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> It is very clear that race-conscious admissions are systematically racist and discriminatory.

Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field. So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.

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> but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

So under that thought process... when does the temporary measure end? Is there a specific goal? Or is it something unachievable like "when income inequality is fixed".

I suppose its not far from the SCOTUS 1st Amendment cases of porn/obscenity, they can't quite define it, but they'll know it when they see it.

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)

>The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point "assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself." Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S., at 510

>But such measures, the Convention instructs, "shall in no case entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate rights for different racial groups after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved." Ibid.; see also Art. 1(4) (similarly providing for temporally limited affirmative action); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Annex to G. A. Res. 34/180, 34 U. N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Res. Supp. (No. 46), p. 194, U. N. Doc. A/34/46, Art. 4(1) (1979) (authorizing "temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality" that "shall be discontinued when the objectives of equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved").

Income inequality is only "unachievable" exactly because of thinking like this. If people were genuinely invested in equality they would be asking "what can i do to get us there faster?" instead of being defeatist and calling it unachievable because you didn't personally create the problem.

You didn't answer his question, created a strawman, put words in his mouth, implied he doesn't care about equality (isn't treating people equally, regardless of race equality?)... goodness.

He explicitly said income equality is unachievable. I didn't put those words in his mouth.

You can't answer the question of "when" if a person has already decided the goal is unachievable. Again, those were his words not mine

The temporary measures will end WHEN people are genuinely interested enough to help regardless of whether they created the problem. That is my answer. You just don't like it. And that's ok....

When, in the history of humanity, has income ever been at an acceptable level of equality?

If you/the people who support such a policy can't define an explicit goal then I'd say that's pretty unachievable.

Income equality is outcome equality, which is unenforceable.

It’s very enforceable. It’s just that it really, really sucks to live in a society that implements that enforcement.

I don't believe you, can you give some examples?

Khmer Rouge killing lots of intellectuals is one classic example, although most socialist revolutions had their own variants.

I suppose you can do a No True Scotsman and say that those weren’t truly enforcing equality of outcome since there were people at the top of that society doing the enforcing, but most would find that argument pretty strained.

it should be opportunity equality, rather than outcome equality.

Everyone should have the chance at getting educated, but not everyone needs to pass or excel - it is up to the individual to succeed, but it is up to society to provide the opportunity to succeed. That is why schooling (primary, secondary and tertiary) should be free for everyone.

And why school funding shouldn't be based on the neighborhood it is in.

> So under that thought process... when does the temporary measure end?

Difficult to answer, and honestly not at all a priority to have an answer.

It is when the courts say as a temporary measure its ok. You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

> You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.

The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."

> > You have to define temporary or else it just becomes de-facto permanent.

> Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.

> The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."

Are new Roe v Wade like cases being heard by the court? There's a chilling effect to people bringing these cases to consider.

https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/fede...

I'm sure you're aware that like 10 other states have similar cases working their way through the court system

Ah, I was aware of a couple of suits in states. None yet heard by the Supreme Court, though (or slated for hearing). I wonder if the court would even hear arguments on what they consider to be settled case law.

FWIW, I'm a white person who used to think of affirmative action as unfair discrimination. That was true until I spent time volunteering teaching technical skills to kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods. Now that I have had an up close experience with these communities, I'm here to tell you institutional racism is real and we're far from it making sense to end these programs.

There simply is not a quick easy solution and those who are not oppressed simply have no real frame of reference to understand the problem. I encourage every person who feels these programs are unfair to spend time volunteering in poor minority communities.

I'm like you. White and use to think the same. Love him or hate him, the last chapter, A Jamaican Story, in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers really pierced my heart. I can't fathom what it must be like. I think those that despise affirmative action take things personally. They are right, sometimes it's not fair since they busted their butt, paid their dues, etc but lose out possibly because the color of their skin. It sucks and I'm sorry.

Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky? Because the current policies treat white kids from trailer parks like white kids from fancy suburbs. And they treat FOB Asians like they are doctor's children. And black kids from fancy suburbs are treated as if they came from poor ghettos.

The idea that "oppression" is limited to dimensions of race and gender, rather than ethnic/economic/geographic/etc is as juvenile as it is political useful.

