some particular notion of absolute right.
If some groups were so oppressed that they now put a cost on the rest of society via crime and welfare costs, fixing that will be a long term net benefit for other groups, not an expense. We can discuss the most effective way to fix it, but pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.
That is a valid argument against AA if you can provide the data that shows that only a minority of AA beneficiaries are descendants of oppressed blacks and that therefore the net benefit of AA on oppressed communities isn't worth the cost it puts on society. If you can show that, society benefits because it can scrap a nonworking program and replace it with one that works.
My point was that simply saying there is a cost for programs that benefit black communities is not an argument against those programs. There is a cost to all regulations. We should keep the ones that are net beneficial and discard the ones that aren't.
Typically, the argument against these programs is about fairness, which you might call a "crybaby argument." Life isn't fair. These people should have learned that when they were three. The only correct arguments relating to policy are about whether they benefit society.
“75 percent of the black students at Harvard were of African or Caribbean descent or of mixed race. According to Professor Gates, more than two thirds of all Harvard's black students were either the children or grandchildren of West Indians or Africans and very few of Harvard's black students were the descendants of American slaves.
”
I presented facts that >75% of AA recipients have nothing to do with inner city crimes and poor blacks.
If you think this is ok, I dont agree with this, and neither does Supreme Court
Are you unable to do math? If the net effect of the fraud is -1 per person and the net effect of the non-fraud is 5 per person, is the policy net beneficial or not? You have to show net negative benefit, not >50% fraud for a complete argument.
> If you think this is ok,
I don't think this is OK. I'm actually somewhat disinclined to believe AA for college admissions is good policy, preferring earlier interventions like better schooling and childcare in these communities. I am merely explaining what a complete argument looks like.
> I dont agree with this, and neither does Supreme Court
The Supreme Court didn't rule on whether the level of fraud is OK. It ruled on whether it violates the equal protection clause. Please read more carefully, both the comments here and the Court's opinion, both of which you have failed to understand.
Net benefit is not my argument, it is your argument so it is on You to provide proof that few percentage of native born Blacks at ivy league create any benefit (that exceeds the damage caused by fraudulent 75% )
Exactly. Your argument is incomplete and therefore wrong. If you were denied admission to a university you applied to, it is because you are incapable of making a complete argument, not just due to AA.
> it is on You to provide proof that few percentage of native born Blacks at ivy league create any benefit (that exceeds the damage caused by fraudulent 75% )
Why? I am not arguing for AA. Once again, please read and understand the comments.
One of the lower ones, not the one you wanted, if your comments are representative of your thought processes.
> Your baseless claim that my argument is incomplete is itself without ground.
All policies are evaluated based on net benefit to society. I explained why your argument didn't meet that standard. If you didn't understand it, I can't help you. There is no simpler way to state it.
I already explained that this is how all policies are evaluated, not on arbitrary fraud thresholds. I cannot make you understand it any more than I can make you smart enough to have been accepted at your preferred university.
They don't need to be descendants of oppressed blacks specifically: The claim was that AA doesn't solve the issues of inner cities because the beneficiaries are not of low SES PRESENTLY. What their history is is irrelevant. If AA doesn't add stability to the people presently living in low income areas, it fails to solve the problem.
Accusing people of using hidden messages, intentionally interpreting their post as negatively as possible, is very against the community standards here. Please don't do that.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
This is disingenuous. "Dogwhistle" rhetoric is a thing precisely because it is a "hidden message." It's not against community rules to point out that rhetoric is similar to dogwhistle rhetoric, especially when the comment actually is full of said rhetoric. Or it ought not be: if it is, the community rule is wrong.
> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done
Most histories of WW2 end on the day the Axis surrendered. I was curious about what happened "the day after" and went looking for it. I discovered that with the collapse of government and institutions, the veneer of civilized behavior stripped away. People took revenge on old grudges, stole from each other, murdered each other, neighbors against neighbors, everyone with an axe to grind. It was savage.
It took maybe a year or more for the government to begin functioning, and found they were faced with a horrendous list of crimes. Upwards of half the population were criminals. What were they going to do about it? Put half the country in jail?
What they did do, in country after country, was to simply do a general amnesty for any crimes committed before 1947 or so. The slate was wiped clean, and things just started over.
> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.
Black Americans were not. American descendants of slaves were. Black immigrants do very well in American society. “Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...). That’s a critical distinction. Obama did not suffer the generational effects of slavery and segregation any more than Trump or Biden.
I'm against affirmative action, but I value your points here. I think affirmative action doesn't attack the root of the problem (leaving aside the moral arguments), and we should instead attempt to solve the problems you've stated (and others besides!) more directly. Chiefly, stringent enforcement of race-blind consideration and better funding for public health and school infrastructure to give all communities a respectable baseline of opportunity. Also, reduced or even nullified college tuition. I think that if these are implemented, there may not even be a need for the racial quotas that affirmative action implies. If quotas are to be set, they should be evaluated and gradually rolled back. As for funding...that's a whole other discussion that boils down to unassailable moral axioms, as everything does. I suppose if people were so enlightened to agree on heavily taxing billionaires, this whole mess with equal-but-not-really citizens probably wouldn't be happening either.
Presently many colleges and universities have enough DEI commissars on payroll for their cost to match ~1000 students' tuition. You could easily sack the enforcers of political orthodoxy and extend scholarships to people.
Hah, I forgot about administrative bloat, and I wholeheartedly agree. People in upper management in various organizations seem to have disproportionate incomes to their value. It doesn't help that there's a power imbalance and, often, a lack of understanding.
I hope that with generative AI and LLM everyone will have professor for any subject in their laptop and wont need expensive and useless college degree.
Why have thousands colleges and employ thousands of professors (and useless admin people) who teach the same textbook subject and gove same homework assignments? Not even mentioning completely useless and unrelated to higher education industry of “college athletics”.
Something decentralized and local, with focus on self-learning, group learning, peer tutoring, and AI will make Harvard quality education accessible and almost free for anyone. It will be a matter of personal effort and skills to learn and obsorb such knowledge
Names and connections did matter before Internet. It is overrated these days for most people.
A knowledgeable specialist with experience will have strong local
connections and can have his name popularized globally on Internet, just by getting good visibility online projects/blogs/research/etc.
You dont need harvard connections to create value for the society.
You're right, but people associated with Harvard will still have a leg up compared to most other people. If there weren't these small "cool kidz clubs" that amplify and bolster each others' reputations even when not deserved, experts would be more uniformly recognized regardless of background. That is more optimal than cronyism for pooling talent.
There are plenty of these cool kidz clubs for elites, like your local polo club, country club, golf club, sailing/yacht club, skiing & snowboarding club etc.
AA is such a silly band aid solution that only benefits rich, while the optimal solution should be to lift lives of all poor people across the board.
Institutions such as harvard will lose their relevance over time, for example nobody cares about harvard CompSci people.
If all this kind of problems are cause by a social club that has no other benefits than being a social club, then there is an obvious solution. Remove it from the education system and turn it into a fraternal order, like Freemasons and Odd Fellows. SCOTUS do not have any power over those.
AI can make education almost zero cost in the future.
instead of fighting for limited number of seats at Harvard and blaming AA - we should create AI technology to give Harvard quality education to everyone in the world for (almost) free
> AI can make education almost zero cost in the future.
This is still an open question. LLMs will certainly help to improve teaching. But education is more than teaching. And LLMs have at best a mediocre track record of being correct. So if you are lucky you are taught something correct by an LLM.
Going to university to meet other people with which you can learn together by helping, criticizing, or correcting each other is extremely valuable. That cannot be replicated by an LLM at home. Even the experience of just moving to another city, leaving home is a part of education.
Education will always cost time and hard work. Because oneself has to change to become educated.
My point is that you dont have to pay $80k per year for 4 years, and move to Boston to get a top tier education.
Perhaps your local state college could create local learning environment good enough to teach your cutting edge research and subjects, with the assistance of AI. And mobilize your local community and find peers to accompany you on your student journey.
Top tier education wont be available only to ivy leagues students, but any state school student. And this policy is strictly better than any Admission hack hatvard coukd ever do
> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.
This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.
> It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.
Have any reading materials off of the top of your head that you can point me towards with this?
Surely black americans are hurt, and it's only fair to lift them up, but at what cost? In these cases the asian americans are getting hurt because of it. Why not help lift asian americans up as well? They are also discriminated over a century after all, and now they are paying the price for reparations? Why is that not a discrimination itself?
This SCOTUS case had heavy emphasis on the fact Affirmative Action as it is practiced at elite institutions today, has a net slightly negative effect on whites, and an extremely large negative effect on Asians applicants. It is in practice, a large transfer of elite diplomas from Asian to Black students. Black people have indeed suffered greatly historically. Yet an awkward question remains: Why are Asians paying the price?
Most of the fixes, the tilting of the scales in their favour, do have victims.
Innocent people who just happen to look wrong, who get discriminated against so the favoured people can be quotaed in. Many companies refuse to fulfill positions even if they have qualified candidates if none of the candidates checks the right identity boxes.
You're kidding yourself if you think people who have nothing to do with the bad conditions the policies ostensibly try to correct for aren't being hurt.
Of course, insistence on policies like that doesn't come from nowhere. The education system is absolutely rotten:
A couple samples of the blatant racist rhetoric the universities spew against white people daily. You can write fun shit like this and keep your job since the target is acceptable:
"Whites learn to be white. That suggestion by Thandeka is that whites are not born white. They have to become white. And her suggestion is that white children who were not white originally - they were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. And this abuse is sometimes physical - of being physically disciplined into whiteness, such as being bullied into whiteness. That's a phrase I like to use, whiteness as bullying, but it's also psychological and cultural, and it becomes with caretakers and guardians. Not the least of which - the more important caretakers are of course the white family, parents etc. but it extends to the white nationhood as a caretaker, the white social system, the white social welfare, the white governance system. They also discipline and abuse white humans into whiteness."
I don't know about you all, but to my 90s brain that looks just a wee bit like blatant racism, but what do I know. I'm just an acceptable target.
It's not about slavery; it's about what's going on in the U.S. right now. Study after study shows disadvantages to being black in America right now.
Those disadvantages include, as you point out, echoed effects from discrimination and disadvantage from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and further.
But they also include immediate effects going on today -- like discrimination based on skin color or hairstyle or choice of name or an imbalanced school system or you name it.
Affirmative action is a broad brush, as you say. But to demand that only people whose ancestors actually owned slaves be disadvantaged by affirmative action, and only those whose ancestors actually were slaves benefit from it, ignores the rest of the black experience in America, and is, frankly, offensive.
As a bonus, I'll mention that every time I learn something about black history in America, I find a new way to be disappointed in my (our?) ancestors. The most recent thing I learned is that as recently as the '50s and '60s, since hospitals were segregated, blacks often had much worse access to healthcare. As a result, when they needed immediate treatment and no black doctor was available, they would go to a veterinarian for help.
That's terrible, but the cherry on the shit sundae is that, if the veterinarian happened to be white, the care had to be rendered surreptitiously, because white people wouldn't take their pets to a vet who had served a black person.
9/11 was not a systemic injustice, it was perpetrated by a small group of extremists in a single act. Racial discrimination was a systemic injustice perpetrated by lawmakers, enabled by an unjust society, with country-wide effects lasting multiple decades (if not centuries). It's not a logical fallacy to think that a systemic injustice requires a systemic solution.
I was 10 when it happened, and bullied because of my muslim name at school for years afterwards. I went to mosque, and out of the literally hundreds of muslims I knew everyone to the person condemned 9/11.
I don't know where you get the idea that there was broad support for those assholes in my community, but people who said the things that you say caused a lot of harm to me and my family. I thought you should know that.
Are we to stop bullying Nazis because of the actions of John Rabe? Should we allow our children to join Scientology because of the actions of Leah Remini?
I'm happy that you're a bright and honorable person but the Muslim community has a long and sustained history of violence and calling for violence against those who don't deserve it. Your choice to continue associating with it will naturally draw the ire of those wronged by the Muslim community.
And before you say that it's not just Muslims or that Muslims aren't the worst offenders - I agree. That's why I chose to leave the Christian faith years ago.
I have nothing but respect for the Christian faith and community. I think that throwing them or another community under the bus for the purpose of making a point would be irresponsible and only increases the amount of hate in the world.
I also have nothing but respect for people who conscientiously leave their faith, whether it's Christianity or Islam or anything else. It's not easy to leave a community and I find it courageous and admirable. Thank you for sharing your journey.
Your understanding of Muslims is a narrative that I don't agree with, but nevertheless I won't say that my understanding of world is better than yours, only that I come to different conclusions, and you must at least concede that Muslims do not feel that they subscribe to a violent and hateful ideology. But even understanding the world as you do, it is not inevitable to reach the conclusion that it is acceptable to collectively punish all of us.
I have the privilege of living a happy and fulfilling life, and the ire of strangers who are prejudiced against me is not likely to change that. I am mostly objecting to the idea of collective punishment which has caused, is causing, and will cause countless suffering to undeserving men, women, and children. Even people you hate are capable of feeling as much pain as you are.
> the ire of strangers who are prejudiced against me is not likely to change that. I am mostly objecting to the idea of collective punishment which has caused, is causing, and will cause countless suffering to undeserving men, women, and children. Even people you hate are capable of feeling as much pain as you are.
The notion that people shouldn't be judged by their voluntary membership of a bigoted organisation in 2023 is nonsense.
You're an adult whose continued support and membership enstrengthens a group which has subjugation and discrimination against large swathes of people based on medieval culture at their core.
> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
I think the question here is who is entitled to have the 'revenge' or the reparation or the 'affirmative action'
People who were persecuted or opressed? or their offspring?
For example German government agreed to pay reparation to Jews in (some?) Eastern European countries and Russia, that were alive at the time of WWII and lived on the territories that the Germany attacked.
The reparation from what I know were 2,000 or 4,000 USD one time payment.
--
So in that model
a) the person receiving the reparation had to be alive at the time of the crime.
b) had to be on the territory where the crime was committed
c) I do not think the person needed to prove that they were directly affected by the crime
from what I know the reparation was selective.
It did not cover Gypsys, did not cover non-Jews
--
I do not know what the right model is.
Can a nation be responsible for the crimes their government has committed?
For how long?
If the answer to the above is 'yes' (that the nation is responsible) -- wouldn't that justify terrorism? wouldn't that justify blood-revenge practice?
But that revenge can go for generations, and at some point will be reversed -- that means, in turn, endless wars.
--
May be the correct answer is to limit the action of 'righting the wrongs' to the people who were the victims and alive at the time of the crime ?
But that does not seem to be fair to the victims either
Still, I think my as-of-yet unstated point stands. That is, the government should do everything in its power (reasonably speaking) to serve justice to the criminal and support the victim, but that just isn't possible for massive historical grievances. Where there are current issues affecting Jews or whoever else, they should be addressed. Of course, some issues can be resolved with money, while others are more insidious.
> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
Humans are a eusocial species, and history is full of group guilt, plight, dominance. I do agree with the direction of your thought though. We should strive at the individual level.
1. Life jackets are banned for anyone with brown hair.
2. A very large boat hits an iceberg and sinks. There are a lot of people in the water. None of the brown haired people are allowed life jackets.
3. There is a (for the sake of this silly analogy) rapid discussion, people realize this was probably not a good way to do things, and a new law is passed: people with brown hair are now allowed to wear life jackets!
4. No one gives life jackets to the brown haired people currently in the water.
Just because an unjust law is changed does not mean the people who were previously injured by the law are magically no longer injured.
True, though it's still difficult to just give the brown haired people life jackets (and maybe some drowned already). Affirmative action seems as if the few brown haired people who are easily accessible are given life jackets, and "everyone" is happy. My ideas for reform — better public school infra in poorer communities, blah blah (I expound a bit elsewhere) — certainly would be more difficult but give many more brown haired people access to life jackets. Also, don't forget the other drowning people, even if there aren't so many of them compared to brown haired people.
"you can't simply draw a boundary... Https if people don't have responsibility... Only individuals do"
I think this is specious reasoning. We accept this just fine in other tort circumstances e.g
1) lawsuits against a city after miscarriage of justice
2) lawsuits against corporations when X happens.
Often individual responsibility will be a portion of the trial but to my understanding it is
1) a secondary or even tertiary concern
2) used to deflect blame from the group
I think in general not allowing blame to be allocated to individuals will lead to poor results. We need methods to call systems bad and curtail them in addition to individuals
I think the relevant grouping to take to task for these issues is federal, state, and local governments (and probably quite a few corporations). Not "white people".
> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the sheer size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.
When do we stop hold people responsible for the sins of their great great grandfathers?
I don't hold a grudge against the British for press-ganging my great^9 grandfather into involuntary navel service. He was taken because he was Irish and near the waterfront at the wrong time. How was his kidnapping, forced labor, and whipping with a cat'o nine materially any different from other forms of slavery? When he escaped by jumping ship and running as far inland as he could he was risking beating whipping and execution if he was ever caught. Is that any different than runaway slaves?
Should I get a pay off from the UK because they wronged my family taking my Great^9 grandfather away from his home family and job? They systematically oppressed the Irish for centuries too. His decedents have been mostly poor laborers only edging into middle class with my parents generation.
I don't think I deserve anything that would be ridiculous.
How about my sons they are 1/16 black on their mothers side even though they look to all appearances to be of blonde haired northern European stock. Do they get any special payments for their ancestors oppression? if not what percentage of your ancestors need to be of a single oppressed group to be owed restitution by the rest of taxpaying society.
oh but its was my government shitting on other racial groups. but I didn't vote for them. I usually vote third party and those candidates never win despite having better policy. Yet I am to be held responsible for crimes my ancestors didn't commit (mostly because they were to poor or not emigrated to America yet) and for government policy put in place either before my time or by representatives i voted against.
sure they suffered but why should i be penalized via taking more of my income I use to feed my family thus increasing their suffering for reparation to someone i haven't done anything to.
For historical injustices, it is untenable to discuss paying reparations. Hopefully more recent and/or future instances are resolved early among the actual perpetrators and victims. We should instead focus our efforts on actual problems (for African-Americans, there are many legitimate grievances; I've said my ideas of reform elsewhere). An issue money can't quite solve is mending peoples' perceptions of the government or of the victimized group by others, which is usually the case due to rampant stereotypes (e.g. Muslims and 9/11). Hopefully, the fact that the government would be funding genuine avenues for progress and enforcing policies for race-blind evaluations (why isn't this happening already?!) would slowly mend those wounds over time.
(I realize I'm focusing on the US; this can surely be applied to other countries too.)
Your last line is valid. Now (in the US, at least), where might massive and grossly unnecessary sums of wealth be found to be taxed? Oh yeah, billionaires. A progressive tax and elimination of loopholes such as charities are a start. If the US really is the land of opportunity, why not see if kids of rich people can work to the top themselves? They probably already have an advantage in schooling and whatnot, so inheritance should be capped heavily, or even cut entirely.
> I believe countries, families and things in between can be guilty of stuff.
Sure. When those things have internal organization and hierarchy and structures that lead to them making a consensus decision and acting as a whole, then yes, they can be "guilty" for some values of guilty.
Where's the decision-making system for all white people?
Groups were advantaged over groups. Your line of reasoning itself draws a boundary--in history--and thereby quite conveniently sidesteps the issue.
And yes, a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even in 2023, face structural racism over and above their Ukrainian friends, alas, arising from America's legacy of slavery -- hence affrimative action.
But perpetuating the logic of groups being advantaged over groups only keeps the identitarian mindset going. By openly favoring certain groups the discrimination never ends. All you need to do is look at India where the active discrimination in favor of scheduled castes goes on ad infinitum to see that the effect of any discrimination amplifies sectarianism. The line needs to be drawn somewhere. You don't fight fire with fire, you fight it with water. You don't solve discrimination with more discrimination, you fight it by having people not accept the logic of identitarianism.
> perpetuating the logic of groups being advantaged over groups only keeps the identitarian mindset going
maybe, maybe not - the goal, however, is not to "not keep the 'identitarian' mindset going", it is to right past wrongs, make those wronged people whole, and only then ignore identity, as long as everyone else can do it too.
> the goal, however, is not to "not keep the 'identitarian' mindset going"
I wonder about that. Unfortunately, neither of us has evidence and is just spouting opinions. I'm not being snarky; the space of "maybe this person has a different goal, and maybe they don't even realize it" is a quagmire. I agree with the rest of your statement, and I think that's the only part necessary to drive progress. Who cares what others hold in their psyches as long as actual problems are solved? (I care, but I don't believe in thoughtcrime, so I won't force the issue.)
I don't: it's pretty clear if you look into the history and explanation of it.
> Unfortunately, neither of us has evidence and is just spouting opinions. I'm not being snarky; the space of "maybe this person has a different goal, and maybe they don't even realize it" is a quagmire
you are correct that different people have different goals, and the ones who are in favor of affirmative action have the goals I described in the post you responded to.
I have no doubt that people who oppose affirmative action may have different goals, ones which lead them to oppose it, but luckily, I do not require evidence to be convinced that wrongs should be righted before calling everything even.
that's an interesting question, but not one I feel we need to decide now. I'd be happy to hear your suggestions, but obviously "0" wouldn't be a workable one
e.g. it should be at least 1 dollar, so we can start with 1 dollar without needing to decide the upper limit
indeed, it seems like a question intended to stop the action entirely, rather than one intended to discover the right magnitude of action
as for when everyone can stop talking about racial identity: the racism ongoing today itself is an example of this, so when racists stop doing so first, anti-racists can, second
The question is designed to guide us towards a realistic course of action.
If you can't define a target upon which reaching it would allow us to consider the problem solved, then suggesting that anyone will move beyond identitarianism after the problem has been solved is totally disingenuous.
To suggest that there is no need to define an upper limit to reparations implies that you don't believe the problem ever can be solved, and that these kinds of multi-generational grievances should persist perpetually.
I don't agree that "0" is unworkable. I'm obviously not thrilled that my not at all distant relatives were slaughtered by Nazis, but holding my breath for reparations is only going to do me a disservice and isn't going to bring those people back or undo that suffering.
The suggestion to "start with 1 dollar" is frankly bizarre. Is that all my dead relatives are worth? A dollar?
> The question is designed to guide us towards a realistic course of action.
If you can't define a target upon which reaching it would allow us to consider the problem solved, then suggesting that anyone will move beyond identitarianism after the problem has been solved is totally disingenuous.
the goal isn't to "move beyond identity" yet, it is to right past wrongs. Once we've done that, we can move onto another goal like the one you suggest there.
how will we know when we're at the finish line? It isn't actually necessary to figure that out upfront (that's what agile planning is about, for example). All that's necessary is to ask "are we there now?", and we aren't, so more effort is required before reassessing
when slavery was instituted, the people who supported it didn't ask "when will it be too much slavery?", so we don't now need to ask "when will we make up too much for it?"
> I don't agree that "0" is unworkable
I do, so maybe you can suggest another number, and we can compromise, try it out, and reassess afterwards: after all, it's not like giving 1 dollar would be worse than slavery!
> maybe you can suggest another number, and we can compromise, try it out, and reassess afterwards: after all, it's not like giving 1 dollar would be worse than slavery!
I’m sorry, but this line of reasoning is so utterly insane that I can no longer continue to engage.
> I’m sorry, but this line of reasoning is so utterly insane that I can no longer continue to engage
is it? I'm not so sure.
this response sounds like when advocates of the former president similarly thought themselves above engaging with what they similarly believed was the "insanity" of the american people, and said former guy lost as a result.
The discrimination doesn't go away if you ignore it. The discrimination has continued. It still is. Not forced by the law any more, but still many times perpetrated by individuals based on other individuals' membership or a perceived group. That is the real identitarian mindset you should be worried about.
Discrimination goes away when you stop discriminating, perpetuating it doesn't stop it.
It's like you're saying you hit me, hitting is wrong, so I'm going to hit you back ... and you think that will end hitting for good. Er, if it's wrong, stop doing it.
Well, that pair of Ethiopian immigrants might be doing OK [1]. Immigrants from Africa esp if they are blessed to come from places where English is taught and education levels are higher do particularly well (e.g. Nigeria) and appear to outperform people (incl whites) born in the US. I concede that this data might be wrong in all sorts of ways but wouldn't it be nice if it taught us ways to 'lift up all boats'?
Ethiopian immigrants do not face “structural racism,” which is a term that refers to the structural effects of past discrimination. They may face ordinary racism, i.e. discrimination in the present, but so do other groups. Ordinary discrimination doesn’t necessarily have structural effects.
I haven’t seen studies looking at Ethiopians specifically. But Nigerian and Ghanaian immigrants achieve comparable or better economic outcomes compared to whites. https://paa.confex.com/paa/2017/mediafile/ExtendedAbstract/P... (“Among persons aged 25 to 54, Ghanaian men do not differ from white men while Ghanaian and Nigerian women do not differ from white women in terms of occupational status after controlling for education, age, marital status, and the presence of children, but Nigerian men achieve higher occupational status than comparable white men.”). Note that this is controlling for education, so can’t be explained by saying these immigrants have higher education levels. And of course, racists can’t tell a Ghanaian person apart from an Ethiopian person.
> It doesn't really have anything to do with "guilt", it has to do with the fact that white middle class intergenerational wealth.
Can't you recognize that statements like this are propagating the same insensitivity you are intending to correct?
My grandparents were white. They were Argentine and moved to Las Vegas in the 1950s to clean toilets in hotel rooms (And did so for 40 years) so they could raise a family in something resembling a middle class lifestyle. You can't throw a stone very far in the USA and not hear the same or a similar story, at least in my experience. Someone moved here starting with nothing, worked hard, and was able to dramatically increase their standing in life. Integenerational wealth is not common, in fact it is exceedingly rare.
If your grandparents achieved a middle-class life in 1950's America, they owned a home. That home is a form of intergenerational wealth. If they are still alive, your parents or you or another relative will likely get a windfall someday of probably six-figures.
Which means that windfall will at the least double the average retirement savings of a median millennial or GenX person.
By “nonwhite” you mean “black.” Be clear about who you’re talking about.
But if that’s the principle—why does that justify discrimination against Asians immigrants whose ancestors had no property in America, but far less valuable property in third world countries?
If we are going back to people’s grandparents, a house in even a redlined neighborhood in America is much more valuable than a large house in my dad’s village in Bangladesh. Even a segregated American school is better than the village school he attended which had no walls.
Ah, the First Nations are forgotten again... But anyways I mean "nonwhite"; inclusion in the programs that generated white wealth were literally how the ever-evolving definition of "whiteness" was expanded.
It's an extreme simplification; the idea is called "Baby Bonds" and it was part of Corey Booker's platform. It's not a simple cash payment but a savings account with funds that can be withdrawn only for education, job training, first home purchase, or starting a business.
intergenerational wealth through housing, let me tell you about that. My Grandparents owned two home most of the proceeds form their sale went to paying off their debt. You see as life expectancy's have gone up as has medical cost only much more. Sure my grandfather lived till his late 80 when his father and grandfather died to hearth attacks in their early sixties but the various surgeries and treatment for my grandparent ate all but a fraction of that. My parent spent more money taking care of my grandfather and grandmother in their final years than they inherited, and quiet possibly will have to do it again when my last remaining grandparent is no longer able to afford her retirement home and medication after the proceeds of her house sale run out. And I will have to do it for my parent when their turn comes. There isn't some real-estate driven wealth transfer for the middle class anymore. Its transferred to hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Thank you for speaking some sense in this thread. It is quite easy if You start to look into it, reparations is about justice. Injustice is perpetuated under the guise of “neutral” policy all the time.
> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
Companies and governments can be found guilty of wrong doing.
ChatGPT:
Yes, both companies and governments can be found guilty of wrongdoing. The extent and process of holding them accountable can vary depending on the jurisdiction and the specific circumstances involved. Companies can face legal consequences for actions such as fraud, environmental violations, or antitrust violations, among others. Similarly, governments can be held accountable through legal means, such as investigations, impeachment, or legal proceedings, for acts that are deemed illegal or in violation of their responsibilities. The nature of the wrongdoing and the applicable laws and regulations determine the process and consequences of holding them accountable.
Edit: Havard was ruled against as an organization. Of course organizations can be held responsible for what they do including the government.
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. The people who had been harmed by those policies are not the ones seeking admission to Harvard. Everyone seeking admission to Harvard has been born into circumstances through no fault of their own, so just help the financially less fortunate to provide more equal opportunities across the board. Black people are disproportionately represented among the poor, so this would disproportionately help them anyway.
But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth.
IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out.
Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.
When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale
> But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost.
How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period).
If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
> If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals.
I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
> How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal)
Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world.
> and the same schooling prior to college
This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps.
> The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.
I'm frankly not concerned about the 0.1% that can afford to fly to another country for experimental treatments. The US is the primary place for this anyway, so if the US went universal healthcare route, that shrinks the pool even further.
