Imagine you have a Hispanic doctor, but you know that the MCAT score for a Hispanic to get into med school is lower than the score an Asian would need. Now you question whether your doctor is as qualified as they should be because of their race, even if they did have an amazing MCAT score.
Affirmative action is blatantly racist from all angles.
If being color blind upholds, and being color biased upholds. What should we do.
There’s a separate issue that if you think there isn’t systemic racism against Asian Americans then you may want to practice empathizing. So if there’s historic systemic racism against certain groups, isn’t it worse to identify some groups and turn the screws on them? A vengeance based social policy will be difficult to implement as the perpetrators already got theirs out of the education system and it will likely have lots of negative consequences and lead to a worse society.
I realize I've practically described affirmative action. But there's varying ways to implement this system that avoids certain complaints. Let's say Harvard always admits 5000 students a year, they could add a bonus pool of 1000 students set aside for this. On the other hand if they're concerned about overwhelming their faculty they could admit 4000 students through normal means and 1000 from the special set aside.
One of the objections to this is it's unfair to the 4000 or 5000 students who will now receive a lesser education because of some wrongs that they weren't responsible for.
I'd like to propose it's equally unfair that students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds because of explicit decisions that these institutions made are denied a similar education. In this case should our institutions take no action to avoid upsetting the status quo and maintain a "color blind" ideal, or should they take active actions to rectify historic wrongs that continue to create inequality in the current day?
It’s like poking out a random person’s eye because racists blinded someone. Yes it helps the person who can now see, but the person who lost their eye will likely be bitter.
The best program I’ve seen is the dedicated funding to expand new positions and try to target the expansion toward underrepresented. So while the ratios are still weird, people aren’t being excluded.
Of course this is the most expensive option, especially in zero sum games like Harvard admissions. It’s easier to target some less visible vulnerable population and reallocate the positions.
I do agree that being truly color blind keeps populations lacking 100 years of opportunity locked in a cycle. But perhaps we can get more precise with targeting based on income, or social determinants, or factors that are not specific to race and are more likely to provide opportunity to need. Of course many populations also share social determinants like income, parents education, country of birth, etc.
The problem is not "compounding returns", it is genetics and, to a lesser extent, culture.
Until this fact, which most educated people know but are terrified to say aloud, is admitted and reckoned with, no progress will be made. This will hurt non-asian minorities the most.
Replace 'genetics' with 'astrological sign' and you see how absurd this argument is.
The consensus amongst neurobiologists is that adult IQ is somewhere between 70-80% based on genetic factors. I invite you to read "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard Haier, and the many studies cited therein.
Comparing this scientific work with astrology is clownish, on par with young earth creationism.
People use race as a proxy for class. But it isn't the only thing. And the more people pretend race is the deciding factor, and not class, the more shitty laws and rules we have in place trying to fix a symptom of a disease everyone wants to pretend isn't there.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-...
A quote from the first article:
> “One of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas is the idea that the fundamental problem is class and not race, and clearly this study explodes that idea,” said Ibram Kendi, a professor and director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. “But for whatever reason, we’re unwilling to stare racism in the face.”
And your own sources disprove your claim. Black women earn more than white women. At best you're showing that sexism matters more than racism. But it's only sexism when it happens to women, just like it's only racism when it happens to blacks.
At any rate, anyone who claims race trumps class has not been paying attention: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/5210833...
Unless of course you think the US has suddenly become racist against middle aged white men? Instead of the simpler explanation that race was a good proxy for class from 1940 to 1980 and has completely broken down since, but people whose livelihoods depend on it peddle it like economists paddle trickle down economics.
It seems that you are one, since you're claiming that class matters more than race. I.e. you claim that race doesn't matter very much, which suggests that you are post-racial.
> Black women earn more than white women. At best you're showing that sexism matters more than racism. But it's only sexism when it happens to women, just like it's only racism when it happens to blacks.
If the issue was purely of sexism you'd see white males and black males with the same socioeconomic backgrounds have equivalent social mobility because "race doesn't matter". But article [1] refutes that with a chart that clearly shows a huge difference in social mobility between white males and black males of the same background.