You have had up close experience with one kind of disadvantaged community, and act as if that is the only group that has it. The difference between urban communities and places like Clay County, Kentucky is that volunteers like you won't ever get sent to Kentucky.

> Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky?

Your line of reasoning did a dodge there, swapping out between geographic demographics and racial demographics.

I don't think all kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in Eastern Kentucky. I do think that all the white-looking kids in eastern Kentucky, regardless of other factors stacked against them, will never be denied a job, loan, or rental opportunity based on the color of their skin. I can't say the same for the kids from any of those regions who don't look white.

It’s almost 2020, not 1940. We have major cities that are majority nonwhite. We have entire statewide school districts that are mostly nonwhite. We have huge metropolitan areas that are mostly nonwhite. You can walk into an expensive luxury apartment complex in an immigrant heavy city and find tons of nonwhite people.

And yet the data still shows widespread economic disparity due to discrimination

The data also shows widespread economic disparity due to geography, yet Harvard doesn't give the poor kids an extra 200 points on their SAT. If Harvard actually cared about this issue they would create additional scholarship programs that review people on a case-by-case basis rather than a blanket policy.

geography isn't a protected class. it's not a class at all. it's a set of circumstances. your skin color and the privileges or liabilities incurred are inescapable.

> geography isn't a protected class

Frequently it is. Many laws specifically protect "national origin".

Kentucky isn't a "national origin."

Kentucky doesn't has the support a specific national origin might have because there are no laws about that yet. It's an analogy.

If you think "being from Kentucky" should be treated the same as "being from Ireland," you're welcome to make a case to your Congressperson.

Good luck.

i love this kind of red herring: we're very obviously talking about intranational geography. as the person below me quips: kentucky isn't a nation of origin.

>Many laws specifically protect "national origin"

What laws? The US Constitution provides significantly greater protections to US Citizens than foreign nationals, as many of rights are not extended to non-citizens.

> And yet the data still shows widespread economic disparity due to discrimination

The data shows widespread economic disparity. It does not show the cause, which may or may not be discrimination.

The Little Rock Nine was 1957. What do you believe happened to all those people who protested and threatened violence against those children? What do you think they taught their children?

The idea that we have somehow magically eradicated racism over the course of a single generation astounds me.

Seriously, it's almost 2020. You should get how close to the 1960s that is.

Just want to point out that in the same time period, Asians were heavily discriminated against in northern California.

And yet there is no trace of it now. I doubt you have set foot in Arkansas, because your implication that the attitudes haven't changed much is grossly inaccurate.

It's not fair to hurt people just because you think others have been hurt. You're just furthering the abuse. Many white people have been denied housing, education, and jobs because of their skin. You can't solve ignorance with more ignorance. You're literally talking about ruining peoples' lives because of your racism.

> Many white people have been denied housing, education, and jobs because of their skin.

[citation needed]

This is actually factually incorrect. White kids from different economic backgrounds are treated identically != race-conscious admissions policies as they are currently described in the ruling. And FOB Asians is not an economic class, so I am not sure what argument you are trying to make. Is FOB Asian supposed to be poor? Because you need them to visit some places like Vancouver and Waterloo.

I think your point that oppression is not only racial but socioeconomic is not misguided. But as I understand it, the ruling does not preclude adjustments based on the access and opportunity limitations you refer to, which are not strictly limited to a particular race.

>Do you think the kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in eastern Kentucky?

You have to distinguish affirmative action (in hiring/employment) and race based factors in college admissions.

Most colleges that use race/minority status as a factor in admissions also generally also use socioeconomic status as a factor. However, I am not familiar with any employment/hiring based affirmative action that looks at socioeconomic status.

Just as an example, I went to a top 50 (at the time) public high school in the country, the school is located in a large city (hint: where Jeff Bezos went). I had a 4.0 GPA and was the 50th percentile of the class, approximately #750 out of 1500 kids in my class. Colleges take that into account and I would never have made it to an ivy league (I did get 1 offer, but because I was an athlete and they wanted me to compete for them), but all things being equal if I came from that poor rural area you reference I would be looked at like a scholar, maybe even #1 in the graduating class vs #750, and I might have had multiple Ivy league admissions.