I will recommend Thomas Sowell's writing on this topic, he has some very poignant (and somewhat depressing) points on AA and the wider black cultural landscape that surrounds it.
The real answer is you have to get anything you want ASAP before people stop caring or it becomes more difficult to achieve. This is why certain groups have received reparations and others haven't.
Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.
How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago?
Are their children materially worse off statistically? Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods that everyone who's materially worse off should be uplifted. What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
You cannot have a world that has generational wealth and privilege while not having generational disadvantages. Your definition of victimhood is incredibly narrow here, and wrong.
Using the Federal policies is simply a stark example of how recently racism was aggressively state-sanctioned. The purpose of affirmative action is to help directly break the racist biases in a complex process to being able to attend college.
It is not a singular solution, nor is it a perfect one. I feel like you are attempting to topple AA since it's not a magic bullet to the complex problem of racism in the US. It is an imperfect effort in part with many others to try and tackle the various inequalities in the US.
Even if the US was able to have a truly holistic effort to solve racism and the wrongs minorities have experienced, what good does funding k-12 schools, scholarships, etc. do to help disadvantaged college applicants right now? Nothing. The common dissent is that if they are poor or otherwise disadvantaged then they should receive benefit from programs targeting those disadvantages. But those still are unable to directly address the various unique ways in which a black person with some set of disadvantages is different than a white person with the same checklist. The problem is simply too complex and the breadth of experiences of minorities in the US far too broad to be tackled any way but directly imo, which is what AA attempts to do.
We agree that there are still racial biases in the present day that disproportionately affect Black applicants. But that's not the only disadvantage, and as AA is set up, a Black kid whose parents are doctors who goes to a ritzy boarding school is considered "disadvantaged" compared to a poor Viet kid in a crappy public school who has to spend all his evenings doing deliveries for his parents' restaurant. That is, frankly, ridiculous.
> How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago?
Referring to five decades in relation to a century makes it sound like a lot more time has passed than has actually passed.
> What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
How can it not be? If a parent is traumatized how can that not affect their child? Do you think that the black children from the 50's were not affected by their parents showing up beaten, bruised and bloodied or by seeing their parents hanging from a tree after they didn't come home the night before?
Entire generations of people were victimized in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has not lived through it, and acting like everything needs to be calculated as a 1:1 transaction if it is even to be considered is not a constructive way to enter the discussion.
Victimhood can be passed through generations if the parents' harm was not remedied. Merely ending harm does not remedy it. If someone is prevented from getting a home loan, job, raise, education, etc. because of racist policies, that absolutely affects the kind of life and opportunities that their children will have.
As an analogy, if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
Affirmative action programs are specifically designed to seek out and uplift people who have been generationally affected in that way. It recompenses them by giving them job/education opportunities that they would likely have had if their parents (and their parents, etc.) weren't artificially held back.
How? By having the kid get a smaller inheritance? Or by having the kid not having the privilege of having college educated parents?
If those are the metrics we're using, then use them directly: prioritize first gen college applicants, applicants whose parents rent, applicants whose parents don't have professional jobs. Otherwise, why should a poor Asian immigrant going to a crappy public school be considered "more privileged" than a rich Black kid who goes to Andover?
> if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
The comparison here would be more something like "your grandfather killed my grandfather, therefore I should get privileges over you."
> How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago?
Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was discussed.
Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents, your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you have representation in that process?
Affirmative action is an artificially generated membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for people who may otherwise be excluded.
That's irrelevant, though, when you're talking about the vast majority of people who apply who don't get accepted because of those factors. Telling someone "you're privileged because a child of a Kennedy gets a leg up in going to Harvard and shares your skin color, even though you don't get that same leg up" is ridiculous, to say nothing of Asians who are discriminated against despite having relatively few legacies.
> It's impossible for someone born in 2000 to have been wronged by something done in 1800. Crimes committed during their lifetime? Absolutely, and fix those.
That is disingenuous, Slavery didn't end until the 13th amendment was ratified in 1865 which is 65 years later than you said, but really, slavery was not even a crime.
Systemic abuses continued long after that and even into today. Those are not crimes either...they are written into law like how property taxes are used to fund public education which ensures that people of means get a good education and those that struggle will continue to struggle.
Lynchings, murders, beatings, being forced by gunpoint to not vote...those are crimes and (while they do happen even today) they happened a LOT in the 50's and into the 60's. The people who committed those crimes are grandparents/great-grandparents and a lot of whom are alive today.
Wrongs against minorities are not some long-ago, almost mythical events that we need to just move on from. They are still happening, and they are indicative of a society that values sameness and predictability over the individual rights and freedoms of the people.
That being said, giving a leg-up to a minority applicant over someone else is, in fact, one way to decrease the effects of the abuses that were experienced.
How are the children and grandchildren of Japanese-Americans living through the 1940s doing socioeconomically? Arguably, they were subject to worse racism, harassment, and violence than African-Americans for about two full decades, and we literally put them into camps.
Chinese-Americans worked largely as indentured labor on railroads and various other large projects both before and after the Civil War. How are their descendants faring today?
Howabout Ashkenazi Jews, who have suffered probably the worst through all of recorded history? We're talking TWO MILLENIA of oppression, not a measly two centuries or so. Where are all the Jewish kids killing each other and flunking out of school for all of their historical oppression?
The generational racism trope/excuse is played out, has been massively contradicted by every model minority you can think of, and needs to die. It has no basis in reality.
Do people who regurgitate this insane idea just think Asians and Jews don't exist? The only way one could possibly entertain an obviously incorrect hypothesis is if you intentionally blind yourself to the voluminous countervailing evidence.
And the moment you allow for wrongs that far back, there's no reasonable stopping point. People of Norman descent in the UK have measurably greater wealth than those of Anglo Saxon descent. Should those of Anglo Saxon descent be able to get reparations from those of Norman descent because of William the Conqueror's invasion? And then what about the Welsh, can they get reparations from the Anglo Saxons? My own ancestry is primarily Scottish, French Canadian, and Irish, can I get triple reparations from the English?
It's not about ancient wrongs, the wrongs being talked about were happening as AA was implemented. We're talking about things happening in 1971, not just the 1850's.
The social justice movement presumes to "make things right", but often it's hard or impossible to do so, and trying can have the opposite effect.
Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized.
Why?
Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?
Except those even able to immigrate out of such recently "impoverished" nations are a small self-selected subset of that population, that are likely considerably better off than those who stay behind and and certainly likely to be those with a strong determination to succeed.
Perhaps you could argue the same of slave-descended native born Americans who then apply for college, but the former group are making the same decision, and at any rate, applying for college is rather easier than deciding to move your entire family half-way across the world.
FWIW I'm generally skeptical of whether AA is actually a good thing for various reasons but I assume it's felt "something" has to be done to address underrepresentation of particular races in college admissions. Recent Asian immigrants if anything seem to be slightly overrepresented so for AA policies to have their desired effect, yes, they will by design discriminate against such a group.
The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.
As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.
And that would be my biggest concern about AA (certainly at hyper-elite institutions like Harvard) - it does little to address cultural issues among disadvantaged communities that work against social mobility, including the degree to which formal education is seen as worth pursuing. It may even further entrench such attitudes in some cases. At best, one might hope that if enough members of such communities did successfully navigate the ivy league system and prosper from it, it would prove something of an inspiration to others, but I suspect it's a fairly weak effect.
Is that actually what happens though? And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students? I can't imagine they're just taking in students to satisfy quotas despite them obviously not being capable of excelling in their chosen course.
Yes, I remember seeing an interview with a retired Ivy League professor (sadly don't remember who). He pointed out that many of the AA admitted students struggled with the intense demands of places like Harvard or MIT, but they would do really well at a slightly less elite university. Being consistently worse at everything than your fellow students surely doesn't help self esteem and confidence.
Now, some professors have actually started grading differently according to racial criteria. This will further wreak havoc, because the students know quite well how they stack up to their peers. It makes the "helped" student dependent on being given advantadges, which I think is by design. If your success in life depended on a gigantic bureaucracy of discrimination, would you be in favour of abolishing it?
It's a real problem, and you can see why nobody is addressing it honestly when these are the consequences of doing so.
> And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students?
Yes, very much so. It's no secret that we're starting to see a bi-modal distribution of outcomes for top school students. Contrary to the myth, graduating Harvard isn't (at least, no longer) a ticket to an exceptional career. Plenty of graduates proceed to have a normal (or worse) career that isn't better from what a graduate of a lower-tier school would achieve.
In tech, that means that while some top school grads end up in high-flying unicorns and desirable FAANG positions, others end up in sleepers like Oracle.
> Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.
lets just say for arguments sake that is true, the question then becomes how did it get that way? was it like that in the 60s and 70s and 80s? did something change between now and then?
A good friend of mine was a Vietnamese boat person. Her father drowned off some rickety-ass boat during the process. I dare you to explain to her that she is part of a small, self-selected, well-off group and that her people are "slightly over represented" in higher education.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but this comment is actually pretty disgusting, part of this new type of thinly-vailed socially acceptable racism that is justified on the basis of being on the "right side of history".
The promoters of "social justice" decided to penalize the Vietnamese the US harmed 1 generation ago to atone for the sins of 4 generations ago.
The real reason is because they want equity - equal outcome for all. That means penalizing the overachievers and redistributing the outcomes they deserve to the underachievers.
> The real reason is because they want equity - equal outcome for all. That means penalizing the overachievers and redistributing the outcomes they deserve to the underachievers.
I think you should assume most people act in good faith and are just trying to be nice to people they care about, but because human systems are, like humans themselves, complex and flawed, this can create more harm than good.
There has, as far as I can tell never been a "them". Furthermore, assuming such a "them" exists tends to lead to all sorts of bad behavior.
I can't think of a "good faith" reason for why the grievances of some races are elevated to a top priority, while the grievances of other races, that are often more recent and relevant, are not just ignored - but these races are further penalized by these "social justice" policies.
It's likely that individuals that support the social justice cause have good intentions, however, the cause itself as a system is leading to paradoxical outcomes that are different and sometimes the opposite of what it pretends to promote.
On the contrary, controversial wedge topics such as abortion and, namely, affirmative action show how divided people are. Good faith is valuable but often lacking; I daresay I could pull examples from this HN megathread. And HN is a small portion of the population that is engineered to be somewhat conducive to good faith discussions. I concur that many people here are genuinely trying to express their morals, but the discussion seems lacking in understanding. On these divisive issues, people fall into "us vs. them" naturally, and bridging the gap of understanding is not easily achieved. Everyone is an island in a sea of other viewpoints unless people make an effort to understand.
While that would very much be the the rational decision to make it goes against one of the core principles of much of the discourse in the US, which is that poor people are poor because of some character flaw or being financially irresponsible if you would have just tried hard enough you would not be poor, so why should the state help you.
Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.
> You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful.
I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. There will never be a consensus on what is "made right" and "fair". And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way.
Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more.
I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found.
Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.
"And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way."
I have family who recently immigrated from Liberia, and their general sense is that the black slave descendants had their family structures so incredibly destroyed that it makes sense to focus on those descendants instead of all Black people.
In their communities with strong family networks and more fathers in the home, they don't see nearly the same issues as the mostly fatherless slave descendent families.
Slavery systematically destroyed the family unit of slaves because it was a risk to the power structure. If there was any indication of healthy family structures forming they would split for children and men from women.
But one wouldn't reasonably expect that to continue, no? The critics who say "slavery was a long time ago" have a point on this one. Humans getting married is very normal - if you disrupt that for a generation or two, you'd still expect it to resume. We are many generations past slavery.
The cultural forces behind monogamous family units has weakened quite a bit. It's not super surprising that they can't pick themselves up by their boot straps in short order.
But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. And black folks who are doing fine, but not great, might be doing great right now if not for the color of their skin. Sure, affirmative action based on income will accidentally sweep up some of the right people, but we know how to exactly target these programs, even if we're no longer allowed to.
> But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors.
Maybe they were discriminated against because they were Irish 100 years ago, or Italian 70 years ago, neither of which were considered "white" at the time either. I'm sure we can play this grievance game back to the first humans, but I'm not sure what that would accomplish.
The question you have to ask yourself is: is it more important to help people who are suffering right now, regardless of their race or ethnicity, or is it more important to try and fail to solve some nebulous, poorly understood "inherited grievance" problem.
Very few people in the US piss on the Irish today, but plenty of people and institutions continue to piss on African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. Sundown towns, and the same sick mentality that produces them hadn't gone away, even if some of them have mellowed out on the edges, or are too afraid to be brazen about it.
There's a large difference of degree between the problems faced by those groups.
“you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.”
For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided.
When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage.
Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing.
History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.
>When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage.
As is widely discussed and intuitively obvious, "the past is prologue."
What happened in the past is relevant to the present because the past quite literally creates the present.
As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]:
...we are going back to the old country. We're going back to where many of
our ancestors came from, to see where their stories came from, and their
memories, and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we
are.
This is what history is about. Where we come from, what lies behind the way
we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws
were made.
Should we ignore all that came before, knowing that it informs and structures our societies, ideas and proclivities? I say, "no."
Because we don't exist in a temporal vacuum (thank you, Second Law of Thermodynamics). Rather, our pasts and the impact of the events of those pasts inform and shape the present. Ignore it at your own peril.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that things have causes. Yes, they do.
But the people and laws that caused evilness in the past are largely gone.
What we are talking about here are the effects. But the effects are not cleanly separated by skin color, and the burden of addressing them should not be assigned by skin color, either.
Affirmative Action is just a bad solution from all angles, created by anthropomorphizing groups of people as though they were individuals.
We’re literally commenting on a Supreme Court ruling which tossed out Affirmative Action. It’s not unusual for people to talk about the main topic in the comments.
>We’re literally commenting on a Supreme Court ruling which tossed out Affirmative Action. It’s not unusual for people to talk about the main topic in the comments.
Perhaps you and others are/were. But I didn't. In fact, I never voiced an opinion about Affirmative Action at all.
Rather, I pointed out that ignoring history is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with that assertion, but I didn't discuss AA, nor was my reply related to the recent SCOTUS decision.
Are you suggesting that I keep my big mouth shut if, in your estimation, I'm not sufficiently "on topic?" Not saying that's what you're implying, but it's definitely something that could be inferred -- and I did.
The problem with your logic is that if you leave the past the past then there’s effectively no punishment for discrimination in the present.
Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.
The Ukraine war is not 50 years ago and clearly affects the entire country. If Russia decides to pay reparations that could make sense but it’s a different issue by a long shot.
50 years later after a bunch of people have been born, died, and moved in and out? No way.
— As uttered by quadrillions of philosophers of varying repute
Unless you suggest an omnipotent being intervene, I'm not sure how you intend to enact perfect fairness. Circumstances change over time. With some help from other nations, I imagine Ukraine could recover quite nicely from the war in time (once it's over). People won't come back to life, sure, but that's been true for eons. Unfortunately, African-Americans generally don't have the potential for such a positive outcome, which is why reform needs to happen. To go back on topic, I just don't think AA is the solution (or, at best, it's an aspect of the solution to be phased out eventually). I've said my ideas of reform elsewhere.
Yes, people get away, and it’s unfair. Affirmative Action is not a good solution.
It may have made sense at one time, but that time is passed and it’s incompatible with our Constitution, so it needs to go. From now on, help individuals who need help and ignore their skin color.
Convenient? How about "necessary to keep your head sane"?
Because the alternative is to be forever stuck on all possible grudges of yesteryear, never moving on.
Personally, I am not going to start hating random contemporary Germans only because Nazis killed three of my relatives 80 years ago and, well, burnt and pillaged their way across Central and Eastern Europe.
I just refuse to be a mindless slave to the past, whipped up by nationalist politicians, no matter how horrible that past was.
In one year, the people involved are basically the same. In 50 years, a lot of births, deaths, and immigration have changed the population dramatically.
There could be a discussion about one year vs ten years or something, I don’t know. But it’s irrelevant to the current topic.
Just do what’s right based on individual circumstances. If person A is poor, help them, don’t discriminate against person B. That just feels like a government trying to pass blame for its own failed social policies over the last 50 years.
Well clearly you have all the answers lol. Again your logic is faulty. There is no world government compelling action thus by your own logic any government can simply fail to take action until the duration you have mentioned has passed and then they are absolved of responsibility.
Irrelevant. The question isn’t about legality. It’s morality and one of ethics. Even if it were legal it’s the government itself that would need to be compelled. There’s no higher force. There’s the citizenry which takes us to the current discussion and thread.
A more interesting question to me is how much people think West African countries owe ancestors of USAmericans who were sold to be transported? Should the bill be bigger or smaller because most (?) didn't survive?
> Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not?
Is it the same if you wait five or six generations instead of a year?
Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past is being put behind them.
We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.
Germany was definitely punished through occupation, partition, forced resettlement of its people, forced ceding of territories to other countries, reparation payments, exportation of its industry, and forced labor by its POWs.
But in terms of feeling national guilt, that wasn't much of a thing immediately post war. The national reckoning for the Holocaust and dismantling of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and such didn't happen until decades later, the 68 movement was a major catalyst in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement.
The West and east Germany split was a form of reparations, including conceding and dismantling of the German industry and railroad system.
The key however is that such reparations are not being continued, nor are they repaying the full cost of the damages cause to every person on the planet that was impacted by the war. No amount of reparations can make right the wrong of world war 2.
If we just look at the dollar amount, according to the britannica, the money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000,000 (in 1945), which does not account for the human costs (the cost of slavery in Amercia is mostly about human cost). The reparations that Germany has paid is nowhere near those.
If we imagine them having a debt of $1,000,000,000,000, the inflation alone would be around the same as their GDP.
Germany has paid reparations to Polish individuals harmed by the second world war.
> In the meantime, Poland and Germany concluded several treaties and agreements to compensate Polish persons who were victims of German aggression. In 1972, West Germany paid compensation to Poles that had survived pseudo-medical experiments during their imprisonment in various Nazi camps during the Second World War.[35] In 1975, the Gierek-Schmidt agreement was signed in Warsaw. It stipulated that 1.3 billion DM was to be paid to Poles who, during Nazi occupation, had paid into the German social security system but received no pension.[36] In 1992, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation was founded by the Polish and German governments, and as a result, Germany paid Polish sufferers approximately zl 4.7 billion (equivalent to zl 37.8 billion or US$7.97 billion in 2022[citation needed]). Between 1992 and 2006, Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish, non-Jewish victims of slave labour in Nazi Germany and also to Polish orphans and children who had been subject to forced labour.[37] The Swiss Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust (which had obtained settlement money from banks in Switzerland) used some of its funds to pay compensation between 1998 and 2002 to Polish Jews and Romani who were victims of Nazi Germany.[37]
Germany also ceded around 20% of its pre-1938 territory to Poland. The ethnic Germans who lived in those territories were subsequently denied citizenship and expelled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees)
I'm not really sure that there's anything more to settle between the two countries in 2023.
Poland has fairly less wealth than Germany. Is it fair that Germany has so much wealth today when the countries they attacked do not?
The affirmative action discussed here are not about survivors of slavery. They are descendants and non-descendants. The Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish. Not to every polish person who by being polish is today impacted by the historical events of world war 2.
To put the question in a different way, why is things settled between the polish people and the German people, while things are not settled between the white population in US and the black population?
> To put the question in a different way, why is things settled between the polish people and the German people, while things are not settled between the white population in US and the black population?
Deaths per capita are higher, but their police encounter rate is also higher. The higher encounter rate is possibly due to discrimination, but it doesn't match with your story about calling the cops and then getting shot.
The authors wish to note the following: “Our article estimated the role of officer characteristics in predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police. A critique pointed out we had erroneously made statements about racial differences in the probability of being shot (1), and we issued a correction to rectify the statement (2).
Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.
While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.
The way you analyze statistics matters too. For instance most don't cross-reference crime statistics with economic background and see how drastically that affects any prior (likely racist) conclusions.
Have you cross-referenced that? What I saw was that the lowest economic quintiles of some groups committed less crime than the wealthiest quintiles of other groups. The "economic" in "socio-economic" is important, but so is the "socio", which may include being discriminated against in the past.
Unfortunately, statistics don't really bear out a lot of popular claims about the impact of poverty. For example, per-student funding does not make as big a difference in academic performance in schools as demographics and the local social environment: there are a lot of schools with bottom barrel funding that perform great and schools with exorbitant funding that perform miserably. And family income is not the strongest predictor of SAT scores.
The point of saying "when a black person calls police" implies that the "non-zero" is in reference to an increase from the status quo of "when a white person calls police".
Everyday there is a non-zero chance of being shot by police whether you intiate the encounter or not.
Now, favoring person A due to their skin color, at the expense at person X, because person B was once harmed to favor person Y due to their skin color does not strike me as a productive way to do that.
You can start to make things right by banning that shit about children of alumni, all the bullshit police behavior there, doing some real wealth redistribution, etc. You can go looking at individuals that were harmed too, but modern legal systems have a really hard time dealing with that kind of situation, so be prepared to cover new ground, and be wary of not creating larger injustices than the ones you are trying to fix.
Anyway, I'm far from the US too. The entire thing isn't completely academic to me, but it's close to that.
> Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years!
Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. The "last chattel slave" was only freed around September 1942. I've seen this reference in several places, but the most direct one is a footnote on a wikipedia page [0].
Regardless, it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering. The children and grandchildren of enslaved black people are still alive today! Waving it away with "time has passed" seems more an attempt to bury the issue than to approach it with some semblance of acknowledging the wrong done.
Historically, many slaves were not permitted or able to reproduce, this is one thing that distinguishes the slave trade in the United States. Trying to make amends for those slaves whose line ended with them is probably impossible.
On the other hand, a great many people today all around the world, and of many skin colours are descended from slaves. I am mostly familiar with this history in Europe and Africa, though I have no doubt it went on to a greater and lesser extent elsewhere. Supposing that the average reader here, who does not consider themselves to be "minority", is a "white" American, how confident are you that your ancestors do not include many slaves? Slavery in Europe still exists, but in the traditional sense with open buying and selling and large-scale enslavement it was openly and widely practiced in England and Germany and Poland and wherever you trace your ancestry no more than a thousand years ago.
You may consider it inappropriate to put a time limit on suffering, but in practice it's implicitly done all the time. The US is exceptional in having so many people who bear clear marks of historically nearby enslavement. Other parts of the world have been more successful in forgetting.
If I proposed to some Ivy League admissions panel that the descendants of biblical Jews should be favoured over those of Egyptians on account of enslavement would anyone listen?
>it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering
I'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically?
To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc).
What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.
> tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same
To you. There's almost certainly more genetic difference between two people randomly selected from two African tribes than two people randomly selected from different self-identified racial groupings in a Western country. And a much longer history of conflict between tribes vs races. I'd note the fact this is true goes some way towards explaining why Africa suffers the levels of violence and poverty today that it still does.
As for the rest of your post, while AA clearly is a strong form of racial discrimination that does little to help us achieve an ideal world where "race" is no longer a thing, it's also a policy with an underlying philosophy of "let's provide help to other people different in appearance/ethnic backgrounds" , which is rather obviously a massive improvement on "let's actively discriminate and/or commit violence against such people". And hopefully a step towards a policy of "let's help other people when they need help, regardless of their appearance or ethnic background".
No, to them. I was thinking specifically of the Rwandan Genocide[0], where there was and is no visible difference between the Hutu and Tutsi. The difference was via a field on their national id card [1].
Accepted, the Tutsi/Hutu division isn't one where difference in genetics/appearance seems to be a major factor, though I'd still assume the average Tutsi or Hutu could easily distinguish one from the other in a way outsiders mightn't be able to.
The main division of Tutsi/Hutu was primarily done by Europeans, and the criteria was based on "those who owned cattle became known as the Tutsi and those who did not own cattle became known as the Hutu", and taller persons were also assigned as Tutsi.
Taller men tend to earn more money on average so in those terms both the average Tutsi, Hutu and outsiders should be able to make a better than random guess about who is Tutsi or Hutu.
Ah you have it backwards - there was already the Tutsi ethnic group, but the Belgians found it easier to identify them as Tutsi by number of cattle etc.
"Prior to the arrival of colonists, Rwanda had been ruled by a Tutsi-dominated monarchy since the 15th century."
"Rwanda was ruled as a colony by Germany (from 1897 to 1916) and by Belgium (from 1922 to 1961). Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government. Such discriminatory policies engendered resentment."
"When the Belgians took over, they believed it could be better governed if they continued to identify the different populations. In the 1920s, they required people to identify with a particular ethnic group and classified them accordingly in censuses."
I was taught that there was no difference and it was the Dutch that measured nose length and made the classification ‘arbitrarily’. But isn’t that false? In the time since I’ve seen side by side pictures and it seems trivial to tell them apart. So now I don’t know what to think.
Your society would be doomed to forever look back at historical grievances and never make progress.
As Ibram X. Kendi says: "The only remedy to past
discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Under your and his vision, there will never come a day when people aren't discriminated for things they had no control over.
I think it is probably unwise to pre-suppose an extreme here (that society will never "progress").
The default action today is "do nothing and don't acknowledge the problem." Suggesting any action be taken against that status quo does not in any way suggest that it is a permanent inviolable law that society must continuously optimize for nor does it suggest that it can't be done in tandem with other "progress" society may achieve.
> The default action today is "do nothing and don't acknowledge the problem."
Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so. The world presently has 10e9 people. Historically, something like 10e12 people have ever existed (I'm estimating). If you were to somehow feel the sum total of human suffering in just one instant, I daresay it would destroy you. We ALL pick and choose what suffering to acknowledge, for the simple reason that to do otherwise is impossible (and deadly if it was possible). Heck, we ignore entire categories of suffering in every discussion, like that caused by disease, heart-break, ostracism, bullying, or old age.
You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it. This is absurd. It is vain virtue signaling. Your position smacks of an ignorant pride, wrapped in a claim of impossible compassion. And this sin of pride extends to your "solutions" - you assert that you can accurately assess the suffering of all humans throughout history and take just action to make it right. That's even more absurd.
We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering. It means we must (must!) be highly selective. We must let (almost) everything go. We deal with what's in front of us. We must acknowledge how human life is twisted: Rape and plunder...that yields good kids. Civilizations collapse...to make new for the next one. Rampant exploitation...that yields just and fair societies. Cultural appropriation...that yields great ideas and art. Slavery and dehumanization...that ultimately leaves the descendants in a better position than the descendants of those that weren't taken. It's twisted, messed up, and that's life. (btw the most twisted thing I know of in nature is the life-cycle of this slime-mold/ameoba life cycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlANF-v9lb0).
Yeah, there are plenty of structures that need to be dismantled in the US. The police are out-of-control and there is no meaningful separation of powers at the local level; the health-care system is plundering us all for profit; wealth inequality continues to get worse; money in politics has ossified our power structures. And yeah, America has a profound and unique history of racist dehumanization rooted in southern slavery that continues to this day and negatively impacts many American black people in profound ways. But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK. That's just fucked up.
> The world presently has 10e9 people. Historically, something like 10e12 people have ever existed (I'm estimating).
Tangential, and doesn't detract much from your well-defended point, but the percentage of people alive today is probably much higher than your estimate. The population has gone up so fast in recent years that the total number of people who have ever lived is closer to 10x current population than 1000x:
Given a current global population of about 8 billion, the estimated 117 billion total births means that those alive in 2022 represent nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived
Look I'm not exactly engaged enough to dismantle this piece by piece so this will probably be my last comment but:
> Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so.
You'd do well to do more than assert it. This is ideology.
> You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it.
I said no such thing, and the remainder of your prior statements are also asserting I made any such claim. Making efforts to fix wrongs is not itself a moral failure, nor is it some kind of foolish pride.
> We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering.
What is odd to me is that this is exactly my point. If you somehow think that racism isn't still "in front of us" as you so boldly claim, I encourage you to prove that substantially and convince the people who to this day still feel victimized by it.
> But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK.
I haven't claimed this at all. For what its worth though — you are in some form invoking the paradox of intolerance here. I'm not sure why you felt the need to write this screed, it is entirely separate from anything I've said and completely off-the-rails.
You may be right - I suppose that apart from my first point about ambivalence being the default, it doesn't necessarily apply to you personally. But it does apply to the general ideology this thread is addressing. I'm sorry if I grouped you in with views that you don't share.
The part you quoted was a rhetorical device, hence "start out". The poster went on to explain Jim Crow laws and other systemic discrimination against Black people up to at least 1971.
The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies.
Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.
You can give poor people money, but that has nothing to do with black people. Black people aren't asking for money because they're poor, they're asking for money because the country was built with their ancestors' uncompensated labor, it was entirely legal, and the descendants of their owners still enjoy the fruits of that uncompensated labor.
You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.
Except that the country wasn't built on that labor. It was built on agriculture and industrialization, mostly in non-slave states.
And most of cotton generated by slaves went to Britain, whose textile mills also captured most of the profits off of that industry. Should the USA therefore demand reparations from Britain?
