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.
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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?