> I would never have made it to an ivy league (I did get 1 offer

> "those who are not oppressed simply have no real frame of reference to understand the problem"

Yet somehow you think you are enlightened by a little volunteer work. as far as immigrants in America go, Asians make more money than whites. When you compare Chinese, the difference is starker.

FWIW, I don't think you were really that poor. I grew up white, male, and poor from Appalachia. I promise you, there was no privilege in that. Its a crime against humanity that someone's test scores are worth less than another's simply because they were not born with enough pigment in their skin.

On the other hand be happy you were given the poor white from Appalachia scale for your test scores rather than the middle-class Asian from New Jersey scale.

So two wrongs make a right?

I think America largely fails its poor, black and marginalized communities, and that a ton more can and should be done, but that doesn't mean affirmative action is the right (both effectively and morally) solution, or that it's not systemacially unfair to other groups.

Institutional racism is real. That doesn't make these programs right, or even a solution. Ivy+ schools carefully pick out minorities who didn't grow up in poor neighborhoods. Most of these programs act as institutionalized racism, and give the appearance of doing something without the reality.

If you pick out students who had real disadvantage -- growing up with horrible schools, having uneducated parents, not speaking English, being poor -- I'd be 100% for them.

That's not what we've got.

We've got a system where Harvard will bring in black people from the "right" neighborhoods, and white people if their parents went to Harvard, taught at Harvard, or donated to Harvard.

For starters I'd say when the racial wealth gap has closed and when racial outcomes in education even out. So many of the factors that feed back into keeping those gaps alive can be traced directly back to racist policies like red lining that only ended less than a human life time ago.

Who says fixing income inequality is unachievable?

Are all of your coworkers equally productive? Neighbors? Relatives?

The answer for all 3 for me personally is no. I have family members who make decisions based on different priorities which change their income. My coworkers differ radically in their abilities and work ethic. How can they have equal incomes in this scenario? There is a way to do this, and it hasn't worked any time it's been tried.

I mean, "universal basic income" would be a good start.

Adding one thousand to most statistical measures will either not change it or shift it by one thousand.

Until everyone's cost of living goes up because they have an extra $1k/mo and landlords / retailers know it. The same thing happened with guaranteed student loans. When people have money to burn the market will react by increasing prices.

It might, but it turns out macroeconomics isn't that simple.

I don't think "fixing income inequality" needs to mean that everyone is paid the same amount. It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee, and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth. Even if you did think that they were that meritorious, you could still make an argument that "fairness" should involve balancing both merit and utility (in this case referring to the diminishing marginal utility of money).

> It's reasonable to believe that <insert billionaire here> isn't a million times more productive than their median employee

If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company, and the CEO executes a few big multi-million dollar deals that month, then the CEO in fact would be significantly more productive (in terms of capital to the company) than the average employee.

> and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth.

Yes like taking the risk of starting such a business to employ others and putting down the capital which might be lost.

I also don't know who you think would enforce some kind of "fairness" limit on how much money someone makes. The government doing so would likely be ruled unconstitutional and wouldn't likely ever be passed in the first place through congress.

Just to play devil's advocate, if you put a normal Walmart employee in a CEO position, or maybe just an "executive" position with decision-making authority, how far off would they be in terms of productivity from someone normally in that position? Say the employee was 1/10th as productive as that executive, that would still be thousands of times more productive than that same employee at their regular minimum wage job.

> If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company

If all the normal employees quit and Walmart can't replace them, how much money does Walmart lose?

Perhaps we should calculate value to the company based on that sort of reasoning.

In a given time period, let's say a year, you may personally work harder or smarter than in some other year. Do you believe that you should be compensated the same regardless of how hard or smart you work in a given year?

If you're a self-employed craftworker who produces hammers, should your income be the same each year, without regard for the quality or quantity of hammers you produced that year, and without considering the world's need for the sorts of hammers you produced? How would you go about achieving that outcome?

I don't think fixing incoming equality means zeroing out differences in income. It means shortening the gap between the bottom quartile and the top quartile, which is currently huge.

Jews were also historically discriminated against, e.g. "Dean Milton Winternitz's instructions were remarkably precise: 'Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.'" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States)

Also related: California Alien Land Law of 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...), targeting mostly Asians (Japanase, Chinese, and Koreans). SCOTUS reaffirmed this law in 1923, it was finally invalidated in 1952.