But we could go the other route, and tax the descendants of the slave owners. Unfortunately, the largest and most easily identifiable group of descendants of slave owners are blacks themselves! (You can thank a common practice of raping slaves for a lot of that.)
The best solution that we ever came up with for this mess was school busing. Since we got rid of it, the black-white income gap has been rising. But nobody wants to talk about it. Instead, let's focus on the token gesture of affirmative action, which never made a difference in the lives of most blacks. And which tainted the success of blacks whose success was not because of affirmative action.
And even past that, the north greatly profited off of the South's use of slavery, to the point that NYC almost seceded with the south in solidarity (and protecting profits).
No one is going to be able to go back in time and change history.
Getting into the weeds of defining who is and is not deserving of wealth redistribution is just going to waste society’s resources by pitting tribe versus tribe, and ironically mostly helps those at the top.
“Poor” is easier to define and rectify, and at the end of the day, I think the goal should be to provide a floor to members of society and maximize opportunities to all.
I would look at what happened in South Africa. An explicit part of Mandela's agenda was setting an end point for the discussions around what happened during apartheid.
South Africa is also a good example of what happens if people decide to go back and reopen that box (and tbf, when it came to money the initial movement was quite short-lived, the current President of South Africa got very rich very quickly).
You dont need to go back in time or define who is and isnt to blame. A few simple tax based measures (ex: free college for black people for 200 years) and genuine atonement (ex: replace civil war relics that downplay southern role in slavery and its associated atrocities) and wed be light years ahead of where we are today.
Staple an endpoint on it then move on. The trick is doing SOMETHING meaningful and country wide is whats missing.
Why do you think the country is richer because of slavery?
I'd argue that slavery made a small % of influential plantation owners very rich at the expense of the suffering of a large number of people, and less importantly the economy.
Places in the U.S. that didn't have slaves are richer today than places that did.
Slave societies are generally poor. Africa's economy was largely slave-based until relatively recently (and still is the only place where you have active slave markets, the reason why slaves came from Africa was because it was the only place where there was a local slave industry, largely due to the trade into the Middle East), Brazil's slave trade was 10x larger than the US (the US never actually had a large first-generation slave population because mortality was so low and fertility so high), Caribbean the same, the Middle East the same, India the same.
There is a lot of research on this subject but it is worth remembering that slaves were capital that had a price too. So it wasn't "free labour" in any sense.
Most plantation owners didn't end up rich either, there were economies of scale and the price of cotton collapsed over the 19th century.
Over the long-term though, slave labour has typically inhibited economic development.
In part because when labor is free you have less incentive to innovate;
American slavery in the U.S. South was threatened more by the invention of the cotton gin and the global floor for cotton prices dropping. This was diversified away somewhat with Tobacco, but still a major factor in the economics of slavery.
The sad part is that the US South was fearful of this economic reality - up to runaway slaves and illegal slave trade decimating the profit margins - which meant the powder keg for revolt was ready. But as we can see from the Southern "Tax" men stealing from the citizenry, the French less incentivised because of global cotton prices; the future in American slavery was futile.
I think you have the economic history of the cotton gin backwards there. The slave economy was much more tobacco-centric before the cotton gin, because even with slaves, cotton was too labor-intensive to be worth large scale agriculture before the cotton gin. The cotton gin is a good example of Jevons paradox, where making something more efficient (in this case, making cotton harvesting more labor-efficient) ends up increasing demand (in this case, of cotton-harvesting labor).
Whilst I agree with your point that slavery inhibits economic development, your points on the slave trade within Africa come off as revisionist. The transatlantic slave trade took off after the New Laws were passed and African slaves were adjusted to the climates plantations were in. I have never seen anything to suggest Africa was the only place with a local slave trade at the time, and it is definitely not the only place with active slave markets.
Just last week, a woman was arrested in Germany for practicing slavery whilst living back in Syria. It shouldn’t be hard to find news about people being sold on WhatsApp in the Middle East. BBC did a special on it. This isn’t even going into the obvious slavery, and the market for it, that persists even further East.
>Why do you think the country is richer because of slavery?
There are plenty of books on this subject, I think "Capitalism and Slavery" goes into this well, but it's pretty well documented. Slavery was a huge part of the southern economy, it wasn't just a few individual slaveholders getting rich; it was embedded in the very way of life in the south. It's akin to saying "America isn't rich because of Apple, there's just a few wealthy executives at Apple" - it totally ignores how embedded Apple is in our economy - from the app store, to digital payments, to the entire businesses that live on that platform. It's not controversial at all to say the country was made richer because of slavery.
It's not to say that every plantation owner was massively wealthy, or America was a super power due to slavery, but America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
> Slavery was a huge part of the southern economy, it wasn't just a few individual slaveholders getting rich; it was embedded in the very way of life in the south.
The part you’re leaving out is that, as a direct consequence of this practice, the South was a backwards and impoverished part of the country for that entire period.
> America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
That Industrial Revolution started not too long after American independence, but it only happened in the North, not the impoverished slave economy of the South. That’s one of the fundamental reasons the North won the war. Slavery didn’t make America richer; it made America significantly poorer. And the Northern capitalists knew it at the time, which is why they were a major part of the antislavery coalition that ultimately formed the Republican Party.
Just because the South didn't reap the benefits of it's massive free labor pool, doesn't mean that those benefits didn't exist. Both the North (and even England!) benefitted from slavery even if they didn't directly own the slaves.
The abolition of slavery was economically good - if not for the fact you freed up a massive labor pool out of what was essentially farming into working in factories. But that initial suppression, combined with with the continued discrimination that led to plenty of African Americans (and Natives, and arguably the earliest asian settlers) to be regularly robbed of whatever the could build contributes directly to the reason that we are still circling around the reparations concept today.
Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad", the effects of slavery prevented the entire demographic from building wealth; and a lot of was stolen in a government sanctioned manned, e.g. the Tulsa bombings in 1921, 50 years after the abolition of slavery.
None of your comment addresses, let alone refutes, my argument that slavery made America as a whole poorer rather than richer. Can you clarify what your point of contention is here?
Also,
> Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad"....
What on earth gave you the idea I would believe such a thing? That's the exact opposite of what my argument would imply.
> The part you’re leaving out is that, as a direct consequence of this practice, the South was a backwards and impoverished part of the country for that entire period.
The part that you're leaving out is that they were backwards and impoverished BY CHOICE. They could have automated just as much as the North did. They chose not to, because it was politically advantageous for land owners to keep their slave populations, which effectively also kept wages low for non-land owning white folk.
> Black people aren't asking for money because they're poor, they're asking for money because the country was built with their ancestors' uncompensated labor
Then we'd have to address every single group that has been discriminated against in US history - including Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, Mexican, and more.
Turns out - every group has been discriminated against at some point in history.
So the very idea of reparations for one particular discriminated group - out of all the rest - is racist in and of itself. Additionally, it solves nothing except give people a temporary shopping spree.
You cannot right history's wrongs by throwing some money around.
Let's, collectively, put on our grown-up pants and work together to ensure the future holds equal opportunity - not equal outcome - for all.
> Then we'd have to address every single group that has been discriminated against in US history - including Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, Mexican, and more
if you think that's true, then do it, instead of complaining that another group of people are compensated for past wrongs
it sounds like a "perfect solution fallacy" to me, anyways: we don't actually need to, you just personally feel we should as a result of your one individual sense of morality
If the primary justification for the reparations is that it sets right the wrongs caused by unequal treatment, pointing out the lack of compensation for other groups is relevant since it is also unequal treatment, no?
relevant, I don't think so, but again, you're free to advocate for whatever for whomever, nobody is stopping you, as long as you aren't cynically using discrimination against 1 group to justify not dealing with the discrimination against another
otherwise, again, that sounds like a perfect solution fallacy: 'we can't fix everything at once so we should do nothing'
Neither the Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, nor Mexicans were subject to chattel slavery; it's a unique heinous wrong in American history. Native Americans and First Nations peoples suffered genocide and civilizational erasure, another unique and heinous wrong in American history, and while there can be no adequate reparation, as Americans we are able to sustain several Government Bureaus and Departments, and accommodate Tribal Autonomy, Courts, Casinos, and more as some small measure of respect. Reparations can be non-monetary too.
> another unique and heinous wrong in American history
This is staggeringly incorrect.
> we are able to sustain several Government Bureaus and Departments, and accommodate Tribal Autonomy, Courts, Casinos, and more as some small measure of respect
In no small way are these "tokens" responsible for the unacceptable conditions many native Americans endure today. In so many ways, these tokens turned out to be the most cruel act against these people.
> Reparations can be non-monetary too
They are always monetary demands. There is no reparation available that restores any injustice, nor does not punish those who had absolutely nothing to do with any injustice perpetuated in history.
Reparations are about buying votes, exactly in the same way dangling student debt relief buys votes. It's pretty simple... and in non-trivial ways is discriminatory in itself.
> they're asking for money because the country was built with their ancestors' uncompensated labor, it was entirely legal,
If anything, this is an argument against reparations. Slavery has been around and accepted since before the Bible was written; we just keep finding ways to redefine it. An entire war was waged in which people died fighting to restore slaves' freedom. The debt has been paid.
What reparations should be paid out for is the systemic effect of abusing the justice system to keep blacks in cages long after slavery ended. The war on drugs, the war on crime, the wrongful convictions from both, BLM...that much is extrajudicial and occurred in our lifetimes. They really get/got fucked by the system in a not-so-legal way, which merits correction.
> If anything, this is an argument against reparations. Slavery has been around and accepted since before the Bible was written; we just keep finding ways to redefine it. An entire war was waged in which people died fighting to restore slaves' freedom. The debt has been paid.
It does not matter how long slavery has been around. What matters is that the nation accrued gigantic collections of material wealth on the backs of American slaves. The American Civil War was NOT fought to restore the freedom of slaves. The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
No debt has ever been paid. Those union soldiers were never fighting to end slavery. They were fighting to maintain the union. Those are fundamentally different objectives. Your perspective is not held by any scholarship on the matter past jingoistic elementary school textbooks.
There are even more cynical takes that could be explored (I, too, have been through the mental gymnastics of the liberal American college, an institution most welcoming of tolerance for race discussions), but the net result is that slaves were liberated and assimilated at the cost of significant loss of human life. That abolition of slavery aligned with other objectives does not negate my point that slaves benefited from the war, at the expense of people who didn't owe them anything.
> The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
You just made the argument that the South seceded over a single issue-- slavery. The North responded by declaring war on its own countrymen (it was the North that declared war, remember)-- and not because they wanted to keep slaves, but because the South was out of line.
Were that the case, we could have avoided the bloodiest battle in American history by simply negotiating an outcome where the South was allowed to keep its slaves. We don't care about ending slavery, anyway, so who gives a fuck? Keep your goddamn slaves. Surrender your arms and apologize.
At any point during the war, the Union could have ended it by making the same concession-- they didn't care about ending slavery, right? We'll just keep throwing our sons at the problem and have them shipped back in neat little boxes though.
Once the rebellion was over, the Union could have packed up and went home and still let the South keep its slaves (because it was never about slavery!), or left the slaves to their fate as abandoned property, but instead they were emancipated and had their personhood recognized by the Union that you claim only got involved to big-dick the South.
So the Civil War was entirely about preserving the ego of a bunch of Narcissists whose progressive social values and efforts in abolishing slavery in their own backyard somehow translated to a lack of interest in going to war with a clique of rebels that refused to adopt the same principles, until someone cucked Honest Abe. That much could not stand. We were totally cool with letting the South continue having slaves-- they just needed to be taught a lesson in respect.
Come on. This isn't how politics or statecraft works. The situation is more nuanced than either of us is getting into (economic advantages to war, slavery, etc.) but this is more histrionic than history.
> Those union soldiers were never fighting to end slavery. They were fighting to maintain the union.
The Union soldiers could and did fight for both things. I reminder that this one one of the most popular marching songs for Union troops at the time:
John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back!
His soul is marching on!
His pet lambs will meet him on the way;
They go marching on!
They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!
As they march along!
Now, three rousing cheers for the Union;
As we are marching on!
Of course, individual opinions could and did vary a lot, but the very popularity of the song surely demonstrates the common sentiment among the troops. The elites, now, that is a more interesting question.
If we neutralize generational economic disadvantage, we also eliminate any merit to the claim to compensation for economic injury to past generations.
I would rather no one bear the economic burden of the myriad of diverse injustices committed by our society in the past than that only specifically the descendants of those enslaved in the past be freed of the economic harm of that particular injustice, even if its effects could be fairly isolated, computed, and compensated.
What I believe they’re trying to say is that it already has not been a meritocracy, and because of human nature that stain will always be there somewhat at least this is a attempted washing of the stain
I specifically wrote “less meritocratic” to imply that meritocracy is a spectrum. Obviously, humans are currently unable to achieve perfectly meritocratic institutions, but it is a spectrum where we can attempt to be more meritocratic than less.
Well, it's an intersectional issue. You have to take into consideration that the academic successes or failures of an individual are going to be heavily impacted by the schools they had access to.
Which is directly tied to the above mentjoned issues.
Of course thing's haven't been "made right" (reparations?). They never will be. You simply cannot correct such a large and complex past injustice. By the time you're done sorting through all the details to a reasonable standard, everyone who was around when the reparations process started would have already passed away, and doing this kind of thing sloppily is a recipe for disaster.
The only way forward is to correct current injustices and level the playing field on which people compete today (i.e. the rationale behind affirmative action). I do think the focus should be on class rather than race; the two are highly correlated but not the same. Nothing in the SCOTUS decision seems to prohibit affirmative action based on class, so I actually think this ruling could turn out less impactful than many seem to fear or hope.
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
I don't disagree with you, but I've always found it wrong that in a lot of cases of academic affirmative action, it's Asians who are absorbing the cost of making things right, when they are definitely not responsible for any of the wrongs done.
> when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
As an absolute number, more white people are shot by police than black. [1]
As a percentage of population, the rate is higher in the black population, however that's a very complex analysis when you break it down by homicides by region and the populations (many urban areas are majority black, or Hispanic).
> You've got to try to make things right.
Discrimination based on race doesn't strike me as a very good strategy for making things right. It seems to me like it will just foster increased racial tensions, resentment and problems without solving anything.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations was widely dismissed for the title in 2014, but it's a chronicle of this sort of thing, and it's very much ongoing.
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how?
> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.
How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight.
In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being.
If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.
If that’s your summary of knowledge, it’s misleading and lacks nuance. GI Bill did not exclude blacks, it’s educational institutions that chose either accept or decline those funds for black applicants. Still in South there was about a hundred of colleges accepting black paying with GI bills.
Majority those lynched was white.
You’re propagating victimization narrative.
There are historic black colleges that would and should gladly fill in gaps left by historical white institutions like Ivies. Same with neighborhoods. Both have the same problem that none is willing to talk about in polite non-Southern society.
> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that
High schools in Georgia have had segregated proms as recently as 2019 (and possibly since then too), either formally, up to 2012, or informally (one county had schools that had a prom that was open and then a "white prom" which didn't specify attendance requirements, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to who was welcome where.
> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that.
And to put this in real terms, the number of racial justice who have 'killed themselves' via methods like 'hanging themselves from a tree outside their house with sheets their family haven't seen before' makes you think that this really isn't a whole thing that we've gotten past. It's not like lynchings were legal in the 1950s; the perpetrators simply structurally didn't face justice for their crimes.
And not to mention, slavery still happens. Prison work is a thing, and you don't have to look at too many studies to see that Black men are incarcerated at a rate far out stripping the average. Systemic racism leading to incarceratuon is very much a thing, and enforced prison work is very much a thing, ergo modern slavery.
If reparations were being paid, it could be paid to people who are alive right now.
Where did you get 30 million? One online source estimates 1 million net worth and has some reasoning to back it up. My guess is that if he has owned a house in the DC area since he has been on the supreme court, he would have a lot of home equity too but probably not up to 30 million
>are intrinsically inferior to whites. Most white people (and plenty of black people) choose to believe the latter.
Your assertion is that most (>50%) of whites in the US believe that blacks are inferior? I find that hard to believe.
It's my impression that these folks are mostly concentrated in certain states and retain power solely due to the fact that land mass = power due to the nature of our government.
> t's obvious that they're talking around it, especially when "culture" comes up.
I 100% think it is because of culture and has nothing to do with race. I have a friend who is black, he grew up in the Ivory Coast and moved to the US for school, he is hard working, contentious, polite, and all the other things that are associated with success. This is because he was raised to value education, to work hard, to do good for the world, the importance of family, etc.
In comparison I spent several years doing humanitarian work in the inner cities of northern Ohio. There I saw veneration of doing as little as possible, hostility towards education, glorification of violence, and a host of other things that lead to negative outcomes.
I won't pretend that some people aren't racist, but no person can tell me with a straight face that the inner city culture and everything that comes with it isn't part of the reason we have the disparity in our country.
At least in part, it’s the 20th century political alliance between black politicians and white social liberals. These are not problems that existed in the first half of the 20th century. Ironically, you’re now seeing the same social breakdown in working class white communities, who historically were aligned with white social liberals. Fatherless “barstool conservatives” are the product of that alliance.
Almost all the disparity in income mobility between black and white people is caused by disparities between black and white men. (Black women have similar mobility to similarly situated white women in terms of individual income.) And Harvard’s Raj Chetty has shown that the two things that eliminate racial disparities in income mobility for black boys is growing up in a neighborhood with (1) low levels of racism among whites; and (2) high levels of fathers living at home with their biological children: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. There’s only a handful of places in America, unfortunately, that meet both criteria.
>I won't pretend that some people aren't racist, but no person can tell me with a straight face that the inner city culture and everything that comes with it isn't part of the reason we have the disparity in our country.
I'd posit that when the institutions of society disrespects, discriminates against, humiliates and murders members a group with impunity for generations, it's not very surprising when that group is disrespectful of society and its institutions is it?
And while, for the most part (leaving aside voter suppression, gerrymandering and other mechanisms that disadvantage/disenfranchise) the government mostly no longer murders/discriminates with impunity, there's plenty of anti-African American bigotry (I use that term instead of "racism" as there's only one human race, and we're all part of it) still around.
While I don't think it's constructive for those who have been/are being abused/discriminated against for nearly half a millenium to distrust the institutions that have done so, it's certainly understandable.
> Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?
It hasn't but it should be. One thing I know for sure is that the first step to ending that discrimination shouldn't be to add more. Why not start by removing that?
Pasadena, a decent sized city in Los Angeles County that houses Caltech of all places, was forced to officially desegregate in the 1970s but they've still got tons of policies left over that discriminate in housing [1]. South Pasadena real estate agents unofficial redlined the neighborhoods well into the 1980s and possibly even the 1990s. Schools, especially in Altadena, were still highly segregated when I went to elementary school there in the 2000s. In the 21st century, for f**k's sake.
And that's in a city adjacent to Los Angeles. We don't see many rebel flags in Southern California but the segregation is just staggering.
IME it's even worse in the East coast cities, especially with the way roads, highways, and mass transit are built. I'll admit I had no idea what true segregation looked like until I lived in Ft Lauderdale/Hollywood in Florida (in the mid-2010s).
There's a network effect at Caltech, which does not practice AA, because it's so small. Basically, if you get into Caltech without AA, chances are you got into an equally good university with AA.
However, it's clear to the outside observer that your single-digit hispanic or black prospective classmates at Caltech are generally more miserable than your prospective classmates at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etcetera. They are usually the only person like you in their dorm, or in their year, or in their major. So you don't go to Caltech.
> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status.
Harvard also gets lots of Asians (well, Chinese) who are obviously not legacy admits, and there is/was active discrimination against them at Harvard (they don't want the student body to be too white and asian?). The decision specifically calls this out:
> The high court found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against white and Asian American applicants by using race-conscious admissions policies.
Using merit alone, it is totally possible that Harvard would be mostly Asian very quickly. However, it doesn't fit the narrative that the system is biased towards white legacy admits.
Asians do have a general leg up in terms of family income (which correlates to education success), so if we were discriminating based on income, then we could come up with something fair that gives poorer people (which can act as a proxy for disadvantaged minorities) more opportunity, but at the expense of rich people since we don't have unlimited resources. The problem being that now you are denied getting into Harvard because your mom and dad are too rich...and I don't think many people would think that is fair either.
Plenty of constitutional things won't fly in court of public opinion. Honestly, are best bet is to focus resources on K-12 so much that even poor students get great educations (in spite of their home situation). Not sure that will fly either, maybe go with an updated GI Bill or something.
> This decision was a big win for Asians. Who right now are being discriminated against.
This is the hope but banning race-based Affirmative Action that favors ethnic minorities, blacks in particular, will not particularly benefit Asians in college admissions.
Harvard (as a proxy for elite colleges) admitted 1,942 students to the class of 2027, 15.3% of whom identify as African-American, or 297 students in total. [0] (Harvard fielded 56,937 applicants for the class of 2027)
Assuming every single entering African-American undergraduate at Harvard "displaced" a more qualified Asian due to Affirmative Action, 300 spots at what is arguably the most prestigious college in the United States is not likely to accommodate all the Asians who believe they may have been unfairly rejected because a "less qualified" African-American student matriculated to Harvard.
In other words, the number of matriculating African-Americans at US elite colleges and universities is dwarfed by the number of Asian applicants who will be rejected for reasons unrelated to Affirmative Action.
As a side note, the notion that college acceptance is a rigid formula determined by grades, test scores, and extracurriculars is misguided. Turning the elite college and university system in the United States into a reward for cram schoolers will not improve acceptance outcomes for the vast majority of all individuals, including Asians, who are rejected by elite academic institutions.
Affirmative Action is an issue that prevents people from seeing the larger problem which is: why do American elite universities fail to increase their enrollments for qualified individuals given the size of their endowments? (Harvard's endowment as of 2023 is 50.9 billion [1]) Were such well-endowed elite institutions to increase their enrollments in proportion to the meritorious student population, the controversy of Affirmative Action might become moot.
This is like why doesn’t Seattle and San Francisco grow to cities of 10 or 20 million to meet demand?
Harvard could increase in size 10 fold and still not come near satisfying demand. Why does Harvard have to expand at all? Why not just have more schools?
This is good, but it also leaves out that the Civil Rights Act legislation made this kind of "thumb on the other side of the scale" for "disadvantaged races" patently illegal. Affirmative Action was, therefore, a recognized court exemption - explicitly stated by judges as a temporary measure - and which has been further narrowed in multiple later cases brought to it (cf. University of California v. Bakke, Gratz v. Bollinger).
A more recent group, Students for Fair Admission, largely cited the anti-Asian angle its effects were producing.
Affirmative Action was never part of formal U.S. law, and never designed to exist indefinitely.
Up until 1945, Asian Americans were held in concentration camps after being stripped of all their property. Affirmative action made sense in 1971. Things change. Now it’s just discriminating against another group that’s historically been the victim of white supremacy. A crabs in a bucket situation.
And how do we make any sense of these racist laws when there’s more and more mixed race kids applying to college anyway? Our first “black” President is half white. Our first “black” Vice President is half-Asian. If this chicanery went on for a couple more generations, every kid’s gonna be like Liz Warren, looking for any trace of victim in their DNA…
Race is a social construct. These remnants of apartheid are completely illogical. The rules are made up and don’t matter. There is only one objective race: the human race. It’s about time we started deconstructing it if you ask me.
Sinophobia is getting extremely out of hand at the moment. We need to condemn systemic racism against Asian people and reject the model minority myth, before we repeat some of the ugliest chapters of US history… both parties are way too eager for war in Greater China.
> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, […] Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission.
This is a nice story, but actually not true.
If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed as blacks in the US, but they should thus get at least equivalent treatment as whites and hispanics, not worse.
> If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians.
This logic makes absolutely no sense. Why can't they have a legacy admits AND discriminate against Asians? Are you seriously trying to claim Ivy League schools don't have legacy admits?
Legacy is always brought up in these discussions. The amount of students who get into Harvard because of the boost from their race outnumbers the number of legacy students who get boosted from their status 20 to 1. Basically a race and legacy blind policy would reject 20 times more minorities than legacy applicants and then if the policy is race and legacy discriminatory.
A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants.
Status please? My understanding is that something like 50% of white students had a non academic boost (including legacy and "athletics"). *Harvard specifically, not UNC
In a typical class of 2500 students at Harvard, removing legacy preference would increase the minority population by 25. Removing athletic preference would and another 25. Removing minority racial preference would remove 450.
450 is 18x times larger than 25. But lots of legacy whataboutism. It’s not as big of an impact as people like to think / eat the rich, etc.
This legacy system in likes of Harvard boggles me. If someones parents went to Harvard it might be actually logical to be harder for him to get into not easier. His educated parenting is already a huge plus for him and if he is unable to get into the same university it's on him.
What you need to know about Harvard is that they are a business. Their business is to amass donations from alumni and the likes. Their endowment fund is currently over $50 billions.
Rich and successful alumni means more donations, so it makes sense to take in the kids of rich and successful people.
You are making some assumptions about what Harvard is attempting to do when filling its classes. If its goal is to have a class full of people who did the most with what they had you have an argument. If their goal is to maximize alumni support (financial and otherwise) then maybe not
Harvard tries to be a pretty progressive organization - the way they justify legacy admissions is probably by arguing that the large endowments let them fund underprivileged students with needs-based programs.
They’re also in the literal business of prestige. They use mega-donors for mega-endowments which allows them to attract and fund mega-researchers. It’s also why it needs to be super exclusive (small class sizes).
Legacy admissionss are part of the problem with Harvard's affirmative action scheme that made it really blatantly discriminatory - basically, they kept those legacy admissions and balanced them out by putting a thumb on the scale against other groups that didn't benefit from legacy admissions either, primarily Asian candidates.
I just read The New Jim Crow (I'm late) and it makes a pretty strong case the USA prison industrial complex/drug war is simply an extension of Jim Crow since drug laws are not enforced equally and the Supreme Court through a series of decisions has made it so the prosecutors and law enforcement have to admit to racism to show that anti-racism laws have been broken and they cannot be forced to reveal any evidence that shows this via discovery, overturning much of the post civil war/civil rights reforms. It's a crazy catch-22.
I've heard there is a simpler way that does not consider race that would level the college admissions playing field, make it so there has to be equal admissions based on income level per zip code, but that would kills the grandfather clauses most colleges use to get relatives of graduates entry.
> (It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
At risk of starting a fun flame war, it’s more complicated than that.
Outside of a contingent of Polish mercenaries, whom were deemed something to the effect of honorary blacks, the new former slave regime effectively genocided the whites of the island. Men, women, children, the works. Not only that, but they threw in the mixed as well. Then went about taking all of everyone’s property.
I don’t know where the exact reasonable line is for revenge when you’ve been enslaved, but I’m certain they went well and unquestionably over it.
To that end, I don’t know where the reasonable counter-balance is for France to make claim against the former slave colony for its crimes against humanity but the idea that they have clean hands and or are owed something is an appalling revisionist history of the country.
And this is where most of the problems lie. It’s like a game of telephone, someone says one thing and its passes along until its an extremely toned down propagandist version of what it was before.
> I don’t know where the exact reasonable line is for revenge when you’ve been enslaved, but I’m certain they went well and unquestionably over it.
If so, pretty much every nation is guilty of genocide. The Spanish eliminated the natives in Hispaniola and Latin America. Saint Domingue was basically a meat grinder under the French. There were basically no international law, only allies. I don’t condemn genocide, but do you think if the rebellion failed, the French would have pardoned everyone? Dessalines was guilty of genocide, but most other nations have done worse (Napoleon and his wars).
N.B. Haiti is very small. And the white population was tiny at the time. People always going on about that because black slaves killed white slave owners 200 years ago.
Stop treating all minorities like they are in a single category. The ones that are hurt most in the cases are asian americans. They do not have advantage in "legacy" admissions over other minorities, and they are also discriminated over a century. Why are they paying the price for reparations?
The legacy argument is a fallacy at this point. What's true is children of professors/admins get preferential treatment, as do 7 figure donors. Legacy has barely mattered for the last couple decades.
> > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have
....
> America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
....
Joy and pain will always be there. In group and outgroup will always be there.
Society doesn't need to forget anything. Wisdom is drawn from both good and bad experiences. Those who forget are doomed to repeat the sins of the past.
To me - very simply put - merit doesn’t make much sense when one set of people didn’t get any of the opportunities the other set did. It’s like comparing height with one person standing atop a stool. The nuance here is to find the lost potential in marks and tests due to a lack of opportunity. Race is a crude proxy and it really doesn’t have to be based on just race. But it’d mean admins spend more time interviewing and verifying people’s background and make subjective decisions based on that.
(It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
Not to diminish the injustice of the slavery from which Haitians freed themselves, but I think there might have been a solution short of genocide. In particular, the systematic torture and execution of children was probably not necessary.
(Incidentally, the compensation in question was paid for lost property. The French government apparently considered that to be more important than the lives which were lost!)
> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status.