Sexism is when men aren't paid the same amount as women. That's not the same as a trend between males that shows differences in pay which disappears when looking at women. In other words, people are less racist towards black women compared to black men. That's a problem with racism, not sexism (unless you're suggesting that we should be more racist towards black women so that we aren't as sexist towards black men).
> anyone who claims race trumps class has not been paying attention: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/5210833....
This article doesn't support your point. In particular, it supports a claim that mortality rates are rising for middle class white males because their prosperity has decreased in the last few years. It doesn't even control for background. That is different from my point, which says that when controlling for background, race affects socioeconomic mobility.
In fact, your sources support my claim. The NPR article mentions how middle class blacks haven't felt an increase in mortality rates. That suggests that there's something different about people from different races - maybe that middle class blacks barely had an increase in prosperity to begin with.
As for the controls in your article it completely glosses over the fact that black women have less chance of losing socioeconomic status than white women. That alone kills the argument that race is the primary factor.
Unless you want to explain how the US is racist towards white women and black men? But not white men and black women.
Potato, potahto.
> it completely glosses over the fact that black women have less chance of losing socioeconomic status than white women.
No. The article suggests that it is evidence that there's probably no intelligence/ability discrepancy between different races.
> That alone kills the argument that race is the primary factor.
No. Maybe black men are often profiled as criminals or untrustworthy, but the same is not true for black women. That alone would still be evidence of racism - just not as much towards black women.
To prove that class is the only effect and not some other factor like race you'd have to show that, controlling for class, outcomes are equal. But these articles do control for class and find that outcomes are drastically different. This must mean that class is not the only driver of outcome. It's possible that the real reason isn't because of race - maybe it's actually because every black male in the country for some reason keeps having their memory corrupted by random cosmic rays. But it's still abundantly clear that there's something else contributing to outcomes besides class, and the most obvious (and most likely) is race.
In any case, your original contention (that class is the only driver) still falls.
Oh good. When do we get google nationalized? And a wealth tax? And when do we close the stock markets? Also when do the trials for crimes against the people start, we'll only need to arrest 95% of all politicians. And of course we will be disbanding the mercenary army and replacing it with a conscription army where everyone has to spend 3-5 years. There's a few hundred more things that need to be done. But since all liberals are socialists we shouldn't have a problem with any of them.
>No. The article suggests that it is evidence that there's probably no intelligence/ability discrepancy between different races.
You have variables race and gender, the variables can take on two values each. The claim is that race is more important than gender. Call it the function f that maps race r ={w,b} and gender g = {m,f} to an arbitrary value: f : r,g -> R.
Since we can just look at the values from the graph we can see that the outcome function f has the following property: f(b,m) < f(f,w) < f(f,b) < f(m,w)
So the suggestion that race is the primary cause of worse outcomes is clearly wrong since black women are better off than white women and black men. Similarly the idea that sexism is the cause is also wrong since black men are worse off than every body and white men are better off than everybody.
So you can either admit that race and sexism have no explanative power and accept the fact that class is the predominant factor with some interesting but ultimately trivial second order effects, or you can start doing gender studies and talk about the white male patriarchy and how it keeps everyone down.
I'm guessing you'll pick the second since it helps the capitalists stay in power and you have been exposed to their propaganda you whole life.
And, of course, that idea itself rests on the notion of an inherent superiority on one-side. To be clear, I don't believe that's part of the conscious thinking, but I do believe this oversight is illustrative of the kinds of blind-spots that tacitly guide a lot of thinking on these issues.
That's an unpopular thing to say but that doesn't make it any less true.
Of course this isn’t absolute as there are other factors to consider. But this is what I mean by saying these kinds of interventions increase racism. Since in your example this could lead to patients discriminating against Hispanic doctors.
There shouldn't be any systemic race-based anything.
Unfortunately, however, there is.
Part of the reason these policies are based on race and not some other socioeconomic standard was to get around the problem that the people making the admission decisions were racist (or at least biased).
But I also think it's a fallacy that one's professional performance is highly correlated with their acceptance scores.
Racists probably question.