>Jews were also historically discriminated against

And Jewish people are a protected class, even defined by SCOTUS as a race for purposes of Civil Rights/Anti-discrimination laws

Why should historical discrimination matter to the policy? If at all, it should be about discrimination today.

Ummm...because historical discrimination has led to an environment where educational resources are unequally distributed? The effects of those historical policies still exist...and they should therefore be taken into account today...since they still exist...the effects...

Because Harvard admits on legacy status.

This is unrelated.

No it is not.

If Jews have had a hard time getting into Harvard in the past, and Harvard uses legacy status, then that means that Jews will.habe a harder time in the future for getting into Harvard.

Let's say that your parents were discriminated against, and were unable to go to college, or find a good job, or were actively lynched due to their race.

Do you think their kids might be affected by say, the economic troubles their parents might've gone through, or the fact that they lost family due to the racial animus at the time? Or how about if those families were relegated to places designed specifically for them, to keep them away from the rest of the populace, with less opportunity for education or work. Do you not think that might have a multi-generational effect?

It's simpler than that. If legacy status can influence your ability to enter university, then whether or not your parents were barred entry has a direct effect on whether or not you will be able to get in.

the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs

No, that is not the justification being used.

The argument used to justify this racism is that a rich education requires exposure to diverse people and ideas, and so the educational mission of the school requires that they bring in sufficient numbers of otherwise-underrepresented racial groups. If they can't do this, they say, they won't be able to give their students a good education.

[Note that I'm just playing devil's advocate by citing their view; I actually think it's bollocks. Sure, being surrounded by diverse ideas is important in education. But if they were truly interested in this, then they'd be trying to recruit based on that actual argument, by looking for Protestants and Catholics and Mormons; tall and short people; introverts and extroverts; right-handers and left-handers; city folk and country folk. The fact that the only dimension along which they measure diversity is race reveals that the justification they give is nothing but a convenient rationalization.]

They do in fact look at diversity along those lines too.

Is that the only dimension along which schools measure diversity? It's much easier to become a National Merit Scholar in some states than others; I imagine similar considerations are made in university admissions. A cursory search suggests that geography is indeed taken into account in admissions: https://qz.com/653167/if-you-want-to-get-into-an-elite-colle...

Similarly, coming from a minority religious or cultural background can also be a plus for a college application. Perhaps your complaint is that the process by which these benefit an applicant is less systematized than it is for race? Or that racial preferences are too systematized?

The other categories you mention are likely to be diverse by default---colleges already have a pretty good distribution of short and tall people, and the hand dominance distribution is also pretty representative. There aren't any mechanisms that impede the society-wide distribution of these traits from replicating itself in the student body.

Do they present any evidence to support this claim? I'm only aware of studies like that of Robert Putnam showing that diversity is extremely detrimental to community engagement and cohesion, among many other things.

> So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.

This shouldn't be an acceptable justification, "righting historical wrongs" is a highly subjective policy goal which shouldn't be relevant to a verdict of "constitutionality".

How did you come to this conclusion?

So if we had Chad the legacy admission against Darnell with a single mother, I could see what you were talking about...

But that's not what's at stake here. Chad is doing great, legacy admissions are alive and well. Meanwhile Cletus and Liu are being discriminated against on race despite their real history that flies in the face of your framing.

Why must they be thrown under the bus? Why not Chad?

> the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

This is actually incorrect. The only rationale SCOTUS has ever accepted for affirmative action is to create diverse student bodies. They have never accepted past discrimination as a rationale. For what it's worth, I'm a (former) lawyer. But you don't have to take my word for it! See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/#tab-opi...

> Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field.

Actually, SCOTUS specifically identified this motivation ("right these historical wrongs") as improper and affirmative action programs premised on it are illegal. That is why affirmative action programs instead talk about "diversity" -- SCOTUS blessed "diversity" as an exercise of judgment by the school that would allow otherwise impermissible race-based admission.

No, that is wrong, the Justices are very clear about the historical context of these programs.

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)

If it were about diversity as you claim, rather than righting historical wrongs of inequality, there would be no concept of a termination point of these programs as diversity would be an ongoing concern ad infinitum.

How much racism is necessary to get to the ideal of not selecting people based on race?

Because clearly Asians are at fault.

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