Let's explicitly look at how this affected race (instead of leaving it to readers imaginations), since that was the issue the court was asked to consider. The student body of the US Ivy League looked as follows, circa 2019 (international students excluded):
Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate)
SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.
The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.
If anyone was confused at first glance as I was, these are the mean SAT scores nationwide and not at the ivy league institutions. I was very surprised for a moment to think the average SAT score at these colleges was in the 1200s...
So clearly non-Jewish whites are by far the most discriminated against considering their share of the population and SAT scores. Why is this fact never mentioned in the media?
> but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
The KKK has nothing to do with it fundamentally. Matters of racism and similar (it doesn't just have to be about race, this is a problem of collectivism, of which racism is a subset) will dominate the politics of any highly diverse nation (diverse not necessarily pertaining only to race of course), and without exception.
See: what has been going on in Sweden the past decade (it has gotten worse as Sweden has gotten more diverse). Or see: the forever riots in France by the poor minorities there that have never integrated into French culture.
uh... as a Frenchman, I've noticed a lot of riots, but it's generally white people/native Frenchies doing the whole "fuck the government" thing.
It's probably important to understand that protesting is to France what baseball is to America - the national pastime.
I'd say most immigrants I know, including the largest groups from North Africa, follow an integration pattern similar to east Asians I met whilst living in the US.
Furthermore, I believe that actually political views dominate race when it comes to tribalism:
> Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?
Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.
> Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.
Redlining and racist real estate deed clauses did exist.
The KKK embodies American white supremacy. In 1925 and 1926, 50k white hoods marched down Pennsylvania Ave. 4% (5 million) of Americans were Klan members. There were numerous mass lynchings and murder during the 1919 Red Summer. This was the surfacing of simmering racism because of an influx of Jewish and Catholic refugees from WW I and the increasing household wealth of black people. Somehow, black people, Jews, and Catholics were responsible for all of the ills, lack of wealth, and loss of privilege for the average American white Christian male. Henry Ford was Hitler's hero and wrote antisemitic editorials and books.
In 2023, it's still the case that some social clubs, private preschools, universities, apartment co-ops, and more require photographs with applications because it provides an easy way to discriminate without being openly honest about it. Blackballing (secret ballot cast by colored rocks) is also used to deny people arbitrarily.
> the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people
this is misinformation; State laws had complete jurisdiction over certain matters, by design. "The US" is calling Washington State the same as Alabama. So, no.
I think you’re missing the point. The US had state, local and private laws, regulations, and institutions that discriminated against black people with varying degrees of formality. The discrimination in question existed and was widespread in the US.
I think you are missing my point. The USA itself is not one thing, and the laws are not one thing. Specifically, by design and in fact, people's rights to do a wide variety of things, were and are still, different. The language you are insisting on, is misinformation.
> Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people.
And you seem to be arguing that this is “misinformation”. The best I can make of your objection is that, prior to 1967, the US did not outlaw miscegenation and that it was merely 16 states that did so and that these laws were legal in the US. This is IMO unhelpful nitpicking — the OP’s point had nothing to do with which books the laws were written in and also did not depend on all states being affected.
(The connection between miscegenation and college admissions is rather more distant than, say, the discrimination outlawed not too much earlier by Brown v Board of Education, but even that is a bit of a nitpick.)
States can do many bad things because the US constitution designed by the founders of the country lets them do it. So, no this scapegoat is not available. The discrimination is 100% an issue of the US as a country.
I agree that the founding politics of the United States did bargain with slavers, and wrote the documents and early government, such that the slave trade was legal in certain states. Readers here need to know that there were other states with different founders, who were completely and utterly opposed to slavery, and to Catholic forms of government also, while we are at it. And you might know that slavery, or indentured servitude, or peasants or whatever you want to call that, was a massive part of "civilization" across Europe, Central Asia and into the Far East. There was not industrial base without labor.
Last statement is, some religious people, of different groups, were absolutely and completely against slavery, preached against racism, wrote laws that were fair and impartial, from the very first days. The founding groups of the United States included deeply religious people who opposed slavery and did not practice it, and therefore got no monetary support from that system. And some of those deeply opposed to slavery, grew and built a great society. You or others cannot just ignore those founders and claim now that "everyone did it" , it is the fault of the USA, etc .. The USA was a place that broke away from the Old World systems, including a LOT of slaving, but the progress was uneven, and the slave system was profitable so their masters had a lot of money and things that go with that.
You're right, but we're not talking about groups inside the country. Iran, for example, also has lots of progressive groups, but its still basically a dictatorship in nature. We are talking about the legal framework for the USA itself. This institutional entity was friendly to slavery and perpetrator of human exploitation at several levels. Despite several well intentioned attempts of constitutional and democratic reform with some success, the same nature remains in the 21st century because it was never completely changed.
The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population.
There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather than incorporate all those other factors. It might not even be viable to incorporate all those other factors.
We really only have two choices:
1) Wait out the effects of racism, historic and contemporary, which will take hundreds of years.
2) Sacrifice some of our "individual determination above all else" principles to reach some palpable level of racial equality.
I think both are flawed in their own ways, but the world is always imperfect, so pick your side.
The underlying important question is what do you define as equality?
Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity?
This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue)
The classic opportunity of outcome is proven to be doomed, and is not aligned with your imperfect world assertion.
I can get behind equality of opportunity, which I’d argue affirmative action’s impact was antithetical to this vision.
We’ve come to a point where the new generation is being held accountable for something they had no hand in.
We shouldn’t be trying to treat these diversity reports as a checkbook that needs to be balanced.
I heard something that resonated with me, and will probably get me downvoted to oblivion (if it hasn’t already happened):
those that want to look for racism, will find it.
Once a certain area is solved so to speak, some groups tend to look even harder, and we get to a point now where we have this ever-widening definition of what racism is, the goal posts ever expanding, and this endless loop is our culture eating itself alive.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but this doesn’t imply racism doesn’t exist. But it does imply that our definitions of it have radically evolved, and perhaps is being used for ulterior motives outside of “equality”
This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just can’t get behind that definition and framework.
The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore. We’ve been legally equal for at least 3 generations. Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations. I have no problems with people coming together to help those communities. But we can’t let racial equity seep into our legal framework or we’ll literally be discriminating based on race all over again and all the way down. No horrors of the past justify that level of wrongness. It’s hopeless and fruitless to try and design a “racially equitable” society, and you’re going to always just be an angry person if you set out on that path.
All that said, as always with these situations, I ask “what is the end goal and how can I help get there”. 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause. If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers. I would do it because there’s a clear goal (correct for the past) and path to achieve it (pay money).
What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.
I’d never pay that. Because the money would go into someone’s pockets, sure, but not the disadvantaged. Just some fat cats of the “right” color running the group collecting the money. I mean look at what happened with Black Lives Matter.
> Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations.
And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains.
Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.
LBJ gave the commencement speech at Howard more than 50 years ago and said:
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
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It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.
Then why have the goal posts moved? That’s my only challenge to the status quo. Presumably they’ve moved because moving them is the only way (or at least the only cheap/easy way) to maintain a narrative of injustice. Shouldn't we be able to pursue this vision without frivolously chasing a metric we have absolutely no understand of let alone control over?
It’s subtle but the motives are very different: if you want to maintain a narrative of injustice, then you will find ways to do that. OTOH, if you want to build a narrative of equality, success, and support, then you need to be open to the outcome that racial undertones and the victim status of minorities will fade into history. Thats the entire goal, right?
- People of color don't experience special violence
- People of color don't experience special rates of poverty
- People of color aren't specially diverted from the pursuit of happiness
We're so far away from this goal that we can only hazily imagine achieving it. For example, white high school dropouts have higher home ownership rates than Black college graduates [0]. Either you think Black people are just bad with credit cards (which would be racist) or you think there's some structural cause.
I think people want a number, like a number of years or an amount of money so we can finally say, "we did it, we made things right." It's even in this opinion. I don't think that's a useful way of looking at it, because no metrics really capture what it's like to be in a marginalized group. Hell we can't even agree on metrics for software engineers; we definitely can't get it right for this.
What we should do instead is create race conscious policies that address inequalities when we find them. We should do this for everyone btw: white people who have been victimized by the opioid epidemic, women who've experienced violence, etc. etc. Race-conscious admissions programs were doing this work for college admissions, but sadly not anymore.
I think you jumped to a poorly argued conclusion with:
> What we should do instead is create race conscious policies
Of course, the goalposts you mentioned are good goals. But it’s far from clear that face conscious policies are appropriate or effective.
Appropriateness is, of course, a matter of opinion, but the Supreme Court has decided that the policies in question are unconstitutional. But effectiveness is an empirical matter. For example, in 1996, California banned most affirmative action in public universities. (To be clear, a lot of very well intentioned people at the universities supported affirmative action. Source: personal knowledge.). It took a few years for the situation to settle down, but the results of removing affirmative action seem to have been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the University of California campuses.
It turns out that, just because a policy is well intentioned, it does not follow that it is effective at achieving its good intentions. I could rattle off quite a few examples of policies that fail in this regard.
> the results of removing affirmative action seem to have been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the University of California campuses
This is incorrect; removing affirmative action was real bad for Black students [0]. The article you cite references the discredited "mismatch" theory also pushed by Justice Thomas. Mismatch theory was never supported by data, and the studies that do seem to support it have huge problems [1]. No serious person thinks it's real.
Race-conscious admissions were an unqualified good for millions of minority students. They're probably only second to Social Security as a US anti-poverty policy. There's no amount of weirdo reasoning or fact twisting that can obscure that.
I don’t see the “mismatch” reference. I admit that article is not great. I found a much better article at one point but can’t find it again.
I admit I’m dubious about the study [0]. It says:
> I show that ending affirmative action caused underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality colleges.
This seems like a potentially problematic metric. Drawing conclusions from this depends on the assumption that the applicant pool did not change. It appears that much of UCLA’s post-Prop 209 strategy involved programs to improve their applicant pool. I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.
IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in. (Of course, any admission scheme whatsoever ought to benefit those who are admitted, at least so long as second-order damaging effects from a problematic admission scheme don’t make going to the university in question worse than the alternatives and so long as the university is worth going to in the first place.)
It does appear to be the case, based on terrible but official data that I found, that the fraction of the UCLA student body that is black is similar now to what it was before Prop 209. But I could be misinterpreting what I found. (The recovery was very slow, which is unfortunate.)
The article quotes Heriot referencing Mismatch theory here:
> By eliminating racial preferences, Heriot wrote last week, the 1996 amendment did away with the pressure to admit minority students to competitive institutions their credentials hadn’t prepared them for.
> I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.
The paper is more or less about minority enrollment going up at non-UC schools, so UCLA's outreach is irrelevant here.
> IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in.
I think the problem is obviously a racial hierarchy is motivated to pretend that minority status is already faded into history, especially if it isn't faded right now. Similar to how my boss says that his kneecapping my career is in the past now, there's a new peer review quarter and I have new opportunities so why should I be mad? Maybe sure 10 years from now it'll be whatever, but he just sabotaged me last quarter. Of course to him it's water under a boat, he has every motivation to pretend it to be so, and to say my pointing out that I'm still a harmed party to be goalpost moving or whatever nonsense he wants to come up with to say it doesn't exist anymore and therefore he doesn't even have to lift a finger to make it up to me.
It’s important for me to be very precise and clear here: I am not arguing that speaking up and pointing out that you were actively wronged is moving the goalposts. It’s literally not and I’m not trying to silence you or discourage the royal your initiative to do so! I think your boss should probably be fired and you should get a bonus.
There are, however, people making the argument that we need to focus on equality of outcome as the solution (vs firing your boss and paying you damages). And followers of this idealogical doctrine have made political inroads in schooling and government. It’s this behavior specifically that I’m criticizing.
Yes, part of the problem is that we’re such a binary society so these nuances get bucketed into larger issues and it’s all really hard to sort out.
I would challenge you to cite any government program in history in any country that has successfully achieved "equalization of outcome for racial groups." For those advocating extreme measures and philosophies, the burden of proof should be very high.
>It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.
How does this work, in practice? Look at the comments here; do you think one half of the population is going to vote for politicians who want to implement a special tax that sees money from their pay check going to their neighbors, based on race? That will never happen.
> It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.
Agreed, but as the parent comment said, what's the end-goal? What are the metric(s) whereby we can say "things are now right", or even, "things are approaching the direction of right-ness"?
I wholly agree with everything above the dashes/hyphens, but I partially disagree with the bottom part and a related position I suspect you hold. Maybe we will end up dedicating trillions of dollars through solid reform, but that figure shouldn't be based on historical reckonings of damages. The history of oppression and inequality in the US is gross and tragic, but the past isn't the present isn't the future. There are enough actual issues to solve already. Now, onto attacking a stance you may or may not hold. While certain groups (I won't deign to be imprecise with wording) are heavily disadvantaged heavily from historical racism, it still ultimately remains the sole responsibility and capability of each individual to forge their own path. If the culture is flawed, so too may the people not sow healthy crops to reap. To be sure, this may not turn out to be a significant issue, but it's something to be mindful of throughout reforms. Truly though, I hope for the best.
> 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause
Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police?
> If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers.
The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.
There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden).
> The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore.
Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you.
- Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average.
- People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound.
A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.
> What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.
As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance.
More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race.
I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.
Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.
> As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance.
I can’t follow your math at all.
Something like 30% of the student body, per the opinion, is black or Hispanic. If you assume that all of those people were admitted solely as a result of affirmative action (which is obviously not the case), that creates a 30% reduction in available slots, which will reduce the admission rate of everyone else (assuming the same people apply) by 30%.
This is made up, but I don’t see where your 10% comes from.
It's a made up number assuming _all_ black harvard students are in on the basis of affirmative action.
30, 10, it doesn't matter, my point is your chance of getting into Harvard is already vanishingly small (4%) and even if it's a 30% reduction in slots, your chance goes from 4% -> 2.8% which is a similar order of magnitude.
It's also a biased process in a thousand other ways even without affirmative action, so why are we sweating this small thing. You're likely to be squeezed out by some ultra-privileged person whose parents could pay for essays to be written, SAT coaching, and exclusive extra-curriculars to pad the resume. Not some poor hispanic kid who grew up with nothing and would have scored 200 points better on the SATs with the right coaching.
> You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police?
Of course you can measure this stuff, that's the point!
> The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.
I presented that hypothetical solution rhetorically. I actually don't think that paying money is a real solution. But I want to get to the point where someone advocating for the cause can say "these are the acceptable end conditions".
> In college one of my black friends went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.
I had white and black and brown and yellow friends in college from low income neighborhoods who all experienced this. Yes, it's something I'm able to consider compassionately.
> I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.
I am well aware of the dynamics of AA.
> Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child.
Where's the framework for evaluating as much? Where's the audits to confirm that any temporary cheap discrimination is actually priming the pump and not causing more harm (and yes there is evidence that affirmative action isn't all that you're cracking it up to be). All I'm asking for is to be objective and calculated about these things and not emotional and sloppy.
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Look, you and I are different people with different tolerances for discrimination.
I am hypothetically okay being discriminated against in the short term (as you are) if it provably corrects a clear issue and we have an agreement in place to evaluate the program as it's happening, make sure it's contributing to the desired outcome, and to stop the discrimination once clear end conditions are met.
Of course I'd rather not be discriminated against explicitly since I think that's a sloppy proxy solution and instead I'd rather address the actual problems even if they're more expensive and more difficult programs to execute--everyone should share the load of building the society we want to live in.
In general, you're okay hearing about the atrocities of the past and allowing yourself to be discriminated against on the loose grounds that any discrimination serves to correct the atrocities. You feel guilt about the wrongs of the past and are thus able to justify discrimination as a form of atonement.
On the other hand, I am not okay allowing myself to be discriminated against because of past events I had no control over or participated in, despite arguably indirectly benefitting from them loosely based on the color of my skin. I do not feel guilt or the need to atone for those previous wrongs. I do feel responsibility to contribute to correcting any outstanding issues that still exist today.
Therefore I am not phased by an argument that lists all the bad things that happened and concludes "oh you must still atone". And it is not justification outright for introducing discrimination to me or my children today.
I am swayed by logical assessments of the current situation and well thought out proposals on how to address remaining problems. I want equality of opportunity and I very much disagree we'll achieve it by focusing on equality of outcome. I don't think that's the right path. AA has primed the pump as you say of the opportunity engine for generations now. Let's assess the situation and move on.
We share a desire for the same goal, but we are different in our approaches. If that makes me an asshole and you not, well that's outside of either of our control. I can assure you my stance isn't some cheap sensational response to this headline or something. I have spent more time than I'd wager most have considering these issues and determining how I wish to engage.
> I am hypothetically okay being discriminated against in the short term (as you are) if it provably corrects a clear issue and we have an agreement in place to evaluate the program as it's happening, make sure it's contributing to the desired outcome, and to stop the discrimination once clear end conditions are met.
Do you consider it discrimination that disabled folks get to park in special spots? I don't consider discrimination. Some people just need more help to get where they're going, and some of us will be just fine using the legs we were born to walk with. In the same vein, I don't feel like I'm being discriminated against by affirmative action. And I'm not worried about my kid even if those policies remained in place.
Nobody thinks affirmative action is perfect. For example if I could make a change myself I'd focus on the economic part of socioeconomic more so that it's not mainly privileged people of color getting priority. But you have to start somewhere. With systems governing people it's just not that realistic to ask that everything be perfectly measurable or that there is a neat objective function to optimize.
> Therefore I am not phased by an argument that lists all the bad things that happened and concludes "oh you must still atone". And it is not justification outright for introducing discrimination to me or my children today.
You're very focused on yourself. Nobody is asking you as an individual to "atone" for anything because you didn't do anything. What we are discussing is _systemic changes_ designed to help folks who are disadvantaged _also without having done anything_. Broad, high-level changes like affirmative action just don't have the impact on individuals in the majority that you are making them out to have. They do however have outsized impact on folks in the minority.
In general I find it gross to be so focused on what you're calling your own discrimination when it totally pales in comparison to the experiences of folks who face actual discrimination. You say you're able to consider others' experiences compassionately, but that's clearly just lip service, otherwise you wouldn't be calling affirmative action "discrimination."
> Some people just need more help to get where they're going, and some of us will be just fine using the legs we were born to walk with.
This is exactly the issue at play. There's a fundamental difference between _unending_ affirmative action and temporary 'help'. If you believe in equality of outcome then you will never be satisfied and we will always be 'helping' the disadvantaged group achieve various metrics forever. Eventually people deserve the dignity of a level playing field, otherwise you seem to be saying they're incapable of handling a level playing field which would be.. racist (by definition).
Your example of handicaps is disturbing, I know you didn't intend it in a racist way, but read what you wrote from the perspective of an African immigrant. Just because a person is black does not mean they're 'handicapped'!
Being born a certain race is a disadvantage in the same way being born with physical disability is a disadvantage. They're not the same but that was the point I was trying to make: we look out for disadvantaged folks in some societal contexts. Why are y'all complaining about systemically disadvantaged people getting some help? Is it because you can't trace the taxpayer dollars we spend on things like Section 8 housing back to your wallet, but you can trace back your rejection letter from Harvard to accursed affirmative action?
> If you believe in equality of outcome then you will never be satisfied
If you re-read what I wrote earlier, I said equality of opportunity is the north star. But just because you believe in that north star doesn't mean you can't see the value in skewing the current state by other means until you're there.
There's another thing here: affirmative action isn't something that keeps going much past your college graduation, and it doesn't directly remedy the brokenness of the K-12 education system, where de-facto race segregation is commonplace and you can start 3 grades back just by being born in the wrong town. Even diversity programs at big companies are typically only aimed at new grads. These are limited programs that just try to boost folks who typically haven't had the necessary support to achieve their full potential. At the end of the day the free market will do its work.
Folks claiming the little boost from affirmative action is "discrimination" need to get their heads out of the sand.
> you seem to be saying they're incapable of handling a level playing field which would be.. racist
No, I'm saying colored folks _are_ capable of achieving the same things as white folks if given the same advantages and privileges. But they don't get those advantages and privileges because society is broken. Affirmative action is one tool we can use to help put more colored folks in places of power in society. Without this, we will never sniff equal opportunity -- the north star we all seem to agree we want. Having people who look like you in places of power is important because they can advocate for you and surface areas where the opportunity is decidedly _not_ equal.
> Being born a certain race is a disadvantage in the same way being born with physical disability is a disadvantage.
No it's not! That's the most goddamned racist thing I've ever heard. Holy shit.
You should listen to Thomas Sowell, a "disadvantaged" black person, respond to your argument since you clearly won't listen to me: Discrimination and Disparityhttps://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36222735
To summarize Sowell: telling a bunch of young black children that they're handicapped is the exact opposite of lifting up and supporting those in need. Perpetuating victimhood is not the solution. This worldview is poisoning kids minds and fucking them beyond repair. It is so goddamned unhealthy it's destructive and only serves to reinforce the false narrative that minorities are victims.
How do you propose to lift up and support those in need if you can't even agree that the playing field is uneven and that when you're born black you face systemic injustices?
_That's_ racist.
Oh and I'm not going to read a book by a guy who defended Trump as being "not racist." While we're out here recommending books, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me exemplifies my point: a father telling his son the hard reality of our broken system.
You are certainly free to ignore logic and play identity and association politics. I doubt it will actually get you very far in an intellectual understanding of the nuanced point Sowell argues, but that’s your prerogative.
Welp we're at an impasse because your "logic" doesn't track for me either. I don't think any solution starts with talking to disadvantaged children. Fixing the broken systems they live in should have some impact though.
There's too much bullshit out there for me to read every jamoke's book without doing some filtering based on whether this person is likely to be credible or improve my understanding of a situation. It's not identity politics, it's self-preservation.
Being born black is a disadvantage to your life outcome in the current system. That's the main point.
The comparison to how we treat the physically handicapped is just asking folks to consider why we are okay with helping people at cost to ourselves in one case and not another.
> Being born black is a disadvantage to your life outcome.
You're sick and your mind is diseased. I'd like to see you try to tell this to a black child.
We’re okay helping handicapped people because it’s not racist. Duh. I’m okay helping disparaged kids get into college by subsidizing them with financial aid programs and creating compassionate admission standards. Why limit it to black people?
The supreme court seems to agree that it’s time to move forward and focus on the real issues, not the racial scapegoat.
These ad hominems don't help your point, they just alienate - probably time to take a break from affirmative action commenting for a moment :)
I think we're equivocating with kajecounterhack on what 'disadvantage' means, and they chose an unfortunate analogy to illustrate their idea of disadvantage that is perhaps more fundamental to the disadvantaged person than they were going for.
The point is that 'disadvantage' does not take away opportunity, and disadvantage in the US no longer comes purely on racial terms, at least not when it comes to opportunity for education and financial success. You can get a degree by studying hard for the SAT and better your circumstances for a well placed $20 in high school, or you can join a trade school and say screw it to higher education and still better your circumstances. These opportunities exist for pretty much every black kid as long as they don't break the law and avoid addiction. They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
> I think we're equivocating with kajecounterhack on what 'disadvantage' means, and they chose an unfortunate analogy to illustrate their idea of disadvantage that is perhaps more fundamental to the disadvantaged person than they were going for.
Yeah I do regret drawing this analogy even if I still think it's apt, since it's distracting from my point instead of reinforcing it.
> These opportunities exist for pretty much every black kid as long as they don't break the law and avoid addiction. They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
I wasn't saying black folks are disabled. I was trying to express that some folks have disadvantages in life that start from birth, and color qualifies as one of those because of the way society at large has and continues to discriminate against folks with darker skin. This particular discrimination deserves addressing through efforts like affirmative action because its impact on life outcomes is profound.
You could say that the ability to buy an SAT book is all it takes to get a degree, but this doesn't track with reality. Preparation for college education starts from youth, and in the US public school quality is related to where you live. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow extend to where we live today. An emphasis on education as a means to better yourself is also commonly handed down by your family -- but what if your family traces back (it's not that far) to an era where black folks were discriminated against when it came to education?
There are other interesting ways to slice it (e.g. how many of your parents went to college is a predictor of whether you'll go to college and also whether you succeed if you go; being poor at harvard means you actually don't get the same experience as folks who are better off).
> They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
I 100% agree with this statement, I just think that agency can only get you so far. You need supporting infrastructure, otherwise in the aggregate we will continue to perpetuate inequities (which unfortunately also reinforce discriminatory viewpoints).
I think I agree with this entirely. The problem is these disadvantages don't justify a policy of race-based affirmative action. To do this, you'd need to do one of three things:
1. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a time frame. This is tricky because any time you come up with will seem pretty arbitrary.
2. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a metric. This is also tricky because that metric is arbitrary (worse - it may never be accomplished).
3. Say the affirmative action policy is merited indefinitely which is in my opinion racist, because this is saying there's something fundamental about this group that makes them incapable of handling a level playing field. I simply don't believe this is true.
I think we need to come to terms as a society with the hard reality that all three above cases are morally and logically bankrupt, for any meaningful length of time. Arbitrary race-based criteria for determining 'disadvantage' just don't work. People have to be given the dignity of mastery over their own fate and it's patronizing (borderline racist) any other way, unless extremely limited in scope.
> You're sick and your mind is diseased. I'd like to see you try to tell this to a black child.
First of all, I'm not going around talking to random children. Secondly, black parents _totally_ have to say at some point to their kid, "hey you have to be careful around cops because they won't treat you the same as they treat your white friends."
I don't understand where you got this "you're sick and your mind is diseased" bit. The point was just that the playing field's not level and you're willfully missing it.
> Why limit it to black people?
Because the scale of systemic injustice to black folks is so big that it should not be controversial. The legacy of slavery in this country looms large. To be clear I also fully support measures to reduce overall economic inequality as well, it's just not the topic being discussed here.
I’m not missing anything. I understand exactly what you’re parroting. I’m telling you that you’re perpetuating a racist worldview of victimhood in an effort to signal your guilt and remorse to random peers (likely not even black people). I fundamentally believe your worldview and savior complex do more harm to the very people you think need saving than good. I consider you to be reducing complex nuanced reality to skin color, which is racist. There is nothing you can say to me right now that will change the fact that I don’t feel one ounce of guilt over the history of slavery in the US. There is no possible moral framework where I am responsible for things that happened hundreds of years ago. All I can do is treat people equally moving forward and help people in need. There’s a reason people say dwelling on the past is unhealthy.
> I'm telling you that you’re perpetuating a racist worldview of victimhood in an effort to signal your guilt and remorse to random peers
I'm anon and not even white (my parents are immigrants) -- who am I signaling to or guilty about? The only effort being made is an effort to reason with other anons on the interwebs, so take it or leave it.
You can also keep calling me racist for pointing out systemic racial inequity but last I checked racism is a byproduct of ignorance, and I'm sensing a whole lot of that from you. So, right back at you.
> I fundamentally believe your worldview and savior complex do more harm to the very people you think need saving than good
I get that this is a difference between us. I fundamentally believe that your worldview is faulty because it turns a blind eye to how tilted the status quo is and doesn't consider the status quo to be unethical. Characterizing a desire to level the playing field as a "savior complex" is unfair -- it's not a savior complex to feel that something is wrong and want to fix it, it's just called being conscientious.
> I don’t feel one ounce of guilt over the history of slavery in the US.
Dude nobody cares if you feel guilt or not, you're missing the point. Guilt doesn't help anyone, systemic policy changes do. Why are you making it sound like anyone cares about what you feel as an individual?
> All I can do is treat people equally moving forward and help people in need.
You can also acknowledge the legacy of past inequities, how they persist in the systems we live in today, and work to remedy them. If you step into a colored person's shoes and think about what bullshit they STILL have to face today (which you don't have to, as a white person), you might begin to see the desire for reform less as "identity politics" and more just "advocating for equal ass treatment."
I suspect you’re not very familiar with the progenitors of anti-racism.
Anyway, I’m talking over your head because I assumed you have explored the structural foundation for your assertions that dominant cultures are systemically problematic. Ignore my comments about white guilt and the like, they’re not really apropos, we both agree.
(If you care: see it’s a problem in and of itself that you responded to my argument with a long speech about how black people are victims and should be treated differently even still today and about how I simply don't understand and empathize with black struggle enough. And how my morally bankrupt white culture is unjust and needs dismantling. Oh and we should listen to this anon because they’re asian. Like, you’re already talking past me. I never said anything to that tune. And it’s why I responded so harshly, because 1. i think race-based laws are racist despite past struggles agree to disagree, and 2. it comes from a place of arguing that whiteness confers guilt, whether you’ve explored it that deeply or not.)
Let’s be clear: nowhere did I say we shan’t acknowledge the legacy of past inequities or do our part as humans to make a better world. I simply said that the solution to any remaining problems today must be colorblind. The court agrees.
You said, well no they can’t be colorblind because black people are (charitably) “disabled” because of history and so they must still be propped up.
We can just leave it at that.
Personally I’m only interested in engaging further on these topics when the dialog is not about atoning for past sins via identity politics and race-based policy, and instead the solution is a burden carried by all, not just white people. Come what may.
Nobody is ignoring injustice, they’re just arguing that future solutions should not be anti-white. Or are you implying the only solution to supporting black people is to treat them differently based on the color of their skin?
Give it for a white person to talk about guilt and race, as if everything had to be centered around how white people feel. That exactly itself is racism. It’s pretty simple, injustice was perpetuated by the dominant group against other groups. It still exists today as well as its effects. The dominant group got to dictate the prestige culture, the policies, the norms, enforce its ways.
If you want to support good goals and justice, you must be in support of policies to combat this injustice. And it begins with acknowledging that by being part of a dominant group there are benefits, and being part of a marginalized group there are disadvantages. If you refuse to acknowledge these things, it’s similar to choosing to ignore injustices happening currently.
How did we get from “I disagree with race-based legal policy” to “I don't acknowledge privileges”? Thats’s exactly the type of rhetorically bankrupt leap SJWs make all the time. It’s silly and simply not true. Quit it with the thought-terminating cliches, please…
> You're very focused on yourself. Nobody is asking you as an individual to "atone" for anything because you didn't do anything. What we are discussing is _systemic changes_ designed to help folks who are disadvantaged _also without having done anything_. Broad, high-level changes like affirmative action just don't have the impact on individuals in the majority that you are making them out to have. They do however have outsized impact on folks in the minority.
Maybe not broad impacts, but there are definitely impacts on the margin. Lowering the admission bar for one person means that, all things equal, someone better qualified is excluded. People want the best for their children and will generally prioritize their outcomes over others', regardless of past or present ill treatment of those others.
AA is a violation of the 14th as judged by Scotus. There may well be a 5th Ammendment case if folks are looking for compensation (iirc the amendment that abolished slavery explicitly stated no 5A compensation would be granted to slave holders), but whichever solution is chosen still needs to abide by the current laws that prohibited the past behaviors.
> Lowering the admission bar for one person means that, all things equal, someone better qualified is excluded
This assumes there's some objective way to stack rank high school students by potential, and there's not. At some point exclusive schools like Harvard just shape their student populations to an arbitrary standard. How do you compare GPAs at 10,000 different schools for example? Is a 1550 student who started a company more or less valuable than a 1600 student who won a science fair?
Agreed, ranking is not purely quantitative. However, your example strives to compare two different dimensions of achievement. There is no achievement in immutable characteristics. There may be achievement based on overcoming obstacles that present due to immutables, but the immutable is not evidence enough of achievement.
Any prospect can achieve either of your two examples. People can't do anything to boost their chances if we boost based off of skin color.
If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing - which I'm sure we can agree is not the case.
We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.
> If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing
Do Indian people massively disproportionately own hotels because other ethnic groups don't have the same opportunities? Is there something fundamentally wrong with non hotel owning ethnic groups? It's not systemic Indian supremacy, it's just historical accidents compounded through network effects. Noticeable differences between populations frequently occur by random chance, they're usually evidence of nothing at all.
This only holds under a homogenous monoculture. What if some population doesn't value success the same way as another? You’ll see variance of outcomes for completely normal and acceptable reasons.
For population level differences to be proof of discrimination, you'd have to presume the sameness of background/culture, spread of abilities and spread of interests, which is absurd on its face.
the problem with chasing "equality of opportunity" is that it's basically impossible to quantify.
And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome.
Example:
assume that
a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born
and
b) how rich your parents are
affect your opportunities for success.
These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them.
In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation.
More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline.
Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich.
See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard.
Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities.
In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity.
I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.
I agree that the goals and means to get to them are fuzzy and it feels frustrating at times, and things like affirmative action felt like trying to make two wrongs equal a right. But it also feels shitty and callous to say "Sorry about the whole segregation thing, hopefully everything evens out in a few hundred years or so.."
I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome".
Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?
I have inherited nothing from my parents except financial help with my college education. My dad is utterly in debt from funding his 7 children's college educations because he believes (correct or not) that that is how you set your kids up for success. He will likely die barely out of debt. I am white. I have worked for everything I have. I bought an auction property in the low income neighborhood in my city and have invested blood swear and tears and financially to the point where I am in debt for years to come to turn it into a nice property for the neighborhood. I do not take my privileges for granted. Do I deserve your scorn?
But your father benefited from being part of a majority group who had its culture imposed on others or at least wasn’t suppressed itself. The elites and people who wrote laws were largely from the larger group of white people. Yes there is economic differences, but this is true for any society the elites are generally wealthy. But your father would benefit from or at least not be impeded by this white cultural dominance that was imposed.
Not in my father's lifetime either. And his father is a WWII vet who literally spent most of his "youth" stopping Nazis from killing Jews. Maybe my great grandfather lived in a time where he may have indirectly benefitted from the active segregation of blacks (ignoring that he didn't live in a problematic area), but he died before I was born.
You can't just propagate forward and say well you are guilty because your dad was guilty because his dad was guilty because his grandpa was white in a time where segregation still existed in the south. It literally doesn't make any sense. Harboring that type of animosity towards one group of people based on their skin color is the definition of racism. Reducing individuals rich lived experiences to that of their skin color is the definition of racism.
Let me explain to you, by virtue of being part of a majority culture or dominant culture, your white father already benefits. His ways and norms and cultures and mores are the “default”. He gains a leg up already by not being discriminated against like the marginalized people in society. You benefit from your own ancestors’ benefits if they acquired wealth or at least didn’t pass on trauma to you… but I’m not even talking about the sins of your ancestors applying to you (that’s a very Christian concept btw). I’m saying you benefit now and your father benefited then from being part of a majority group.
As an example, it is very common in US culture to make eye contact in business, but in other cultures this is not the norm and even considered rude or wrong. Many people live in the US who come from Asian cultures where this is the case. When white Americans try to force people to make eye contact and think it is about “respect” they are completely enforcing their way on others and this can lead to marginalization.
Another example, handshakes. Men and women in many cultures and religions do not shake hands because of gender differences, and this is often a matter of respect and beliefs. When white Americans or Europeans try to force people from opposite genders to handshake, even when this is against the way of life for other individuals, this is a form of oppression. And it’s not even far fetched to say oppression exists in handshakes… in many news articles there have been cases where European countries cancelled citizenships or deported people based on someone’s refusal to handshake the opposite gender because of the cultural and religious beliefs.
Any culture has pros and cons. You’re acting like the only positive culture history has seen has been “white” culture (which is kinda racist in and of itself). Of course people build cultures to achieve positive social outcomes!!! That’s life, meng.
What you’re explaining does not justify reparations and conveyance of generational guilt. Look at the comment I responded to. I asked whether I deserve scorn. You’re arguing that I deserve scorn and somehow need forgiveness literally for being white.
The micro fluctuations in cultural benefits you’re describing isn't tangible in any way. You’ll just be shouting into the void forever trying to equalize every culture so that no differences remain. And you’ll hate a lot of people from different cultures along the way. And guess what: our law already treats people equally, we’ve already achieved legal equality.
Finally, logically, it simply doesn't follow: culture (a) at one point in history did something we now consider wrong. Culture (a) listened and changed. Culture (a) removed the bad parts and kept the good parts. Therefore the remaining good parts must be bad and culture (a) must be dismantled and destroyed and anybody who participated in it and shares its majority skin color shall be scorned and etc.
Ok from the contents of the comment it appears you may not be interested in recognizing historical wrongs & working towards rectifying them. Even statements like “full legal equality” are very clearly biased towards certain beliefs, views, and culture. In reality there are many laws that have been written with nefarious intentions & this includes selective enforcement or enshrining one particular cultural standard over another. The crack vs cocaine laws of the 80s in the US is a very good example.
>You’re acting like the only positive culture history has seen has been “white” culture
I’m certainly not stating this. If it seemed that way then now I will plainly state white culture is certainly not the only positive culture. Every culture has positives and negatives.
This is not about generational guilt, it is about establishing justice. Generational trauma and current day injustice has been enforced against minority groups.
>guilt
I’m not here to grant any white people forgiveness or make them feel guilty. this conversation need not focus on the feelings of guilt of white people. Guilt with no action is not helpful. Don’t feel guilty for something you didn’t do. Just don’t support oppression and help in establishing justice.
It’s better if instead of denying established evidence because someone is afraid of feeling guilty, that we focus on how can we as people in society use this evidence to do better today, given the historical context.
Why do you see establishing justice as an attack on white people and their culture?? Unless your culture is to promote injustice which I don’t think most people desire, I don’t believe you should be opposed.
This is not about dismantling a culture and making everyone the same. It’s about establishing justice.
If a culture has injustice and oppression, then no doubt these elements must be opposed.
> I have inherited nothing from my parents except financial help with my college education. My dad is utterly in debt from funding his 7 children's college educations...
Contradicting yourself much? The whole point of the previous comment was if your father was black he would be much less likely to get the loan in the first place, which would result in, at the very least, crippling college debt for yourself, which would in turn lead to renting until you're ready to pass the ghost.
No, the point is I have no traceable lineage to a hoard of wealth amassed by slave owners 6 generations ago that is filling the family coffers as people seem to be implying is true of all white Americans. My family immigrated over here 3 generations ago from shit conditions in a war torn Europe.
Furthermore you have no idea my family’s situation and whether my father would or would not have been actually more likely than a black man in a similar situation to “get a loan” (he didn't even get loans like you suggest). And generally your comment doesn’t even apply to my situation it’s cant be reduced in the way you’re trying to argue it can. Also student loans ensure that there isn’t discrimination in who can take out a loan for college. Arguably my dad paid a tax because he didn't have use take out loans and help pay that way.
> They came over to this country and immediately had more rights than any black person walking down the street.
That's simply not true. Rights are not granted by laws, they're innate.
> We know for a fact that this is the case.
Can you please point me to the data on this so I can better educate myself?
> Student loans also conveniently are non-dischargable except by death. Almost like being enslaved.
The point is that complaining about access to loans and concluding that I'm privileged because my dad could have accessed loans easier than a person of color is neither here nor there, because there were (and still are) plenty of programs that give preferential access to financial aid to minorities when I went to college, including but not limited to loans.
> What's your father's poor planning have to do with the plight of other people?
About as much as the color of my skin has to do with my current situation in life.
> That's simply not true. Rights are not granted by laws, they're innate.
> Can you please point me to the data on this so I can better educate myself?
Ah, I see. You won't even pretend to argue from a position of credibility. Tell me, what rights did women have to vote before the 1920s, or blacks before the mid 60s? The term "inalienable right" is fictitious. You don't have a right in a society unless you or your society can defend it. You SHOULD have the right. It does not mean that you do.
> The point is that complaining about access to loans and concluding that I'm privileged because my dad could have accessed loans easier than a person of color is neither here nor there, because there were (and still are) plenty of programs that give preferential access to financial aid to minorities when I went to college, including but not limited to loans.
Everybody has access to that aid based on need. Now, as a person who paid every dime of my own college tuition out of my own pocket (and worked 60 hours a week while friends living in the same neighborhood with slightly poorer parents received thousands in grants), I would argue that student aid should not be based on the wealth of the parents at all.
You could hypothetically argue that the United Negro College Fund is a racially biased private organization, but then, there's a reason that the fund exists in the first place, and it's the same reason that HBCUs exist, BET exists, In Living Color existed, etc, etc. Racism has not gone away. Racial biases against people of color has not gone away. Why should attempts to mitigate them?
> About as much as the color of my skin has to do with my current situation in life.
This is not about you. This has never been about you. This is about the nation righting a wrong. You have benefitted from this, indirectly, without paying anything into it. The descendants of slaves are not so lucky.
> The term "inalienable right" is fictitious. You don't have a right in a society unless you or your society can defend it. You SHOULD have the right. It does not mean that you do.
Then civil disobedience is a sham, too. You should listen to the people who wrote the book on fighting for rights in a unjust society. The moral philosophy surrounding the civil rights movement is very informative. White people did not "grant" black people rights. Black people demanded to be treated fairly in an unjust society. And white people said, yeah the law is wrong and unfair we fucked up. And change happened.
> You could hypothetically argue that the United Negro College Fund is a racially biased private organization, but then, there's a reason that the fund exists in the first place, and it's the same reason that HBCUs exist, BET exists, In Living Color existed, etc, etc.
I mean they are racially biased. So what? It's awesome that we have advocacy groups, scholarship funds, and communities centered around black culture (a HBCU is emergent BTW not sure what you're arguing about those). These are great things! We're generally talking about whether it's okay to legally discriminate based solely on race to correct for history. The SCOTUS doesn't think so anymore.
I honestly think you're extrapolating my position into something way more pedantic and annoying than it actually is.
> You have benefitted from this, indirectly, without paying anything into it. The descendants of slaves are not so lucky
I pay taxes...? And I participated in all of this. I went through the college system with worse odds than minorities. Some white guy somewhere is a wage slave because of it. I mean you so easily write off the things we've done as a society to help the situation and act like white people don't get any credit for listening to the struggles, having compassion, and finding ways to participate. It really confuses me. How exactly should a good white boy behave? Always asking how next he can prostrate himself at the altar of racial equity? How he can demonstrate his commitment to justice by finding ways of struggling even further in atonement?
Anyway, you are trying to invalidate my comments by reducing me to my skin color and claiming that my entire life is privileged. I mean seriously it's so passé at this point. College was 10 years ago now. The world has moved on from De'Angelo and Kendi.
It used to make me angry when people did this but I've come to terms with being discriminated against based on my skin color. I'm beginning to believe that it's human nature and can't be cured. I'll still argue that it shouldn't happen and that we can transcend race and achieve a colorblind society, because two wrongs don't make a right, but I can't stop you from needing to signal your guilt by calling out white privilege as if it actually helps anybody...
> The descendants of slaves are not so lucky.
Not all black people are dependents of slaves. Not all white people are descendants of slave owners.
^ This was the topic at hand if we stop getting distracted by the details of exactly how I am and am not privileged.
Bottom line: obsessing over who historically struggled more doesn't get you anywhere. It's a tribal distraction that, if we're not careful, might derail the entire liberal society we've worked so hard to build. I really hope we didn't burn an entire generation trying to relive the glory days of victimhood. What problems have we actually solved playing identity politics? Exactly zero.
Under what moral philosophy is it acceptable to hold people responsible for things they had no part in? Other than your abstract idea that "history should be fair," do you have any justification for this idea?
I had no part in interning Americans of Japanese descent during WW2. But I believe that the country I live in is responsible for addressing that wrong. And I feel the same about addressing the wrongs of slavery and racism that continue to this day.
We decide as a country, the same way we decide that billionaires "deserve" large tax breaks. The way we decide to spend more on defense than our top 3 competitors combined. The way we decide to sell grazing, mineral, oil and gas rights for pennies on the dollar to companies seeking to "profit" off the natural resources of our country.
We elect representatives in Congress and the WH, who based on public opinion in the form of voters decide.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury." --Alexander Fraser Tytler
His prediction was 300 years. Anyway I don't think it's until recently where we've really started voting ourselves money straight from the treasury. Time will tell whether that's sustainable.
We've always voted money straight from the Treasury. Government contracts, government subsidies, you name it, it's been from Day 1. Every tax break we give is money that the Treasury could spend. Every "incentive" we provide is the same. The Whiskey Rebellion was Treasury money...
With all due respect, white people don't need your forgiveness.
When will the black Africans who's ancestors sold people into slavery earn your forgiveness?
They don't need it either.
No one alive in the US has legally owned slaves.
The more we focus on this insane rhetoric of "sins of the father" the longer it will take for everyone to just see each other as humans. I'm a jew from a tiny family, most of them died in the holocaust and Russia. I don't expect reparations from the current Germans or Russians, they had nothing to do with it. I came to this country in my early teens with my parents who had literally a few k to their names after selling all their possessions in our home country.
My dad died essentially a pauper. My brother and I each are by all measures financially and socially successful now. People should stop spending so much effort blaming the past for their present, just get on with it. Its your life, do or do not.
I'm more than happy to forgive black people for the sins of their parents once they no longer inherit from their parents businesses that get preferential treatment in government contract bids, any houses bought with special mortgages designed to subsidize minorities, etc. etc. etc.
Or you could realize that civil society is impossible if you insist on punishing people of the present for the sins of the past.
Did German jews get a tax break? Or was the burden carried by all?
Generally, I think the nuanced take is that nobody is saying they don't want to help right past wrongs if the effects are still present today. They’re saying that doing so on an artificial boundary of a protected class is toxic and backwards and does not positively contribute to the solution.
What if we just invested more in poor and disparaged communities and added a 10% federal poor and disparaged communities tax. I don't see anything rhetorically sour about that (the number isn't the point). A burden shared by all to work towards a better world given to those communities with clear needs…
Equality of opportunity after centuries of slavery and then legal discrimination in a society that allows (and even outright promotes) inherited wealth and opportunity is not possible.
Imagine my ancestors stole all of your ancestors stuff and I still get to keep it all and anything I've built using it. We've stopped stealing your stuff now, though, so we have "equality of opportunity."
If you are part of a majority group you benefit or are at least not impeded by the cultural dominance asserted by the majority group’s control of policies, power, laws, etc. equity is about justice. People were not treated justly and still aren’t, this is why we are discussing this topic.
> 'majority group', 'cultural dominance', 'control of policies'
This is fundamentally a race-based conception of the world, a conception that defines power along racial lines, which groups and analyzes people fundamentally based on race.
We have the benefit in the last 50 years to move past this way of looking at the world, many of us have come to the realization that race isn't a useful way to group people, period. Any disadvantage you see in society that appears 'race' based can be better explained via other means. If people aren't treated justly, it's not because of racism except in vanishingly small amounts, in obscure and backwards parts of the US.
'Structural racism' falls prey to correlation is not causation, a misguided explanation for group differences, an oversimplification, and it won't generate progress as long as the cause is incorrectly ascribed.
No you’re just ignoring racism if you ignore the groups that exist. This is well known hence why the idea of someone being “colorblind” is erroneous because it is trying to ignore disadvantages and pretend the field is level.
Here’s a misunderstood concept: race is a result of unfair policies. “Black” as a racial group does not meaningfully exist without the historical racism and oppressive policies enacted on black peoples. Without distinction between groups, there would be unity. But we know, for example, black people were treated unfairly and still are in many aspects today in the US, so the construction of the black race occurs because of these differences. Aka, the marker “black” for a person identifies someone who faces systemic racism in the US. It’s not just about the wavelength of light a person’s body reflects. Racial groups are the result of history, culture, policies, and present day attitudes.
Not like Chinese Americans had it easy in the past, why aren't they adjusted upwards instead of downwards?
Fundamental issues I have with aiming for basically equal outcome by artificially tipping the scale until some metric evens out:
- Which dimensions do we make adjustments based on? is it just race or do we consider wealth etc?
- How much do we adjust? Black Americans had it tougher, boost by 10, Hispanics by 7? Chinese by -5 because they somehow succeeded without tipping the scales?
- Where does it end? We tip the scale for 200 years and if things are still out balanced keep adjusting?
Now imagine being from neither group, which would be the majority of Americans. Maybe we could limit the debate to descendants of slave owners and slaves? Also imagine that opportunity changes over time as society becomes more equal. the US 2023 is a lot different than the US 1865.
This example is about generosity. In this case you don't owe anything to your less fortunate peer, but not sharing it is greed and when greed is the driving force of our society, it's not surprising nobody wants to share his wealth. In a society of a far future that will run on generosity, being obsessed about possessions will be seen as a weakness. It seems that some proponents of the "affirmative action" sense that future society, and try to implement it here, but since they poorly understand human nature, and since their own nature is imperfect, they pervert the high ideal.
You're changing the definition of opportunity here to still mean outcome I think.
> <Outcome> is somewhat inherited, therefore there cannot be real equality of <outcome>.
The US used to be a land of 'opportunity' for poor immigrants. They came to the US and worked hard to overcome their circumstances and make a better life for themselves and their children.
It would be insulting and demoralizing to them to say that opportunity is impossible because they're poor, because their uncle doesn't own the bank down the street. The point of opportunity is that it's _possible_ to succeed, the scales are not unfairly weighed against you by law or societal prejudice.
Many things make achieving outcomes hard - poverty, mental health, bad luck - these are sometimes affected by the past too, but they don't necessarily take away opportunity in that the hope in success is still possible. This hope is important to the soul is it not? This is why opportunity is so important, it's essentially hope.
Opportunity is not a boolean "have" vs "don't have". It's a probability distribution, and much of that probability is inherited.
The son of an investment banking executive has much greater opportunity to also become an investment banker than some rando dude from the street, even if it is remotely possible. That opportunity delta is real, and it's largely, almost entirely, due to family ties.
I would not say that I have the opportunity to become a billionaire, even though it is technically possible, but astronomically unlikely.
I agree that opportunity is a spectrum but I disagree that it's inherited in our country because I disagree with your definition of opportunity. It's a spectrum in the sense that people can succeed regardless of societal prejudice or discriminatory laws, even though they'd have more opportunity if that prejudice didn't exist. Equal opportunity does not necessitate an equal outcome, nor does it imply it.
Immigrants don't have the opportunity to become president of the US because of US law, but any natural-born citizen of the country does have that opportunity regardless of the likelihood. The US has always had immigrants achieve boundless success here which is why it was considered the land of opportunity, not because everyone did - or because it was 'fair', but because it was possible.
Asians are not a homogenous group. For example, Filipino and Vietnamese outcomes did not do as well as Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese immigrants in the wave from the 60s.
There are lots of factors that contribute to an ethnic group's relative success in playing the economic game, some of which are unique to that cohort and not the ethnicity itself. Past results do not guarantee future performance.
One example: the communist revolution expelled professors and academics from China, thus many Chinese and Taiwanese-american immigrants from that generation had scholarly backgrounds which obviously translates well. Compare to a history where your people were enslaved and your cultural background entirely erased.
Another example: getting an H1B as an Indian person today is super competitive / hard, but much easier if you're another ethnicity. What does that mean for future generations of Indian-Americans? There's going to be a selection bias.
> Asians are not a homogenous group. For example, Filipino and Vietnamese outcomes did not do as well as Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese immigrants in the wave from the 60s.
There's some variation, but even so they still perform better than "white" people with the same socioeconomic status - even among Filipino and Southeast Asians: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4060715/
>The underlying important question is what do you define as equality?
Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity?
On an individual level, the obvious answer is opportunity, but how do you measure that? Generally via outcomes. If two groups are equally capable and have equal opportunity, you would expect similar outcomes.
> If two groups are equally capable and have equal opportunity, you would expect similar outcomes.
No, because this assumes that different groups have equivalent values. This is plainly false. There are some broad similarities for sure, but each gender, ethnicity and culture values different things which will inevitably produce different outcomes.
This is why obsessing over outcome equity is doomed from the start. It implicitly relies on either enforcing homogeneity, thus erasing cultural uniqueness, or outright discrimination in preferring some groups over others to overcome any cultural values that might impact outcomes so the final numbers look pretty.
> No, because this assumes that different groups have equivalent values.
Values are not intrinsically tied to your race, they just correlate to some degree like income and geography. Saying we shouldn't compensate for your parents values is like saying we shouldn't compensate for your parents income or zip code. That's fine, and it's not immoral to believe that, but just make sure you're being logically consistent in the things you believe we should and shouldn't control for.
Equity is about justice. It’s an ethical issue. If you cannot understand justice, you cannot understand equity. Very simply, when a majority group uses its power and position to enforce its cultural norms and policies on the rest of society, they benefit or at least are not harmed, and further their own group. And this becomes so embedded in the society that the injustice becomes “invisible” it is just accepted as fair. Something as simple as where a highway is built heavily skews to minority neighborhoods being negatively affected.
Understand this. Then you will understand equity is fundamentally about justice and if we don’t seek to establish justice then we have failed.
I understand you think it's ethical, and I disagree for the reasons I laid out in the post you just replied to, among others. It doesn't seem like you've engaged with the points there so I have nothing further to say.
My previous comment did engage with your points. It’s not about making everyone the same, it is about reducing the unfair aspects and power games that the majority group continues and has in the past, exerted on the marginalized.
If Someone says that siding with an oppressor is justice, I think they should relearn ethics.
> It’s not about making everyone the same, it is about reducing the unfair aspects and power games that the majority group continues and has in the past, exerted on the marginalized.
And the methods by which it attempts to do so enforces homogeneity or discrimination. The ends do not justify the means.
But what empirical historical example of "outcome equity" has proven as harmful in scale and magnitude as slavery or other oppressive, authoritarian social orders? How much of this concern is founded in actual history? Even one example would help ground such a hypothetical concern.
Who said anything about harm? Harm is not the only consideration.
We could reduce harm to indigenous peoples living in the Amazon by forcibly moving them into cities with proper healthcare, but this would destroy their culture and violate their right to autonomy.
My parent comment explicitly said that AA is harmful, and I see it like how people abstractly state that communism is harmful to the social fabric or something. Now give a relevant empirical example. Even a scientific study would suffice. Stop playing lazy abstract word games unbefitting of STEM experts. And please carefully reread the upthread remakes before joining replying, Naasking.
I doubt there is such an example that fits; there certainly is a lack of significant historical evidence for actual harms of affirmative action. I think we would agree that some (many?) detractors of affirmative action give the impression that they believe affirmative action is an evil on the approximate level of slavery, warranting maintenance of the status quo. Still, slavery is an unfairly high bar to establish injustice, and I agree with other AA detractors in that the outcome of AA is morally dubious. I firmly believe that AA doesn't tackle the root of the problem and thus has dubious efficacy, too. I hope everyone embraces reform along the lines of reduced or nullified college tuition and better public school and health infrastructure to lift all communities up. Money shouldn't be an issue at this time, except for the backwards society that we live in. The fine game of nil, indeed!
I think there's no contradiction that AA doesn't tackle the root of the problem (I think that is a half truth) and AA is actually what universities morally ought to do on their part, and that it is neither proven nor disproven that AA policy could actually accelerate reparations through intergenerational effects.
Noam Chomsky points out that in poor countries such as Brazil and India, there is much more affirmative action (e.g. to compensate for wrongs of the caste system). It's America--a rich, powerful, and unequal country--that is so ideologically opposed to this.
I note your mention of other countries, though progress still seems slow there. There still seems to be plenty of corruption. I think the reforms I've mentioned are far more promising, though if AA is to be implemented in a way, I should think that framing it based on actual economic status is both more correct and more defensible; people need money in most things and a reasonable demonstration of merit can justify generous financial accomodations.
> At a most naïve level, yes. But the post-modern left’s big assumption is that evolutionary, biological, and other factors can’t play a roll in those outcomes.
Democracy's big assumption too btw.
> At some level we have to be okay allowing for inequality of outcomes because we cant even identify let alone control all the social and biological variables of being human.
We are. MIT isn't admitting people with IQs in 60s due to genetic defects are they? It's a matter of degree, and managing that requires measuring. We can't measure people's inborn abilities, so we have to make palatable assumptions measure what we can, and act accordingly. The "to discriminate or not to discriminate" choice is purely one of lesser evil. There is no good answer here.
I’m not sure I understand your MIT point. So what are the numbers today? Where’s the gap?
In my example Native Americans are expected to thrive in a college environment that promotes binge drinking despite having equal distribution of IQs. That’s arguably unfair to them and isn't solved by tweaking the input distribution by identifiable racial characteristics. Rather, it’s an unfortunate adversity that needs to be overcome (ideally with awareness, empathy, and support of other people even those who do not have to face that adversity).
> Rather, it’s an unfortunate adversity that needs to be overcome.
Well yeah, but again
> ideally with awareness, empathy, and support of other people even those who do not have to face that adversity
the question here is how much support and what kinds. Any amount based on race is still a form of affirmative action, it's just not happening in a college admissions office.
In the context here I think people take affirmative action to mean “official race-based consideration in the college admissions process”. While helping others out when they demonstrate need is action, it’s usually just called being a decent person and you don't have to limit it to artificial racial boundaries.
> While helping others out when they demonstrate need is action, it’s usually just called being a decent person and you don't have to limit it to artificial racial boundaries.
100% But back to the context: controlling for racial disparity. If your answer is "just be nice" then you're choosing the "wait it out for 100's of years" option. That's totally your prerogative, and I personally flip flop between the two in terms of which I think is better for society.
In favor of affirmative action, one argument that doesn't even require comparing "equality of outcome/opportunity" between individuals, is that the university should have some say in the makeup of its incoming class, and should have a right to minimize its homogeneity. You might argue that race is not an attribute upon which homogeneity can legally be measured, but that won't change the fact that it's a proxy for life experience. All else being equal, two people of the same skin color will have more in common with each other than two people of differing skin colors, by definition of "all else being equal." So if you're an admissions office building a freshman class with the goal of optimizing the learning experience for each member of it - which includes the learning experience from interacting with classmates - then which would be the better outcome: (a) one where everybody looks the same and has a large degree of overlapping life experience simply due to shared skin color, or (b) one where each student has a chance to meet another student with a completely different upbringing from their own?
Now, I'm personally against race-based affirmative action, but I also recognize that a freshman class composed entirely of students of the same skin color is not an ideal outcome. The fact of the matter is that everyone in that class would have some degree of similarity in their life experience, because their skin color is unavoidably something upon which people notice and discriminate (e.g. dating preferences, subconscious stereotyping, etc.).
I think the ruling also understands this, and it emphasizes that university admissions offices are allowed to consider upbringing in their evaluations of applicants. So if they want a class with some poor kids and some rich kids, and some musical geniuses and some athletes, and some boys and some girls and some gay people and straight people, then they should be allowed to consider all those factors. And perhaps naturally this will result in a class with a heterogenous racial makeup. But what they can't do is work backwards from that, and assume the racial composition of their class must be a proxy for all the other axes along which they want to minimize its homogeneity.
I'm not sure about the underlying logic, and I think it's possible it just shifts the problem - because there is always some human element in admissions, and I'm not sure it's possible to minimize group homogeneity along an axis without discriminating along that axis when evaluating an individual - but I do feel that explicitly discriminating evaluations of individual applicants based on race is clearly wrong.
As a final point: It's also worth considering that even when discriminating on race, the universities were still discriminating along other axes arguably not "in the spirit" of affirmative action - for example, a black person from a boarding school would receive more "benefit of the doubt" than a black person from a public school. And isn't that institutionalizing whatever biases led one applicant to a boarding school but kept another at home? Maybe a positive outcome of this ruling is that it will force universities - who rightfully strive to minimize homogeneity of their incoming classes - to actively seek metrics for measuring diversity instead of lazily depending on skin color while ironically institutionalizing the same biases that affirmative action sought to eliminate.
"the university should have some say in the makeup of its incoming class, and should have a right to minimize its homogeneity."
If they don't take federal funding, I could understand that.
Both Universities involved in this case do, so are subject to the Constitution of the United States.
> Both Universities involved in this case do, so are subject to the Constitution of the United States.
No, accepting federal funds doesn’t make them government actors, nor does it subject them, particularly, to the Constitutional provision here (which binds neither private parties nor the federal government, but only the states.)
They are bound by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though, and the Court has a history of interpreting the language of that statute through the lens of its 14th Amendment jurisprudence regarding similar language, which it followed (while altering the guiding jurisprudence) in this case.
I agree with you; however, the federal government is of course a government actor and cannot continue to give funding to these schools if they continue to use affirmative action. Without the funding, the school essentially closes its doors or offers severely curtailed services.
> I agree with you; however, the federal government is of course a government actor
Not one affected by the restriction on state action in the 14th Amendment.
> and cannot continue to give funding to these schools if they continue to use affirmative action.
Yes, it can (this is obvious, since the decision itself explicitly allows the federal government itself use race-based criteria in its own admissions at the schools it runs, notably, the military academies) and it can change the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that the interpretation of the 14th Amendment limits on state action that the Supreme Court imported to it due to textual similarity are not imposed on recipients of federal funding.
But race discrimination should (in theory) be illegal regardless of federal funding status. So if it's already illegal, and the assertion is that universities don't have the right to minimize homogeneity in their classes (presumably along legal, non-racial axes), then taking that logic to the extreme, why should admissions offices have any discretion at all? Should every university that accepts federal funding be required to follow a standardized rubric when evaluating applicants?
Standardized metrics are one of the constraints that made affirmative action a problem in the first place, because when evaluations are limited to standardized metrics like test scores and GPA, the top universities have enough applicants to fill their class a dozen times. So they need to discriminate on some attributes. Maybe one alternative is a standardized baseline and a lottery system for the remaining spots. But when you're at the point of removing discretion from the process, and imposing government designed rubrics on every school, the process starts to look a bit Soviet...
Is it soviet or is it meritocratic? I think the Soviet Union was inherently corrupt and would wager that more discretionary decisions were made there than in the US today. I would be fully on board with your suggestion of a baseline and companion lottery system. I think all discretion should be removed. Let the most qualified people in based on high school grades and standardized test results. Everyone should have the chance to succeed based on that.
I understand completely that life is harder for some than others, whether due to race, religion, financial history, etc. but to allow for a selection process to use any combination of that and intentionally exclude people due to their race is wrong. This is America, some people have it easy and are born with golden parachutes, but those people are actually few and far between and everyone has the chance to work hard here and succeed. Again the effort involved will vary but the opportunity is always there.
Equality of outcome can only be enforced currently by a tyrannical government. It’s wholly doomed unless we can identify and correct for every hidden variable affecting outcomes.
If the outcome doesn't depend on your actions, there's no point in doing anything. Such a lethargic society cannot function, so to push it into motion the ruler has to use force and cruelty. The people will do the work, not because they hope to get something, for the outcome is always the same - cheap food and 4 hours of sleep - but because they want to avoid punishment.
I don't think anyone seriously suggests "equality of outcome" should mean "regardless of any actions/decisions you take in life". I would treat it as meaning "given two different large subsets of society that differ markedly/measurably on key indicators, there shouldn't be a difference in average outcomes between those born into one subset vs the other". Depending on the indicators/subsets in question that may well be a worthwhile & achievable goal. Particularly if the "outcomes" being measured go beyond just material wealth (e.g. health/wellbeing outcomes).
This premise about large subsets falls apart when you apply it to maples and oaks, even less it's applicable to free willed creatures gifted with intelligence. If you see a difference between two subgroups, it means your understanding of why these groups are the way they are is lacking.
I literally have no idea what you mean. But if we see that, for instance, average life expectancy is markedly lower for the subset of population that identifies as "native American" vs that of those that identify as "white", that's clearly an inequality of outcome that there's reason to be concerned about. Which isn't to say it mightn't turn out to have a genetic basis that leaves us with limited options to compensate for, but it's surely worth ensuring better understanding the causes and doing what we can to ensure there aren't systemic barriers preventing particular subgroups from accessing the same degree of medical care etc. available to others.
One issue is there's infinite metrics to measure outcome, and any measurement you choose will have certain groups excel in compared to others. Once we achieve equality in a certain metric we will always have new ones to work on essentially forever. This may be a good goal for people/institutions but it can't contribute to discrimination being indefinite in scope.
Another issue is we're talking about group level outcomes here - which means we're already accepting that there will be biases in measurements, otherwise the group wouldn't be a 'group' (unless it's literally just skin color which is - a pretty arbitrary/racist way to group people all else being equal).
Equality of outcome is just a fancy way of saying tyranny. Freedom can only exist and only be freedom if you have the right to fail or succeed, if no one can fail or succeed because everyone is made the same there is no freedom, there is no choice.
Those that advocate for equality of outcome desire to make again a slave state, where they as "superior educated white people" can ensure that black people are "taken care of" by ensuring they all have jobs, they all have housing, they all have healthcare, they all have food, and that they have no freedom.
Except it's not mostly poor, hardworking ADOS (African descendents of slavery) students that benefit. It's rich, Black students that are benefiting, especially those from outside the US and no lineage from slavery. The problem with affirmative action is that everyone is only looking literally at skin color, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.
Anyone who's attended an Ivy League school can attest to the truth of this, and I've been vehemently disagreeing with every anti-AA comment in this thread, so that says something.
Pretty much every Black student I see at school is African (immigrant)-American, not ADOS.
Rich ADOS should still benefit, though. We should be looking at lineage instead of skin color, because thinking all black people are the same is a handicap of both
the left: who think that all "people of color" should be compensated for slavery, and
the right: who love to say that US blacks were sold by "their own people." That's like claiming innocence for molesting a child because their parents sold it to you.
Test scores and income are enough, as they are objective measurements.
Grades, as mentioned in another comment, are not consistent across different high schools, and they favor people with more resources.
Sports, as in play in the university team, which demands high performance, is also fair, and probably doesn't demand a lot of places, as you can't have a sports team with hundreds of people.
The issue is that also, generally speaking, anyone who was legally discriminated against probably lives in a jurisdiction performing poorly in test scores, since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax, and due to historic discrimination the formerly discriminated groups also live in areas with lower housing wealth. (A lot of people also moved out of districts with large minority populations when integration was mandated, taking their taxes and wealth with them.)
Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.
>since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax
Not true at all. There are many places like California where School funds are distributed Statewide. The results are relatively predictable. California passed the Serrano decisions in the early '70s mandating local taxes be spent Statewide on schools. This was followed immediately by a prop 13 where residents decided that if their money doesn't go to Local Schools they won't pay. As a result California dropped from top five in the nation in school funding to the bottom five.
Correct. If you live in [poor high-percentage African-American town in Alabama] you cannot choose to go to high school in [wealthy mostly-white town in Massachusetts].
No they can't. That's why Republicans are a big proponent of school vouchers so that parents can choose which school a child can go to, but Democrats say that is racist.
Not quite, because you can be house-poor due to luck with owning, and also owning a ‘bad’ house in, say, New York City would give you a high paper net worth when comparing to the entire country.
There are also large differences in salaries and income across the country due to variance in cost of living. Poor in New York may be a decent wage in Gary or Biloxi.
If you don't put any independent effort, then the tests would match whatever the school taught. However, you do have the opportunity to apply yourself and put all the extra effort you need to get a higher grade, independent of your school. The things that would matter there are family support, not in economical sense, but in moral support that your extra effort is right.
You're technically right, but you and parent (GP?) seem to ultimately be referring to the same group of people. Apologies if you picked up on that; I can't tell.
Yeah, the point should always have been explicitly to be reparations for slavery/Jim Crow and the Native American genocide. But that was never really explicit, and there was a lot of mission drift over the last fifty years.
It's probably a reliable collective action problem. For example, the point of the 1965 Civil Rights Act was to help black men so their families could stay intact, but Howard Smith poison-pilled the whole thing by diverting it to women.
For people who are in the military, I point this out in its internship form. The Skillbridge program was designed to facilitate internships for departing servicemen to address difficulties with veteran unemployment, but the spoils mostly go to officers with highly marketable skills, like submarine and cryptography officers. After all, those officers have each been practicing the art of finding and utilizing beneficial programs to their advantage for decades by that point in their lives; why wouldn't they use this one too?
and redlining, and other formal, informal, intentional and unintentional institutional (particularly governmental and financial) policies that limited people’s access to success based on their race.
Anything explicitly discriminatory that the government could have done something about and chose not to. We need to forget about "microaggressions" and deal with the macroaggressions. It's typical that white liberals have embarked on the project of detecting subtle clues to the slightest slights and condemning people for them, when they should just treat historical race-based abuse claims like any other compensation claim.
If you look at black people's family trees enough, you'll find plenty with specific inheritance claims against their white, slaver ancestors. Black people in America are the descendants of white rapists as well as imported slaves.
Not to mention so very few families owned slaves back in the day. The way people talk, you'd think everyone had slaves - no, that was a very small minority of ultra-wealthy people.
What about people who's families immigrated here post-slavery? Their tax money has to pay reparations too?
Reparations is a non-starter. Any discussion or endeavor to push for reparations is a naked attempt to buy votes with lies.
Unpopular to hear, but it needs to be said more. While I believe that the US still has a ways to go to truly achieve equality of opportunity (and then equality of outcome really would be based on culture, I would think), culture is such an important factor in peoples' personalities and therefore an important factor in peoples' outcomes. I can't speak to other life forms, but culture (nurture) is a powerful force in humans that can rival genetic dispositions (nature).
They're not concerned with the angle used - any angle that works is acceptable - just that more successful groups are brought down, and they're concerned with the levers used to bring them down (as a matter of cultural control). The idea is to be able to dominate politically through manipulation. For some political machines that's viewed as a critical tool: intentionally segment people into conflict groups (forever subdividing as you go), spur endless conflict and cultural control through the conflict (hate speech controls = end of free speech, and so on).
I think it's more that admissions aren't actually optimizing for academic success. They're optimizing for career success. If you just look at academic signals you'll accept the most academically successful students but that's not the point. It's not unreasonable to punish applicants for spending more time studying because studying skews the metric they're using to predict career success.
> studying skews the metric they're using to predict career success
Which is what?
Studying is hard, getting academic success is hard, and there is a positive correlation for both of those and career success, as academic success requires discipline, grit, and hard work, which are all useful for career success.
They've been using academic success to predict career success. I agree it's a good predictor. It's not foolproof though. The issue is that it can be skewed by devoting more resources to academic success instead of for example starting a business or political action or sports. Is someone less likely to have a successful career because they started a business instead of studying an extra hour every day? This is why the most elite schools switched to extracurricular and interview heavy admission criteria which ended up disfavoring asians who tend to spend more time on academic success.
The goal was to actually do a better job of finding the applicants with discipline and grit, not just the ones who have it in an academic context.
What kind of logic is this? So having wealthy and well-connected parents gives you a huge edge on career success, and you are saying admission should take that into account and favor that heavily?
I don't know about should, but they are taking it into account and I'm just saying why they are. Whether maximizing career success is the right choice is certainly up for debate.
The ironic thing is that standardized tests are the most objective metric we have. Things like extracurriculars reflect more on the parents and community than the kids.
It's a zero-sum game. There's no such thing as taking privilege "away" from Asian kids. If you increase the acceptance rate of some race, it has to be decreased from somewhere. There's literally nothing else that can be done.
I don't know what your definition of taking privilege away means, but in my definition giving preference to someone for limited resource means taking privilege away from others.
Yep, I got some scholarships for being the first in my family to go to college, and also from the Dante Alighieri Society for my Italian heritage. They really didn't put much of a dent into tuition, and I worked full-time or took on loans for the rest. I wouldn't describe myself as "poor" but my parents were lower-middle class.
Well non-whites especially, because the government literally gave away money to white people (specifically excluding black people) in the 50s and 60s to buy houses and build generational wealth.
So yes, poor people, but also very much non-whites.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like <1%) portion of all people going into universities in the way it was intended. What would be much more useful is exactly what you say, taking much more of the student's overall socioeconomic status into account rather than race.
We would probably find that this does a better job of helping those who actually need help. And that would likely mean that minorities are still prioritized.
Finally, what we should really be doing if we care about helping those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is make all community college free. It's already very cheap as-is , we just need to take the leap to make it totally free. This would also help the student loan crisis since those who are going for bachelor degrees would only need a couple more years of education vs. 4
No, we don’t need to be making community college free. Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids? All you’re doing is making it marginally easier for the people already sufficiently motivated to succeed in college to have a little easier time.
Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certainly not with public funding.
I'm married to an primary school educator and you are bang on. Not that I'm implying zero sum, but if effort is to be prioritized, this whole college discussion is moot. An emphasis on education needs to start in the home with some behavioral training by the parents to ready the kids for an educational setting. It's been a growing problem for years and if it keeps getting worse, we might as well enroll everyone in Harvard for free, because it eventually won't matter.
EDIT: What I mean by that is partially to say, dealing with motivation and behavior occurs at lower grade levels and schools are fighting an uphill battle. Affirmative action politics at the collegiate level feels like putting the cart before the horse.
A teacher friend's school was sued because they disciplined black students more often. No consideration for the fact that the disruptive students were indeed disruptive. Now they're just not allowed to keep discipline, full stop. You can imagine the results for everyone else in class, the well-behaved blacks included (who are statistically most likely in need of a good learning environment at school)
There are definitely many facets to the problem, and education is only one part of the equation in many poor (black, hispanic) neighborhoods. One can only change the variables that they have access to, however. I think it will take some time but ultimately I think elementary education in particular is super critical.
> Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certainly not with public funding.
I just don't get this. Yes we need to improve primary and secondary education, but we can't just pretend like tertiary education doesn't matter to people. College isn't just about learning material in classrooms. College provides a way for young people to transition in a structured way into adulthood. It provides job opportunities and social interaction that you just can't get as easily or consistently if you immediately go into the workforce as a high school grad.
> College provides a way for young people to transition in a structured way into adulthood.
Given that the majority of people in the United States do not have even an associate's degree and still transition into adulthood, even if your assumption that it gives people a structured way into adulthood was correct, it's serving less than half the population. The majority of people do complete high school, or an equivalent, though. It's pretty plainly clear that preparing children to transition into adulthood needs to start earlier. That goes hand in hand with the failure of the elementary and secondary education systems in the United States.
Also, just philosophically, I am morally opposed to the idea that people who don't or start complete college for one reason or another should be subsidizing those who can and do. College degree holders earn dramatically more money in their lifetime over non college graduates.
I understand that the goal is to expand the number of people that can attend college. I think that you would expand that number more by improving the K-12 system and you'd leave everyone better off by doing so. If you want to increase the number of disadvantaged people in university (i.e. the people that would go to college if it were free but can't afford it so they don't) you should look at expanding the Pell grant, not subsidize college for everyone.
>Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids?
Because the hot topic this past decade or 2 has been about the college bubble. And we conflate college with university. I think Community college is cheap enough that no one is worried about paying off debts for 20 years in CC, but there is certainly that problem with university. With almost zero alternatives.
And to be frank, it (university costs) is an easier problem to solve. there are (apparently) 1600 accredited universities. I'm not sure about free, but if we can price control tuition (and all those other "extra fees". I know your loopholes) for even 100 of those universities, that would create opportunity where none may exist now. elementary/secondary education... we're talking 10's of thousands of schools to take into account. And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.
> but there is certainly that problem with university. With almost zero alternatives.
The alternative is mostly that a lot of people shouldn't be going to college. We shouldn't be guaranteeing loans and the government shouldn't be in the business of handing out student loans. That is a large contributor to the massive inflation in student fees. When you improve elementary education, the negative effects of less people attending college are offset by the general working knowledge of the populace being higher, of better quality, and with a mindset that allows people to really think and learn.
Without that, all we're doing is basically setting people up for failure and a whole lot of school debt. There is a large percentage of Americans who have absolutely nothing to show for their time and money spent on college because they never completed their degree.
> And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.
The entire public school system is one that favors the privileged. They are funded largely by property taxes and so obviously the wealthier your area is, the more funding and thus better education children have access to.
So yes, there is extreme deficiencies in equity when it comes to educational opportunities in the United States. Providing subsidized college doesn't fix that issue and it doesn't target the right people, either.
I wouldn't necessarily oppose actual public (completely government funded) universities that compete with the private schools, but that's serving such a small population of people for it to really see much benefit.
>The alternative is mostly that a lot of people shouldn't be going to college
Well you need some sort of post secondary education these days if you don't want to be stuck in entry level jobs. It's not like I'm opposed to trade schools nor the peace corp nor apprenticeships. But trade schools are also feeling a similar strain these days and apprenticeships are non-existent for high school graduates.
Saying people shouldn't go to college is like saying people shouldn't have good jobs. And i don't think that's a better alternative.
> Well you need some sort of post secondary education these days if you don't want to be stuck in entry level jobs.
This is entirely because people created this notion that everyone should go to college. The vast majority of jobs don't need specialized education that college is supposed to offer. If you start deemphasizing college as a basic requirement, while simultaneously improving the education system from the bottom up, you will create better outcomes and a more educated population.
Most people don't have college degrees in the US and yet it isn't the case that half of the population is unemployed.
I don't disagree with you. But convincing jobs to lower their automated HR requirements in a time where they can still hire plenty of college grads seems harder than encouraging post secondary education. Which is already harder than getting proper primary/secondary education. In addition, it seems futile to discourage acedemia from encouraging students to remain in their bubble. It goes against their best interests.
I'm simply talking about the path of least resistance. We're well past the times where you walk into a mom and pop shop and grab a job in a few days time. At least in Metropolitan areas.
I listened to that same episode of Throughline. It was a great discussion that touched on aspects I’d not considered.
One the key takeaways for me was the question of “what is it trying to achieve?” and “is it working?” To which the answers are nobody can agree but it’s not achieving any of the possible goals.
The effects of affirmative action having been banned from California public universities since 1996, including Berkeley and UCLA, was also quite telling. This happened nearly 30 years ago, so the effects are very clear to see.
Diversity was rocky for a few years, but they eventually figured out other ways to have it without using affirmative action.
The part about community colleges being a huge lever at getting more students into higher education was interesting. It’s not talked about much but has proved to be very successful.
> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.
More or less, but not precisely. How do you define a "minority race"? Universities in America discriminate against Asian Americans despite them being a minority of the American population generally, ostensibly because they're over-represented in universities.
As I understand it, there was some evidence: Asians applications were being suppressed, due to volume to maintain...a more diverse student body (or maybe just every elite school was racist?).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/02/27/what-...
There was a logic to the idea of racial preferences as originally envisioned. Studies show that the income gaps between American descendants of slaves and indigenous Americans basically have been unchanged even after segregation and legal discrimination was ended. The reasoning goes that racial preferences are necessary to undo these disadvantages.
But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.
A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.
Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.
> Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having fairly diverse schools, and they do precisely what you say - they focus their efforts on lifting up those who come from poor socioeconomic situations, which tends to capture a lot of the same people affirmative action was trying to do.
> In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think.
In that case, can you explain why two schools would've fought for the explicit use of race in deciding school admissions all the way to the Supreme Court?
California has been trying to overturn it's race-blind policy for some time. The original policy was instituted about the same time as everyone else's. The intent of overturning it, of course, is to then go further and institute a policy more like the one seen in this case.
It has been overturned at the referendum level every time.
You are referring to California public colleges. Some California private colleges which received federal funding were still using racial identity as a factor in admissions. I received an email from my alma mater today stating that they were discontinuing this practice due to the Supreme Court decision.
European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it.
I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People need to focus on race otherwise they would start to pay attention to the enormous social/financial disparity between the top and the bottom of the pyramid. And we really do not want that.
I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA has been known to work with entertainment and critical industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace)
It really does feel like people weren't at each others throats as much 10 years ago as they seem to be now. It's almost like it's being used as a wedge to divide and distract from more important issues.
Or maybe you just weren't as aware of the problems black people face in america? The amount of times my conservative family members tell me "Such and such wasn't a problem when I was a kid" while completely ignoring the problems proves it isn't a genuine concern.
But the identity and diversity stuff was a thing long before that time.
Don't get me wrong, politicians and elites are absolutely using identity to play the populace against each other. But this is less part of a grand conspiracy and more the oldest trick in the book of politics, there's evidence of it going back all the way to classic antiquity.
> EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies.
Depends on the country. As usual, Romania isn't really a EU country. We have reserved places for Gypsies in universities as a means of integration... not that it's ever worked.
The poor black urbanite and poor white trumpist are arch enemies but should be close allies.
The world is governed by international capitalist classism. It gives no shit about race or gender. It just cares about having lots of disposables that have few options. There being more disposables in a particular race is a historical artifact, not a goal in itself.
Likewise, you could diversify the captains of industry but the system remains exactly the same. Because it isn't governed by race.
Back in 2009 I thought the tea party and occupy Wall Street crowds would realize they were opposite sides of the same coin. I thought if both sides came together maybe we’d see some material change. But no, the powers that be divided them apart and convinced each the other was the real enemy. Same as it ever was.
The attitudes to race are different because of the different situations. The US is multicultural and founded on stolen land, whereas European countries (at least in the east) are nation states with a single dominant culture.
To preface: I don’t really have an opinion on affirmative action per se:
That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education. They’re “ivy leagues” for preserving class inequality having been marketed as schools.
To the extent that race is a distraction from class, the fact that counteracting racial bias in admissions has failed to uplift the poor just puts too fine a point on this arrangement.
There’s some good discussion downthread already. I want to make a particular observation that your intuition is:
- totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors
- reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable
- what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they want this to be the predominant intuition even for people with more context
- logically reasonable if you assume advantage barriers generally follow a similar pattern and even then if you assume good faith
- untenable on inspection for the same reason any social democratic institution needs to exist: a thing that’s supposed to be structurally fair intrinsically isn’t, and demands correction to address that
The problem is that an economic axis isn’t the only one involved. Sometimes it isn’t even involved at all. Racism is deeply embedded in American culture and history and outcomes, even when other factors are otherwise favorable. And at least in the US, this is a huge source of conflict among otherwise like minds even on the left.
It would be much better if those with an open mind to “can’t we just level the field” had a more open mind to the various axes of relative and historically intentionally stratified advantage. That applies to race, to sex, to sexuality and gender identity, to disability. And in each, structural inequality is much more particular and involved than access to money/resources.
There are a lot of other factors that influence advantages and disadvantages in every aspect of life. This is of course trivial. The point is that you cannot reach a better approximation of justice by a complex rule set determined by some king makers. No, racial discrimination will inevitably worsen the situation. Also, this is by definition the most prominent and straight forward example of structural discrimination as well. It becomes structurally unfair.
Likewise a better approach to social democracy is to look at disadvantages today. It is a common mistake to create false problems. This would not be the first time. And participation in society sadly has a lot to do with economic factors and I am sure that is something social democracy would like to address. Of course there are exceptions, but you have to be careful about the metrics you choose.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?
This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race.
However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power.
But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race?
EDIT: Well the votes on this comment are going up and down faster than an "Essex birds drawers" as the BOFH would say.
> However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power.
An alternative one: A culture which has a history of structural racism due to slavery which therefore still thinks about many topics through the lens of race despite it often not being the best suite lens.
Let's imagine a hypothetical America, where we remove the economic aspect. Let's imagine that every household in america pulls in $250k/year and prices are uniform for every household across the nation. No one is poor. Everyone goes to the same excellent free schools where the teachers also make $250k/year. We've removed economics as a variable. Everyone is equally educated and equally rich.
But let's leave one variable in: America is exactly as racist as America is currently. Ethnic backgrounds and cultures still exist, and there are enough white assholes in "gatekeeping" roles to affect the distribution of people who pass their gates. This is a fact that is a true thing that already exists in America; we're not ADDING it to the model, we've just left it in as the only thing we want to measure.
Structurally, as a society, you want the distribution of people who pass through higher education into roles like "Doctors" and "Lawyers" and eventually "Politicians" to broadly match the distribution of cultures that comprise the society as a whole. Otherwise you create an apartheid state, and an angry under-class that threatens the stability of the system. This is an axiom so simple that even Lyndon Johnson understood it.
So in our Model America, you need to have a law that says "yeah we know that everyone is the same, but because a degree from [Prestigious University] has a ripple effect that affects society as a whole, we want to make sure that graduating classes have at least the CHANCE of reflecting the cultural diversity of the nation as a whole, so we need to have a law that prevents Bad Actors in Admissions from just saying 'Oh, we already let in all the white people in line, wink wink wink, sorry, maybe next year'"
That's the reason you might still want quotas. And given the distribution of test scores because everyone ISN'T identical frictionless spheres, you might want to add a weight to minority test scores to float them overall, so they get in.
And yeah, that might not seem fair if you're in the majority; or if you're in the minority whose test scores are highest, but there's a clear and self-evident purpose to those kinds of weightings. Life's not fair, but it should be equitable, overall.
Do you think being an African American hurt Barak Obama's chance to be the Democratic nominee for President? Or to be elected President?
To answer my own question - it's complicated; it did hurt him in some regards but it helped him too. There were a lot of people in the primary and general election who wanted to know they weren't prejudiced and voted for him at least in part for that reason.
This wasn't legal affirmative action. It was something else. I don't know if I'd call it an "unfair right" but for the right person in the right circumstance it can be an advantage. Does it out weigh all the disadvantages? Probably not.
These are all statistical measures. For any one individual may not see the benefits of these privileges. Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable.
There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions?
This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
> These are all statistical measures. For any one individual may not see the benefits of these privileges. Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable.
Some variation is unavoidable, but statistically significant variation isn't! Why should people in those underpriviledged groups accept a society which gives them fewer chances?
> There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions?
Yes, it does matter? If police interactions are calmer and you live longer, you have more chances to turn your life around. We as a society have more chances to help them.
> This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
We should help the poor, and we should work to remove disparities between races and ethnicities. Why are those things opposed in your mind?
1) Many people of that race may be independently wealthy and do not need help. Grouping people by race is a bad measure of “need”
2) I haven’t heard realistic plans for actually helping people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.
3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge cases.
4) You could easily find other ways to group people to locate “disadvantage”. Religion is an easy one, but affirmative action based of religion sounds quite discriminatory.
5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People’s difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by actual experiences.
> 1) Many people of that race may be independently wealthy and do not need help. Grouping people by race is a bad measure of “need”
But people are being treated badly due to their race. Why can't we use race as one criterium to decide who needs help? Why do we have to pretend that racism isn't a real social thing that affects peoples lives?
> 2) I haven’t heard realistic plans for actually helping people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.
Well, if you define these plans as unrealistic you're not going to find realistic plans. But affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan - so much so that it is (or was) reality!
> 3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge cases.
Sure, but people are being treated badly due to those nebulous groupings with many edge cases. Why do we have to ignore that?
> 4) You could easily find other ways to group people to locate “disadvantage”. Religion is an easy one, but affirmative action based of religion sounds quite discriminatory.
Do you have statistics showing that a similarly statistically significant difference exists between different religions?
> 5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People’s difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by actual experiences.
"The people who identify racism are the real racists!" isn't as good of an argument as you think. People have different experiences due to their race. Attempting to find ways to curb that isn't "racist", it's "normal social behavior".
> But people are being treated badly due to their race
Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
> affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan
It's also kinda racist.
> people are being treated badly due to those nebulous groupings
This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race. However, I do not see why this means people need "help". What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still have no answers.
> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
Why should the affected groups, or society at large, accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to make things fair in light of this fact?
> It's also kinda racist.
Can you explain why? You cited MLK Jr. earlier. He didn't think that AA is racist. Where do you disagree with his position?
> This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race. However, I do not see why this means people need "help". What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still have no answers.
No, you've gotten answers, you just don't like them. I've explained pretty clearly why this means people need "help", what kind of help and so on.
I'm trying to take your reply in good faith, but I'm really not understanding. Can you walk me through your thought process? The earlier discussion was:
>>> But people are being treated badly due to their race
>> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
> Why should the affected groups, or society at large, accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to make things fair in light of this fact?
So the court helped black people in regards to the bigotry of racists by "preventing universities from being racist". Your solution to racism is to treat everyone equally - which in turn means that black people just have to accept the bigotry of racists. So your solution is for them to just suck it up. Am I understanding you correctly?
"Your solution to racism is to treat everyone equally"
Yes. This is the logical solution. The way to end X is that everybody stops doing X. It's very clear, simple, and I'm sure you would agree with virtually all values of X.
Wow, so it really is just "suck it up". Do you really not understand how problematic this line of thought is for those who are being discriminated against? Or do you just think that the only racism in this world is affirmative action, and minorities aren't being discriminated against?
Why are you ignoring my point? I've brought it up multiple times. Instead of just repeating your position you could, you know, respond to my argument regarding your position.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”
Do you think it should be eliminated? Then why are you arguing against its elimination? Why do you claim to think it should be eliminated? Why should I be convinced that you actually believe it should be eliminated?
I will repeat the point once more, please directly engage with it.
Earlier in this comment tree the other user wrote:
> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
I agree with this, so the presupposition for the rest of the comment chain is that this statement is agreed upon, unless otherwise specified. I pointed towards this statement multiple times and asked: if this means that minorities will be discriminated against (since the agreed upon statement is that racists will still exist), and the attempt at "positive discrimination" is forbidden, they are simply discriminated against. What is your solution to this problem? How do we help them to no longer face discrimination under your proposed solution?
I don't think you have a solution, as you have so far failed to bring one up (even though I asked this question multiple times). So far, your position is equivalent to "they just have to suck it up". Can you finally offer a different position?
> We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
Why not both? I expect you'd find the cross-section of people who want to, say, give black people better medical outcomes, and those who support helping the homeless and poor is quite large.
I feel like "what about the poor" reliability shows up when discussing helping brown people, but as soon as something is designed to help the poor the same politicians show up to condem it as entitlements or socialism.
I've seen no evidence to suggest that anyone trying to better minority outcomes has ever actually distracted from implementing programs to help the poor.
Well for example we already discussed that black people have worse health outcomes, we could perhaps study why that is and focus on fixing those things, ex through outreach programs.
Assume we can fix poverty entirely. We already live in a world where, accounting for income, black people have worse health outcomes than whites. Why do you assume helping poor people will fix that? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume we'd now love in a world where no one is poor , and black people still are underserved by our healthcare system? How do you propose fixing it if we can't acknowledge the racial disparities?
> The focus on race breeds inaction because we insist something must be done before we have any idea how to solve it.
Bull. We aren't unable to implement programs help the poor because people dare mention race. Plenty of people are trying to push for programs to help the poor regardless of race. It's not the people who acknowledge that black people are more likely to be poor standing in the way.
Outreach programs can't be part of the solution? Why not? The suggestion was based on studies that found a high amount of distrust of the medical system.
William J. Bennett’s Aug. 12 commentary is the latest example of a recent trend in conservative public relations--opponents of affirmative action claiming to be the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. They invoke the sentence from King’s 1963 speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged by “the content of their character,” not the “color of their skin.”
Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
You are incorrect about MLKs assessment. From the LA Times.
Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
I also seem to recall a factory or trade uprising/strike in/around Europe between 1400-1700 where they basically made up whiteness to divide the laborers and get them to argue amongst themselves (successfully), but this may be apocryphal as I cannot seem to find a source.
Really, people had to be told that people with white(r) skin, are similar..?
How stupid do these people think 'everyone else' is. This is the most absurd thing I've read all day.
Humans, who divide themselves along such lines as _what tv shows they like_, had to have the concept of _skin colour_ invented for them. Really think about how ridiculous this assertion is.
It wasn't that they just said that they looked different obviously, what a ridiculous assertion . They seeded talking points of racial supremacy amongst them to divide them when before they saw themselves more unified as workers with their race not having inherent merit.
> But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race? (snip) If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race.
Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never really true in the US today.
If you help "all people" with "no regard" to race, you have just participated in favoring white folks over all others, even though you likely don't realize it. The systems by which you choose to "help" all have various types of racism built-in, and you will have racist results as output, even if you yourself never directly try to commit such an act. (This is what systemic racism is, sometimes called 'institutionalized racism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism )
Affirmative Action, while not perfect, is one of the few things ever tried that actually accounts for this. It's saying, "you can't be more racist than X" where X is some kind of objective metric (say, "percent of enrollment by race"), and it does not care which of the thousands of people or systems involved are causing the issue, it attempts to force-corrects for it.
It is an emergency stop-gap, until such a future as that result is already happening naturally, making it redundant. The fact that we still depend on it ~60+ yrs later, is sort of living proof that we haven't really dealt with systemic racism yet. (As if all the other evidence, between housing, employment, police brutality and murders, etc, wasn't already enough)
There is another reason, less talked about, that higher education started considering factors like socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and national origin in admissions.
It became clear that immersing predominantly white, privileged students in a predominantly white, privileged campus during 4 years of college was poorly preparing them as leaders for a future world in which they will encounter a greater diversity of backgrounds than their parents did. (Because of both changing U.S. demographics AND growing global trade.)
And it became clear that sourcing students primarily from white, privileged backgrounds was poorly positioning the institutions themselves in an increasingly diversifying society.
As legal barriers to the financial and political participation of women and minorities fell, there were more opportunities for people of those backgrounds to succeed. And elite higher education institutions want to remain the schools of choice for the most successful members of society (regardless of background). They can’t do that if everyone thinks they only care about rich white people.
Adjusting admissions to increase the diversity of backgrounds of new students was a way to short-cut solutions to these challenges.
In short, a thumb on the scale to bring the student body more in line with global diversity was also done with an eye toward remaining competitive as a top choice among options for higher education.
> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already.
I don't know about this. Like about 1000 undergraduate students are admitted to Harvard each year, Harvard being named in this suit. Affirmative action at Harvard being necessary to help anyone seems like a stretch. Is Harvard really the only way to help people? It's an elite school so I think the stakes are different than helping people because the applicant pool is very elite already.
I think in reality the US is embroiled in ethnic conflict and people are fighting over spots at elite schools for their children and a lot of this is political. There are other countries where affirmative action is used and a similar thing happens. Like in India for example, the child of a billionaire from the OBC designation has a much higher chance of getting into IIT than the child of poor Brahmins. The OBC designation has expanded over time for political reasons to form coalitions, as I understand it.
> Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?
Ironically the SFFA case argued that specifically white kids were being backdoored into Harvard at the expense of Asian students[1]. So yes, the goal would not be met. Although I need to read this case closely because the official decision mentions more about Black and Latino affirmative action.
I think it's a mistake to think the intent is to benefit individuals of specific races. This has very much been something where the intended benefactor is American society in general.
As an example, I went to a good public school that had a policy where the top 5% of high school students were automatically given admission to the university. While this was technically race blind, it was de facto affirmative action, because a more poor high school is not as competitive as a rich high school.
At first, I too, thought that affirmative action was bad because racism of any kind is bad. However, it dawned on me one day that if this policy wasn't in place, there just wouldn't be many minorities at our university, and in a way I would be deprived off a well-rounded, diverse college experience.
Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities.
I don't think it's really any different in how the American justice system doesn't exist solely to provide justice for victim or the accused. The most important beneficiary of our justice system, is what happens when you have justice for society. Sure, individual cases don't always have what is perceived as the "right" outcome, but that's considered acceptable in our system if the result is justice for society.
OP's point is still important, though: you're talking about the wrong kind of diversity. If you go to a school with a bunch of kids who grew up in upper-class neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., who cares if a few of those kids have black skin? They're contributing ~nothing to the diversity on campus, because they grew up in the same place and come from the same income level.
On the other hand, if your admissions policies make a point of drawing from many income brackets or many countries, suddenly you have a whole world of people who you likely would never have associated with and who are actually different than you in meaningful ways.
Country of origin and socioeconomic status are a much bigger deal when it comes to diversity than race, because race isn't real. It's a proxy for things that are real, and continuing to use it as a proxy perpetuates a subtle form of racism.
There’s a parenting tactic out there where you spend the money on private elementary and middle school then turn your kid loose on a low performing HS augmented with outside tutoring. They graduate top or very close to top of their class and stand a good chance of getting into the school of their choice + scholarships.
> Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities.
Why does the student body need to replace part of its Whites and Asians with minorities to be "rich and diverse"? Can't it be rich and diverse by having different people which are each his own individual not defined by his race?
Also, aren't you worried about how getting denied admission to a college because of your race will have a very negative effect for "society"?
> Why does the student body need to replace part of its Whites and Asians with minorities to be "rich and diverse"?
Hey, so there are two parts to your question, the "rich" part and the "diverse" part. I'll start with diverse because it's the most obvious.
In order to have a "diverse" student body, it should be represent a plurality of points of view. If everyone was White/Asian then the student body wouldn't be diverse, because, by definition, there would just be people from those backgrounds. Obviously there's more to diversity than just race, and I'm not not trying to argue there isn't. I am trying to keep this response short though, so forgive me from enumerating on other things when you asked specifically about race.
Ok so now the "rich" part of the question. College is an important time in one's life where many people get the opportunity to experience freedom for the first time, while they pursue a challenging, serious education. However homework and lecture is not the only place where our education happens. Being exposed to a lot of ideas, people, and experiences is also critical to the college education. By this line of reasoning being around people of all sorts of different backgrounds is part of that aspect of education.
I grew up in a suburb of Texas. There were not a lot African Americans. I actually can't remember there being any. My family wasn't wealthy though, and my parents are immigrants (just to give you some context and to keep my story honest). I truly think that if my university hadn't had its affirmative action program, there's a good chance I would have made it to adulthood without having ever been around non-white people in a meaningful sense. When would I have? I didn't choose what family, city, state, or country I was born in. All of those things happened outside of my control, and, frankly, from the perspective of someone who was from a city like New York or London I would have seemed pretty ignorant.
It's sort of like traveling, you know? Having the opportunity to travel gives you a baseline level of experience in the world that there really is no substitute for. I think having an ethnically diverse student body is similar, and that is why I said society is the primary beneficiary of affirmative action. That's my best way to answer the question without there being an actual person in front of me and being able to have a face to face discussion, so I hope you take my answer as one given sincerely, even if you don't agree with it.
> Also, aren't you worried about how getting denied admission to a college because of your race will have a very negative effect for "society"?
I am Italian. My "race" invented pizza, so no.
Edit: Also, kidding aside, give me a break. I don't even know how to answer that. You're acting like you're the victim of some kind of race war, and it's cringe. I hate to say it, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's true. You sound like one of my parents when they pretend like "you can't joke about anything anymore" or that everything is "so complicated with all the political correctness". Madonna.
I wouldn't consider that affirmative action. In any case, I would support more universities with similar policies. Your point about the justice system is interesting. In principle, it sounds good to me, but I'll have to ponder it. Thanks for that food for thought!
Glad you thought it was interesting, that makes me really happy to hear. Re. "not really affirmative action", I'm not like an AA expert, but my university went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend that very admission policy, in a lawsuit that attempted to repeal affirmative action.
I think in general the population is mostly against affirmative action because it seems racist, and they just substitute their own ideas of how those policies are implemented. It's the same thing where if you asked people if murderers should be let go over some kind of procedural technicality, then they'd probably say no because murder is bad. However, in practice those technicalities are stuff like how evidence is collected, which can lead to potentially innocent people being convicted, etc...
To add in a slightly different angle, this sort of thing is not exclusive to America.
For example, in New Zealand, a couple of weeks ago there was a bit of a kerfuffle due to reporting on those of certain ethnicities being prioritised on surgical wait lists.
Those against it were arguing (validly) that prioritisation should only be based on clinical need.
However, the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation.
So how do you resolve this? In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution.
Instead you get a "hack" like this to increase the weight of the minorities to even things out overall, hopefully to be removed later while you resolve the trickier issues.
Sometimes just targeting things to those in most need doesn't always fairly target across ethnic groups.
> In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution.
If they managed to identify that “the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation”, it means they have done 95% of the required work already. So either the report is bogus, or the solution isn’t as complex as you make it to be.
The problem is, according to my reading of SCOTUS, that you can have affirmative action on anything but race. It occurs to me that it would have been far more effective if Harvard based their selection criteria on socio-economic considerations rather than race.
It seems like a well-intentioned but badly thought through process designed to ensure disadvantaged groups gain access they might not have gotten to their system.
The general idea seems to be - if you are of a particular race, you are automatically disadvantaged over ever other race. There is probably some truth to this. However, perhaps they now need to look at how people of a certain race are disadvantaged (other than because of their race itself) and use this as their selection criteria. This might actually also raise all groups - there are plenty of people in other racial groupings who also are disadvantaged for reasons other than their race.
FWIW, I am not American and I realise this is a sensitive area, so if I am out of line for whatever reason I can just say this is an observation which may not be accurate.
The uncomfortable fact is that we're actually very bad at predicting who will thrive at college and who won't. It's like hiring in that way, and I'm not joking when I say a lottery would probably work just as well as what we do.
Very true. But I think that it’s more important to give as broad a cross section of society the chance to succeed, whether they do I guess is not something we can predetermine.
Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender.
Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender?
Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.
Similarly with the race thing. The US fought a big civil war about whether people with dark skin were livestock or people and the losing side didn't actually change their mind just because they lost. So they needed laws to address that.
This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?
> But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.
What makes you think that affirmative action for women was successful?
I don't see a lot of women garbage collectors. There certainly aren't a lot of women working on oil fields. 5% of Firefighters are women. Whenever I hear about AA it sounds like the plan isn't "equality" but "construct an ideal racial society". Sounds a lot like the bad ideas leading up to WWII, which eventually led to the most horrific crimes against humanity in the history of the world.
I don't think that women are quite equal in terms of social perception and treatment, but I don't think the proportion of women garbage collectors or women firefighters is a good indicator of that. Rather, it's more subtle; women are more likely to be perceived as overly emotional and treated as submissive, and so on. I don't think there's a wage gap, but the lack of standardized maternal leave (though parents in general should be given paid leave) can greatly affect career opportunities. I agree that some people seem to prefer a bizarre "ideal [insert convenient demographic marker here] society", and I vehemently oppose such a notion.
I think that worked in the timeframe it did because women as a group aren't generationally poor (which is to say they aren't born any more or less well off than men), and so the entire shift was one of cultural attitudes. Perhaps AA for women helped normalize female doctors more quickly (haven't looked at any data on this but it seems plausible), though it remains to be seen if the same strategy can work for balancing CS. I'm curious though: did people at the time assume female doctors were less qualified because of AA?
So why even look at race at all (in college applications)?
I live in a small, now-EU, once a socialist country, and we calculate points based on grades and starndardized tests, and top X get accepted to college, without colleges even knowing who they are at all.
As a non-American, I think watching season 4 of The Wire, which has an education and politics focus, was both eye opening and profound. Highlighted the profound gap between US and where I grew up on a number of issues.
I am from India and have lived in the U.S for over 2 decades.
I have observed "affirmative action" arguments in two continents.
I am going to answer your specific questions,
>Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Racial justice issues are separate from economic justice issues.
Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
Racism is a complex issue and in listening to Black/Asian/Brown Americans I have come to the realization that such programs have to be specific to each and every race because they experience racism in different ways.
Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect.
They never run these experiments right and this one looks to be no different. What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. You never see them use names like Cletus or Billy Bob or other names associated with lower class whites.
The names in the NBER study were drawn from actual birth certificate data correlated with race. It was not a subjective choice from researchers. Latonya was used because Latonya was the first name given to 4.7% of the black female babies born during the study period. Just like Allison was 4.7% of white female babies in the same data.
If you perceive common African American names as lower class than equally common white names, I believe that's part of what the study is trying to demonstrate and not a flaw of its design.
I am hesitant to wade in here. I am not asserting anything about the actual study, but just observing this thread.
You seem to be ignoring the earlier statistical complaint by the other poster. They are implying a null hypothesis where names signal socioeconomic status and discrimination may be on that status rather than race.
To test for this, you cannot start with unequally characterized populations (black and white) and compare equally popular names from each population. You need to first stratify by socioeconomic status and then draw popular names from equivalent sub-populations. E.g. equally popular black and white names among babies born to households with lowest quintile income and high school as the parents' terminal degrees; equally popular black and white names among babies born to households of middle quintile income and 4-year college degrees; etc.
I don't think it's even relevant. Hiring practices that are based on class discrimination but result in racial discrimination can still be racist even if that isn't their intent.
But more to the point, racial discrimination has been replicated by many studies constructed in different ways. A famous 1978 study found discrimination when sending equivalent resumes that had a headshot of either a white or black person attached. Other studies have looked at including extracurricular activities that imply a certain race.
Yes, but this sort of gotcha study is missing the fact that any merit-based system will discriminate against minorities that are not given a proper education.
Explicitly filtering by race is bad. However, if it leads to the same outcome as filtering by qualifications, then forcing people to switch hiring practices doesn’t actually improve anything.
The blame shouldn’t be on the hiring process, but instead (at least in the US) by the politicians that have set up our cities and schools to be systematically racist.
(I still think this is a bad SCOTUS ruling, to be clear.)
> What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites.
Is Latonya associated with lower class the way Cletus is? I honestly don't know, and I'd be surprised if most of the people hiring did. What are some "black" names not associated with lower class? My sneaking suspicion (without evidence) is that "black" names in general are more likely to be associated with lower class and to escape those connotations one would have to avoid the more ethnic names, but I'm open to being educated on this point.
If black-coded names are more strongly associated with being lower class in spite of data demonstrating that they actually have the same class distributions as white-coded names then that is racism.
The ruling is about college, not job applications. It's actually the other way around in universities when it comes to black applicants. As another non-American foreigner it's bizarre to me how many "anti-racists" are shocked by a constitutional court affirming that discriminating based on race is unconstitutional.
Here in my country, we calculate points based on grades and standardized test results, and top X students (based on points) get accepted to that college. Race and name doesn't matter at all, if you're above the cuttoff, you're in.
Lex Fridman had a very good discussion of the topic with Harvard professor and author Randall Kennedy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WRIDTV6l5WcbNt2aaO02K?si=f...
The discussion of affirmative action starts at 2:22. The entire episode is very much worth listening to if you want to get hear a nuanced perspective on race problems in the US.
It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance.
Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance?
My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation.
For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.
Norm Finkelstein recently said the careerist trajectory of college education (in America, but probably everywhere really) has been steadily going on for over half a century, and it really is a loss for cultivating an freethinking public commons.
One issue is it isn't applied fairly. I know a Chinese-American who inquired into AA and was turned away because he wasn't a "traditionally disenfranchised" minority.
Because the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a non-white person or community that was starting to become prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them. At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of the most blatant examples include:
- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]
- Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2]
- Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3]
> - Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]
A lot these debates really come down to just how impressed one is by arguments like this. It so happens that an Interstate was built through the neighborhood my entire family occupied in St. Louis in the 1950s. Some of them were "displaced." I can't for the life of me figure out how this is supposed to be relevant to my life today. I'd wager that I'm the only one of my cousins to even know about it, since I'm interested in local history and bugged my grandparents about this stuff before they died.
It just doesn't amount to anything. My family members had a trillion decisions to make -- big and small -- both before and after that singular event and the sum of those decisions had a much bigger impact on familial wealth -- note: there was none -- than that one time in the 1950s they were forced to move.
Again, I would submit that nobody really believes this. Look at your own family. Do you all live in the same neighborhood with strong neighborhood-supported familial bonds? Probably not. Even when I lived back home my mom lived in one neighborhood, my brother another, my friends in different local munis. Today I live in another state to be near my wife's family, but the closest family member is a 20-minute drive from where we bought our house!
Modern people are spread out all over the regions they occupy.
It really seems like on this one topic people accept arguments on behalf of other people that they know with perfect clarity make zero sense when they try to apply them to their own lives.
Do you believe that people who can not afford a car can have the same long-distance family+friend support that you had? Do you think that your situation applies to everyone?
If that interstate was never routed through that neighborhood, would members of your family be financially better off today? A fully paid off house unlocks a lot of financial freedom for the current occupants and potentially generational wealth for future family members.
This is a new argument in the past few years and it doesn't make sense. You do not need a parent with a paid off house to go to college and be successful. I didn't have that and I don't know many people who did. My friends whose parents have paid off houses now did not have them back when the kids were going to college and how would that have helped anyway? Home equity loan instead of student loan? How often is that choice made? There are some rich families who manage to pass wealth on generation after generation but it's rare in my experience and not needed to succeed
The typical American's biggest monthly expense is housing. Owning a house drastically reduces your monthly expenses. If you're young, out of work or on a fixed income, minimizing that expense can have an enormous impact on your quality of life and the choices available to you.
The generational wealth kicks in when your heirs can assume your mortgage free lifestyle, generate monthly income from it, borrow against it, or sell an asset that has likely appreciated in value (sometimes greatly) since it was purchased ages ago.
No it doesn't historically and in most places even in the US. If you live in an unusual area, e.g coastal California, at an unusual time, e.g. the past 20 years then yes if you bought 20 years ago your cost would be much less than equivalent rent. OTOH if you mean own it outright then sure but with 30 year mortgages almost no one would own a house outright until pretty close to retirement. And sure if you inherit a house you can live rent free but for most people who inherit a house it would be 20-30 years before you yourself die, i.e. pretty close to retirement. So yes some people get a nice surprise late in life (but hardly most people- I won't for example). Difficult to see how it would make much difference in someones life course
The average age of inheritance is like 50 and the average sum inherited is like $40k (these numbers are from memory). I couldn't figure out what percentage of people ever receive an inheritance at all, but I don't think it's large.
Plainly, this is not generating "generational wealth" that's giving people an enormous head start.
These tropes are repeated uncritically because people want them to represent large effects.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?
Universities would do this instead of affirmative action if it would lead to the same result. But it wouldn't. It would help poor Asian students. And it would hurt the URMs who are not poor. They currently benefit from strong affirmative action programs but would fare much worse under a program like you describe.
I've long thought that poverty is the best way to do this, because it's self-correcting. We'll probably never be truly and fully equal in every way, just because random stuff happens and there's only one perfectly equal state out there, but a whole lot of unequal possibilities.
So inasmuch as any group is disadvantaged, they'll get more help due to there being more of them that are poor and this strategy will work to self-correct the imbalance.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4].
But why is that? Wouldn’t the right answer be to identify and root out any systematic racism benefitting whites rather than implement explicitly race-based (one might even say “racist”) counter-measures?
The "root" is probably in the police, war on drugs, racist people on positions of power, neglected neighbourhoods, etc. The World has been trying to solve racism for decades now, if it was so easy, we wouldn't be talking about this right now.
Affirmative action makes sense because it's a policy that's simple, cheap and fast to implement to counterbalance this. And let's not forget that, in the past, the State legally discriminated against those people and no historical reparation has ever been given to them.
As an immigrant to the US I also see things that way on the basis that you can't fix the wrongs of a race based problem by using a race based solution. Especially left leaning folks around here like to deride that notion by calling it "color blind policies" but I think seeing everything in the frame of race is THE problem and it just entrenches the views of people on both sides of this debate.
I think it's much saner to completely throw away the framework and look at the issue: what you're trying to fix here is economic inequality, so do that. The side effect is you can avoid resentment from people unjustly disadvantaged by race based policies and avoid further radicalization of a discourse that has no basis in anything measurable.
To be clear: race is made up BS, and how americans view race is absolutely idiotic for anyone that hasn't been raised here. Whenever I need to check a box I have to choose between being white, or latino, or black etc...
Right there you see the problem: that list has two skin colors of uncertain definition, and a category that's cultural and not based on skin color or other physical attributes.
I was born in a mediterranean country (Italy) and according to current categorization I'm white but I went to school with other Italians that are darker skinned than people I know that call themselves "of color" in the US. So which box do they check? Can I check "latino" since well, we're the original ones? Or do I have to ask to add a "cisalpine gaul" since I'm partially from the north of the country and have a red beard?
It's complete nonsense. You're not missing anything, it's just an entrenched cultural view that people raised in this country can't seem to be able to escape.
As an immigrant in US, I feel that this whole American exceptionalism thing has been sort of internalized and reflected by much of the American liberal left into some kind of "we're exceptionally bad" deal. I often hear claims that US is horrible because such-and-such is common practice here unlike "all other civilized countries" or some such, while the speaker is oblivious to the fact that many American laws regarding something are actually very liberal by that standard (voter identification is probably the single most common example, but it also comes up sometimes wrt abortion term limits in some states).
To be clear, being better at something than somebody else who is even worse than you is not a valid excuse for being bad either way. I just hate that this kind of rhetoric 1) discredits the points being made, and 2) spreads misinformation.
Are Irish people of a different race than British and German people? You may think they aren't, but it used to be so. Absurd, eh? Except that it was the case, because of a deliberate strategy to make poor people fight among themselves.
Latinos are just the foreign "du jour".Tomorrow it's going to be someone else. And it is deliberate.
> Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender)
Very few colleges prefer women. Of those that do, it's pretty much just the engineering focused ones and thus would pick up nearly as many Asian women as white women.
Generally, (weak) male preferences are more common given the general male underrepresentation in higher ed.
> They are striking this down for purely political reasons.
On its face affirmative action is pretty blatantly a violation of the 14th amendment:
Which to a trivial reading would come out as 'All persons [black, white, rainbow] shall have equal rights to attend [state funded school], and as such a right to a fair and impartial admissions process'.
Affirmative action adds the clause: "except those whose skin color we do not like today, those shall have to score higher on tests. Those whose skin color we do like today, those shall not have to score as high. Those whose skin color we do not care about can score the same as before."
No, it isn't. From a strict textual reading, the 14th says
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Admittance to a school is not a deprivation of life, liberty, or property. Nor is this "equal protection of the laws".
Where in the 14th does it say anything about school attendance? When did school attendance become a right? Which amendment does that come from?
Seems like a pretty liberal reading of the 14th to come to the conclusion that prestigious school attendance is somehow a right for white people.
Oh, and this ruling also said that "private schools are allow to discriminate on race if they so choose, this only strikes down the federal law tailored to roll back institutional racism."
But hey, if you want to make the argument that higher education should be a right funded by the public I probably could get behind that. I just don't think there's constitutional or historical backing for that conclusion.
>Where in the 14th does it say anything about school attendance? When did school attendance become a right? Which amendment does that come from?
Brown v. Board of Ed, to start, seems to pretty clearly dictate that public schools may not discriminate on the basis of race because it is a violation of the 14th amendment. What is affirmative action if not a discrimination based on the color of one's skin?
> When did school attendance become a right?
I don't really feel like in 2023 I should have to be arguing that the right to attend a public school shouldn't be conditioned on a pupil's race or ethnicity.
> public schools may not discriminate on the basis of race
Harvard is NOT a public school! It is a private institution which receives public funds. Huge difference but I guess that's not something you want to consider.
Nobody has the right to attend Harvard. They must discriminate based on something. (see: their legacy admission system which accounts for half of all their admissions. Which is fundamentally racist because, guess what color of skin harvard legacy admissions predominantly have?)
> I don't really feel like in 2023 I should have to be arguing that the right to attend a public school shouldn't be conditioned on a pupil's race or ethnicity.
Again, Harvard is NOT a public school. Affirmative action was conditions for receiving public funds. But if you are really mad at harvard for not letting in more deserving students maybe redirect that hate towards the legacy admissions which almost certainly pushed out well deserving students.
> Harvard is NOT a public school! It is a private institution which receives public funds. Huge difference but I guess that's not something you want to consider.
That’s okay, because CJ Roberts did consider it.
> Title VI provides that "[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." 12 U.S. C.§2000d. "We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI." Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although JUSTICE GORSUCH questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard's admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself.
I'm not a legal expert and was wondering about the same question. Does the reasoning imply then that if Harvard wanted to forgo Pell Grants and other public funding a la Bob Jones University back in the day, they'd be permitted to practice AA?
I am not a lawyer but my understanding is it just means that as long as they do, they are evaluated as a public institution for the purposes of interpreting compliance with the Fourteen Amendment. I don’t know if it would be permissible to do explicit racial discrimination and call it AA, and then say “well we don’t take federal funding anymore so we’re good”. Interesting thought experiment, however.
I just finished reading the whole opinion, and yeah I think Justice Thomas would agree with you. He, in his concurrence, is super hostile to any sort of racial preference or protection. Holy Moly is this guy angry about racial preferences for anything. He started his concurrence with a history of slavery and proceeds through an excruciatingly detailed legal history of how we got rid of it. If he were here in the thread, he'd probably say "you are bound by your own predilections, as afforded to you by the Constitution, but if those predilections manifest harm in your result, you will find no quarter with me."
The supreme court is picking and choosing how they want to follow their textualism/originalism (as are the defenders of this opinion). There's no originalist argument for striking down AA. That makes them political activists (my original claim).
But if you want my personal opinion on AA, it's that it's a net good even though it's not perfect. We do need to deal with the fact that PoC have been discriminated against and that discrimination shows itself in generational poverty.
There is a mountain [1] of evidence that poverty has detrimental effects on education. We've spent decades forcing black people into poverty through red lining, racist loans, and even firebombing them when they became too prosperous [2]. So, of course, the offspring of these actions are going to have a much harder time succeeding.
Black americans have had higher rights of poverty for as long as we've tracked that statistic [3].
So should we "discriminate" against white people by making it easier for PoC to get admitted? Absolutely. The racism of the past has ripple effects that still haven't been fully addressed.
Now, to be frank, I'd rather that discrimination be based on income. Which would STILL result in black people getting a leg up (see poverty stats). But, you can't just say "well let's just be color blind now" and think everything is hunky dory.
I also support government reparations. Which could also be argued to be "discriminatory" since they'd primarily go to black people. Well, guess what, we discriminated based on race. The only way to heal that is helping the race that was discriminated against.
okay, what constitutional basis does the civil rights act have to protect you from discrimination by a restaurant that should not apply to a university?
> Whenever the Attorney General receives a complaint in writing signed by an individual to the effect that he is being deprived of or threatened with the loss of his right to the equal protection of the laws, on account of his race, color, religion, or national origin, by being denied equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof, other than a public school or public college as defined in section 401 of title IV hereof, and the Attorney General believes the complaint is meritorious and certifies that the signer or signers of such complaint are unable, in his judgment, to initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings for relief and that the institution of an action will materially further the orderly progress of desegregation in public facilities, the Attorney General is authorized to institute for or in the name of the United States a civil action in any appropriate district court of the United States against such parties and for such relief as may be appropriate, and such court shall have and shall exercise jurisdiction of proceedings instituted pursuant to this section. The Attorney General may implead as defendants such additional parties as are or become necessary to the grant of effective relief hereunder.
Did you know that private schools can discriminate based on race today (In fact, this SC opinion reaffirms that)? The civil rights act explicitly only applied to public schools, not private ones.
What prevents the civil rights act from applying to a (private) university? The text of the bill. Could it? Yeah, if we amended it. Should it? Yup, we should push for that.
What gives the civil rights act its power? 9th amendment, 14th amendment, and article 1 of the constitution.
For many in America, the race issue is more about who we are as a nation than it is about practical results. We want to identify as abolitionists, who defeated the slaveholders and moved toward "a more perfect union" (a line from the Constitution which Lincoln echoed in relation to the war).
The disagreement is essentially about the best way to achieve equality, which though a nebulous term is accepted as a goal without debate, even though the definition of the term can be widely different, as in this case. The conversatives argue that we can only achieve equality by being colorblind. The progressives argue that we can only achieve equality by consciously addressing inequality.
I see some merit on both sides. I tend to lean toward the conservative view, but I recognize moments in our history where active intervention was both noble and necessary (desegregating schools, for example). The question is whether those actions were special cases or are examples for us to follow going forward.
Because the focused has shifted to outcome over equal opportunity or treatment in the present. Some of us think that's misguided and the equal opportunity approach was working.
The equity approach is so blatantly racist / classist that I can’t believe it has taken root in left leaning states like California.
Equality based: Fund the schools, and use evidence based educational reforms, with the result that California schools were top ten in the US.
Equity based: Not everyone can do math and stem, so defund science and art programs (already done) and try to discontinue funding for calculus (almost happened this year). Schools are now 43rd in country, but rich districts can have parents fund the missing programs via donations, and are some of the best in the country. Further fuck with things by forcing UC admissions to be based on standing within each school’s graduating class, so illiterate minority kids end up being admitted to the top schools, and need to be weeded out.
Basically it’s a bandaid. There is a massive problem with the talent pool coming from minority communities.
Look at any school in a lower income area and it’s plagued with issues of attendance, resources of things like access to technology, commitment of parents to help their kids outside of the classroom with homework, and general safety that fails to provide a quality learning space for children to become qualified when they leave school.
Since you can’t put massive school reform with budgets and funding to provide this to schools in a political cycle of 2-4 years, we just keep kicking the can down the road and accept instead of helping build better youth who all can compete for jobs and colleges, let’s just lower the bar and make it seem like we are doing something.
There are a lot of replies here and anything that talks about "economic" conditions probably doesn't understand AA.
AA is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a social justice program.
Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. For example, despite owning homes in the same neighbourhood, the appraisal of homes of black people ends up lower than white folks[1], there are more traffic stops and searches for black folks than white[2]..etc., you get the drift.
So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. Now there aren't many ways to suddenly make this go away. So, AA is an attempt at making this go away by saying, put more of the people from the underrepresented community in places where they are underrepresented, starting with the high echelons of education. By that the society hopes to the laws we create, systems we build as a result will have the perspective of people from those community. It's not a silver bullet, not a magical solution, but one amongst many things to try.
> Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money.
That sounds backwards on both points. Poverty impacts how people perceive and interact with the world from building relationships to the use and conservation of assets. For example people in poverty are less likely to save for the future because institutions necessary to safely preserve assets into the future are distant therefore resulting in behaviors motivated towards immediate consumption. That is not something fixed by just throwing money at it.
At the same time social systemic unfair treatment can be fixed with money as it allows an otherwise well positioned person to alter their relationship with the constraints imposing such unfair conditions.
> So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family.
That imposes a bunch of unstated assumptions that may or may not apply. Most all my neighbors are black families of different economic statuses who moved into a predominately white neighborhood and did just fine regarding social capital.
I agree with what you said about poverty, and I feel as if the same is true of systemic unfairness. Perhaps the African-American (I do not like the term black, but that's for another discussion) neighbors you have really are treated very similarly as the rest, but stereotypes are powerful. I imagine most African-American people can't get others to treat them equally, even if the others truly do believe that they aren't racist. I think the horror around "unconscious racism" or whatever is overblown, though.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
"Poor people" aren't a unified political coalition in the US.
For various reasons, you can't do political favors for poor people and expect them to reliably vote for you.
Black people are a unified political coalition in the US.
I recommend reading about Bueno de Mesquita's model of selectorate theory for understanding how stable political patronage networks operate; the model is very insightful for cases like this.
I assume it's similar to the system of "minorities quotas" for admission into Romanian universities in Transylvania. The region has a significant number of Hungarian ethnics and used to have Germans too but now they're rather vanished.
Anyhow, from the total number of seats per year, a larger number is allocated to Hungarians and a smaller one to Germans. The caveat being you don't have to be ethically German, only to speak it. In the wake of the new woke movement I can see a radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one ;) ;) ;)
So with Hungarian they fill those places with what I estimate to be 100% ethnic Hungarians. With Germans however, they're like 99% Romanians and Hungarians who take the hit of having to learn / speak German for the advantage of having fewer competition. Like mainstream (Romanian, Hungarian) computer science can have 10 candidates per seat, the German line has 1.5 or so: much easier to get in. I know a guy who couldn't code a FOP loop (with the typo of P instead of R) out of a paper bag but completed the German computer science line.
I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation.
In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. In his opinion, he argued that affirmative action which is a race based policy is logically incompatible with the Equal Protection clause.
Affirmative Action was always about race. The US historically and systematically discriminated, disenfranchised, and disadvantaged slaves and children of slaves. The problem with race based policies like Affirmative Action is (a) like Roberts argues it is illogical to fix historical racial discrimination with modern racial affirmation (b) you have unintended consequences like discrimination against Asians (c) how do you even define race in today's hyper connected world? e.g., Is Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, an African-American? Are recent immigrants from West Africa also African-American? Race conscious policies are generally distasteful because you then dwell into how many generations of your ancestors were from X continent and what percentage you are of Y race.
> In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination.
That is so ahistorical, it makes me wince. A war to end slavery, yes (though you could argue even that). To end racial discrimination? That is a ludicrous thing for a supposedly educated person to say.
Abraham Lincoln didn't think the freed slaves should get the vote.
The controversy animated Roberts, himself a graduate of Harvard College and Law School.
“Take two African American applicants,” he said to lawyer Seth Waxman, representing Harvard. “They both can get a tip, right, based on their race? And yet they may have entirely different views. Some of their views may contribute to diversity from the perspective of Asians or Whites. Some of them may not. And yet it’s true that they’re eligible for the same increase in the opportunities for admission based solely on their skin color?” Waxman acknowledged that being an African American or being a Hispanic could give the applicant a boost and may even be determinative of who gets a coveted place in the freshman class.
“Race, for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip,” Waxman said, offering an example that Roberts immediately skewered.
“We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players,” he rejoined. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of considerable concern.”
> In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination
The US Civil War wasn't even fought to end slavery. That's a jingoistic talking point that "patriots" like to tell themselves that has absolutely no basis in reality. But "discrimination?" That's pure, unadulterated idiocy.
The war was fought to put down a rebellion by Southern states who refused to modernize because they used slavery to maintain their representational numbers in Congress. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't even enacted until year three of the US Civil War, but the Southern states saw the writing on the wall and decided to act while they believed they still had time to do so.
The rebellion was the important thing to the North.
An important slave-holding state for the North was Maryland. They did not secede or get kicked out or even made to become slave-free until they changed their state constitution after the Emancipation.
Go read any article/book about living as a person of color in America, also read about the history of slavery, jim crow, and civil rights. You might understand then, you will never get that story via HN or American mainstream media. I mean if you're serious about it at all, read about it from the perspective of those who are being discriminated against.
The podcast of the WSJ might answer this for you (episode of june 29 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-r... )
They say, some states already banned affirmative action. Universities in those states have tried to still recruit minority students, by going to schools with large group of minority students, and actively recruit there. The problem is, those tend to be schools with poor students. Students who cannot pay their university fee. Universities end up subsidizing those students, which is expensive. With affirmative action, they could more easily attract rich minority students.
The one thing I find that is often lost in this discussion in America is, why aren't we targeting the K-12 system where the majority of these discrepancies occur? We talk about tipping the scales at admission to universities, but never to what I believe is the actual root of the problem.
Amen. AA benefits middle and upper-class black kids far more than it does kids in the inner city. You can't convince me that Ivy Blue Carter (Beyonce and Jay-Z's daughter) has faced more hardship and prejudice in her life than a white kid who grew up in a trailer park.
The answer is basically: America has managed to make race and socioeconomic status incredibly highly correlated, especially in its large coastal cities where basically all poor people are non-white. It's nothing like, for example, Northern European cities with large white working class populations.
Obviously there are a huge number of poor white people in America. Mostly in the vast countryside with its small towns. And you're right that they're forgotten about a bit in this debate; certainly no one expects them ever to send their children to Harvard.
I think the reason they are forgotten about in this debate is that the white educated classes feel very guilty about the terrible race-wealth correlation.
Basically the problem is that poor Whites and Asians significantly outperform even affluent Blacks and non-White Hispanics. So simply going based on income would lead to a wildly unrepresentative low proportion of Black and Hispanic students.
Income based help is the only non discriminatory way of admissions. Colleges dont like this because then the college would overwhelmingly reflect poor white people, and they would not be able to claim "diversity". No institution of wealth exists that does not play politics.
To demonstrate this fact you will overwhelmingly see black individuals from very white and non-poverty backgrounds graduating from unis. Most don't make it their first year, the costs are insane and the culture drinks its own Kool aid.
If blues legitimately cared about people the streets would back them - they do not. It's us vs gov.
Is there a legal way to discriminate based on race? I thought that was pretty much illegal in most countries, despite efforts in sections of both left and right to keep racism alive...
I have wondered this myself and I think the answer is that American universities want to discriminate based on wealth. They actually want the richest kids possible going to their schools. Their business model depends on it.
At some point, you have to declare the war against something, over. The war against polio, the war against dengue fever, etc. even while there may continue low-grade outbreaks. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
It’s a part of the equation because the Equation is so designed to be against it by the variables that are included and excluded.
I promise if you spend even an iota of time digging into this you will find some meaningful substance that resonates wi the buoy without asking other (indirectly or unintentionally) to do your mental labour for you and to your satisfaction to be convinced otherwise.
This itself is an example of the type of variables and equations that exist that seem second nature because of how they are conditioned into most people from a young age without awareness.
We do have policies to benefit the economically disadvantaged. The amount we spend on this front is vastly, vastly more than any race-based interventions. I would argue we should do much more on that front.
But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try.
The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us.
If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked.
The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.
You misunderstood the intention of the program. The problem is not to help poor people, there are other programs available for that. The problem is to fight racial based discrimination, which is rampant in the US. Until the 60s, universities were out of reach for African Americans and other minorities, not just because of economic issues. This type of programs came to revert this situation.
math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems. Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring them back to the top !
Why stop at the students, choose the professors by lottery too, Nih grants by lottery… May as well just burn limited resources. Lottery math doesn’t work. Someone has to fund the lotteries. And lotteries funding lotteries ain’t going to do it. Someone has to actually produce something of value for there to be value to allocate.
I think the argument here is that once you've already filtered down to qualified candidates by primary criteria, then you can lottery off the rest instead of performing a secondary sort.
I guess the secondary sort is reserved for university, with a tertiary sort waiting at the corporate level. the heavy lifting is being done by the sorting, not the lottery at each level.
One of the things of "why not class only" is because in America race matters a lot. I mean it quite literally: studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less qualification. In some cases black people with a college degree have job prospects similar to a white person with a felony record.
Here's a PDF. White people with a criminal record are received more positively than noncriminal black-sounding people.
"Employment discrimination against people with criminal records, especially in entry-level positions, is rampant, as demonstrated by a 2005 report produced by the Commission called “Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market” written by Drs. Devah Pager and Bruce Western. [1] The report relied on results from matched pairs of testers of young white, Latino, and African-American men who applied for 1470 entry-level jobs throughout New York City. Not only were whites more likely to get a callback or job offer than Latinos or African-Americans, African-Americans were nearly half as likely to be considered as whites.[2] When white testers presented with a recent felony record, they were as likely as Latinos and much more likely than African-Americans to receive a callback or job offer.[3] Overall, people with criminal records are only half as likely to get a call back than those without; for African-American applicants, the likelihood is reduced to one-third.[4]"
You can't exactly double-blind study black people but how many studies do you really need? My original stance was only "in some cases, discrimination exists". You're really ridiculous about the bar of evidence you expect from me here.
Ethnic and cultural discrimination (in the US and elsewhere) is not just a form of discrimination against the poor; in fact, it is a causative factor (in the US and elsewhere) in relative and absolute poverty. Trying to squeeze the issues into a one-dimensioned worldview misses what is really going on.
There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in any fair way. We are just making more victims that future generations will look down on us for.
I want to leave a fair world to my children, not one filled with hate and systemic racial discrimination.
> There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in any fair way.
Agreed. At some point you do have to shrug and say we tried our best and move on with a moral bankruptcy. But we're not really close to that point yet. Bankruptcy comes after you've exhausted extraordinary measures. I would say realistically you need maybe 100 or 150 years of positive effort before you shrug and give up, and we're barely even at 50 yet.
The US fought a civil war with the entities owning slaves. But reparations to slaves and their descendants is a separate issue from affirmative action.
There's a long-standing effort by Nation of Islam (the American hate group that is only nominally Islamic) to rewrite the history of slavery in the US as largely orchestrated by and for Jews. Nonetheless the actual numbers show that they "possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean" [1] though the reason why is still not well understood.
Hate groups pointing out facts to further their own agendas doesn't make the facts any less factual. There is no more reason to bring the Nation of Islam into this discussion than there is to bring in the persecution of the Palestinian people.
I'm going to assume positive intent on this and that it's not a troll comment.
Race in the US is horribly complicated and tied into so many parts of life here in the US. Full Stop.
HN comment sections aren't really the place to go into the very fine details, especially just one comment like mine. and the fine details do matter. Ok, all that out of the way, now to the questions here.
Let's take a small micro-example and explore a bit:
You are an African-American woman experiencing preeclampsia at 30 weeks gestation. Preeclampsia is a very serious medical condition and can cause death to you and your baby. You go into the hospital not knowing what is wrong with you, but you know something is wrong.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that African-Americans don't feel pain like other people do.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that women over-react to pain [0].
Like it or not, many medical professionals do not believe the above if they are African-American women.
So, as a worried mother-to-be, you get a doctor assigned to you, likely at random. If your MD is not of the same race or sex as you are, then your experience is likely to be less positive than if they were. From what I have heard from African-American women whom I am able to talk with about medical care, the experience is highly likely to be a negative one unless they get someone of their own race or are lucky.
So, having more people that are of diverse backgrounds in the medical field leads to more positive outcomes for patients of every race and sex.
Meaning that you have to get more diversity into the med schools to begin with. Which means that you have to get more diversity into colleges. Which means you have to get more diversity into Secondary education, and in primary education. Which means you have to get more diversity in pedagogical training. And round we go.
Yes, we could solve this by untying med school from college. Yes, we could open up the med schools to more than just the select few we already have. Yes, we could have more nurses and RNs that accompany MDs. Yes we could make medical care a single payer system and try to solve this from there. Yes, there are a million other ways to fix this.
Hopefully you begin to see what a complex mess racial issues are in the US and how at each and every level, race is a contributing factor that affects everyone. I haven't even come close to any of the real issues here, and there are so many spider webs that tie into each sub-issue. Look at this Supreme Court Decision itself, the first black supreme court justice, a Harvard Grad, voted to end it. Thing get really really squirrely.
[0] I have personally experienced this with my SO during labor, BTW. The attending OB-GYN, a man, remarked to me 'How can you stand the screaming all the time'. I threw him out of the room. No joke, this really did happen.
Differences in racial health outcomes are absolutely concerning and the medical training issues you call out are unacceptable.
However, examples like OBGYN diversity might outline a slightly different aspect of race and racial issues in the USA.
OBGYN is one of the most diverse specialties and, even with more diversity, it's still going to be unlikely for an African-American woman to end up with an African-American female doctor (assuming emergency intake and ignoring sorting done at the time of physician selection).
In the 2022 NRMP Match data[0], OBGYN residency applicants were 86% female and 11% Black/African American(B/AA). Quick and possibly unreliable skimming of recent paper abstracts returned ~62% female and 11% B/AA for the current overall OBGYN pool.
11% of OBGYN is lower than the overall population demographics in the USA but the B/AA population is still only 13%.
The answer might be better education and training for all doctors, or it might involve matching patient and doctor demographics for the best patient experience, but we're never going to have enough minority group doctors to make a minority group patient likely to receive care from a minority group doctor in a randomized setting.
Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people (or “model minorities” like Asian race) are not disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it’s the opposite.
You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.
Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.
If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.
This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated topic.
While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial.
This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.
However, for the class in question - African-Americans - is it not the case that they have been in America for generations, and so these cultural 'characteristics' would have been far more influenced by their experience in America (at the hands of the ruling white population) than anything that they might have brought with them over the Atlantic?
Unless you think the 'characteristics' have a strong genetic component, and so we are back to racism.
African Americans have retained a pretty distinct identity throughout this time. There are a lot of shared cultural artifacts to be sure, but the existence of a completely distinct dialect of English with its own distinctive grammar is solid evidence that the cultural overlap is not complete.
I resent the implication that any claim of genetic differences amounts to racism. We need to be able to have a reasonable discussion about genetics that doesn't come with all the value judgments that people assign to different genotypes. It's a bald fact that there are genetic differences, and that shouldn't be controversial. The inferences we draw from that fact can be racist, but the fact itself is just a fact.
The only conclusion that I'm arguing for is that people are born and raised differently, and we should expect to see different outcomes as a result. It's pretty obvious that we have not yet reached the point where the differences in outcomes are due exclusively to different choices, but we should expect to eventually reach such a point! People prioritize different things in their lives, and sometimes people prioritize things that the majority doesn't believe are important. That doesn't make them flawed people.
The point you’re making is that some cultures devalue educational achievement and success? So much so that we should expect to see members of those cultures disproportionately lacking access to opportunity because they “don’t want it?”
You're putting words in my mouth and, once again, oversimplifying. I'm saying that measurable economic outcomes are tightly wound up with personal identity, and personal identity is an extremely complicated mosaic of many different factors, and many of those factors are cultural. What we believe about the world, ourselves, and other people has a profound impact on the way we live our lives.
It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.
I did not claim "any variance in numeric results" is racism. I said the specific "variant" of numeric results that show non-white races disproportionately lacking access to opportunity and wealth is racism.
The amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world is not the reason non-white racial groups disproportionately lack access to opportunity and wealth and you know it.
> You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.
> Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.
I read this as saying that any difference in outcomes is due to racism. My understanding of your argument is that if it were not for racism then all outcome curves would be identical across all racial categories, because there are no real differences between racial groups.
Yes, probably a misunderstanding then. The line you quoted says disproportionate. It’s not saying “difference in outcomes” it’s saying “disproportionate outcomes.” And it’s not any outcomes. It’s outcomes that specifically control what is deemed as valuable in the society, in this case education, which is widely understood to be a gateway to success/wealth/improvement/empowerment/power/etc.
I understand that there are differences between cultures. But saying that a culture difference is the reason that a culture disproportionately lacks access to the things deemed of value in the society is blaming the disadvantaged for their disadvantage. That is literally racism. “You do not have the same access to education that white people do because your black culture prevents you from having it.” That is obviously preposterous. What prevents none-white races from having proportional access to education (or anything of value in the society) is the racist system. People do not inflict racism onto themselves. It is inflicted onto them by the race in power.
You'll notice that I've never argued that we reached the point where racist factors in outcomes have been eliminated—I've only ever argued that when we do reach that point, I expect to still see disproportionate outcomes in the way that we currently measure them, because we will still value different things across different cultures. And that's okay! I think a lot of our definitions of success are fundamentally flawed, and cultures prioritizing other things have a lot of value!
Just make sure that when talking about cultural differences (specifically in regards to race) you don’t imply that “some cultures” (you know which ones) don’t value prosperity/wealth. It comes off as … you know what.
But it could be cultural. All the facts point to that being the cause. If there is so much racism against black people how could Nigerians and Carribean Blacks be some of the most prosperous ethnic groups in the US?
>> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already.
That's actually where you have missed the point. This isn't about disadvantaged people. This is only about race. In the US, racial discrimination is evil and is generally disallowed. But you are 100% allowed to discriminate against poor people. That is capitalism. If someone said Disneyland was discriminating against poor people because they charged an entrance fee, the vast majority of Americans would laugh at the concept of even calling that discrimination. Everyone who sells something for a price, including schools that sell access to education, are allowed to discriminate against those who cannot afford to pay. So "disadvantaged" isn't enough. To get protection or some sort of leg-up your disadvantage must arise from race/sex/religion ... basically anything other than lack of money.
> I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race"
Is that true? I have heard that white males benefit most from admission rules to colleges (perhaps primarily in California?). But maybe that's "quota rules" and not affirmative action.
Regardless, it appears as though the while male is probably going to take a hit if all admissions become strictly academically based.
The central argument, and what Zimmerman backs with data, is that affirmative action benefited white men because it disadvantaged Asians and women, both of whom, statistically, will be more-likely to have higher academic scores.
A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants.
For 350 years of US history africans and their descendants were enslaved. Native Americans were ripped from their land and relocated, often with genocidal levels of casualties.
After that, these two groups were substantially discriminated against in law, and other races were added to the mix to be given less rights than others.
Today, there are huge disparities between outcomes for different races in large part due to this historical discrimination. There's also an ingrained culture of stereotyping and discrimination that's hard to lift. It doesn't matter if you're the first generation of Americans descended from African immigrants who came in the 1980s... you still are impacted by this legacy.
The concept of affirmative action was to specifically counteract the effects of these negative, historical circumstances and provide a countervailing effect.
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people. (I suspect it's similar elsewhere, but we are also a pretty racially diverse country, so the effect is larger)
> I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people.
Then why are the white people equally poor? And does it matter where they live? For example in a major city compared to a dying small town where industry has left? That's a really broad claim to make. Would it hold true in Appalachia, for example?
White rural poor is the absolute lowest class in the US. Late night show hosts openly joke about fantasizing their death so it’s one less vote for the other guy. It’s probably the only class in the US where the rest of US society relishes their suffering.
But just like many will never be convinced that vaccines are safe and the earth is round, many will never be convinced that racism in the US is real, I suppose.
I once failed an undergraduate student because they argued that racism ended in 1965 and that racism did not exist after that. It's like they didn't pay attention in class at all.
> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.
The tl;dr is: because there exists systemic disadvantage-ous-ness clearly caused by, and maintained along lines of race. It's not just The Past™ that was racist to damaging degrees, Now™ is too.
All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get a good-paying job, and more likely to get one that abuses you). Race is just one more, and it's particularly effective at leveling the field because it has extremely strong correlations with (and very clearly a cause in) tons of them.
But with affirmative action it's about race and not being poor. It's not a measure that looks at household income, but a measure that looks at skin color. Poor white Bobby from a trailer park in alabama is financially fucked, and noone cares about him, because he's white.
> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right?
It has been transformed into that through the twin attacks of "diversity" and "class, not race," but what it was meant to do was aid the problem that the US ran into after it released millions of slaves into the street with nothing, and they didn't manage to magically create something from nothing.
It transformed from that into an efficiency argument to stay "constitutional" in a country that largely doesn't feel any guilt over slavery. Instead of staying an excuse not to pay reparations to their discarded farm equipment, the justification was A) that everybody should get a fair shake, and some people couldn't because of who their parents were ("class, not race", "equality of opportunity"), and B) that "diversity" of background gave an creative and decisionmaking advantage to businesses.
The problem with these stupid justifications for affirmative action is that they don't support it at all. A) actually argues against race-based affirmative action, and B) paints it as a problem that should be naturally solved by the market with no intervention.
The problem that the US has is that it had brutal discrimination by laws at times so harsh that in 18th century Maryland (iirc) there was a law that would sentence a white person to death for teaching a black person how to read. The problem is that black people collectively have barely more per capita wealth than they had when they were freed (which was $0.)
That being said, black people have increased their proportion of national wealth since freedom, and white people's proportion of national wealth has been reduced, so that's sure libertarian evidence that black people are intrinsically superior to white people, though who can say if that's due to genetics or culture. If reparations were paid that brought the black share of national wealth to parity with the black proportion of the population, racism against black people would cease to be an issue that the government should be concerned with.
One of the issues with the US is not just that certain races are more likely to be poor but they are segregated as well, meaning that there are counties, neighborhoods, and school districts where minorities are concentrated, at levels sometimes approaching 90% or more. And as a result of that, historically the residents of those neighborhoods weren't just economically deprived, but cut off from power, and influence. People lived in dilapidated housing. They couldn't afford to repair because banks wouldn't issue loans. They couldn't afford good schools because schools are funded by county or district in the US and so a poor local population means underfunded schools. They couldn't get good jobs because they had a poor education. All of their friends, family and neighbors were similarly dirt poor. In other words there was a cycle of pervasive generational poverty which didn't exist in the mainstream culture. Even if they scrimped and saved to try to move to a better neighborhood, they were often either entirely excluded on the basis of race, or faced rampant and sometimes dangerous discrimination upon settling in the new neighborhood.
Anyway, so the goal of affirmative action was to try to break that cycle, by essentially awarding the best and brightest from those segregated communities opportunities they could never achieve otherwise.
There was also maybe a sense of society thinking (at least in the case of blacks and maybe indigenous americans) "We owe them because we put them in this situation by kidnapping/enslaving or massacring their ancestors." Whereas with just generic poor people, to say that we owe them anything (as in "we owe them because our economy requires a pool of desparate labor") would be an indictment of capitalism, which is not an acceptable thought pattern in the USA.
> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Capitalist societies literally cannot subsist without a class of people living in poverty. At best, that poverty is exported to other countries but it must be somewhere.
It's telling that not a single reply to your comment actually engages with the question about poor smart white kids. The answer is simple: poor white kids are the outgroup, and "mainstream" American society would like them to kindly go away. They aren't wanted. Society has no use for them.
I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted and abused into in orders to support it.
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