I think people should be treated equally, and not given better or worse treatment based on their race.
Policies that ignore race increase the odds that black Americans who are born poor will die poor, and the proportion who are born poor is huge relative to other races because of the US history of slavery followed by overt discrimination.
(Worth noting: it may be possible to achieve the same goals by affirmative action around poverty, not race... But would Daniel have been satisfied were he told he was too rich for the honors program?)
That having been said, it's a difficulty universities are already familiar with because they have to evaluate students in this fashion to determine who gets needs-based scholarships.
(Anecdotally, during my university years I lost one of my needs-based scholarships because my parents' income spiked. Of course, that income was from one of them getting a severance package upon termination...)
No, Daniel would be happy if he was judged on his individual merit.
Honest question, what if we swing the pendulum too far with fixing the past. Do we then need to be racist again in the other direction in the future to fix that?
It's a ridiculous idea to try and tweak society at this level, and the only correct fix is unequivocally enforcing equal opportunity at the level of the individual.
We lack the power to do that. You can't control who somebody's parents are, and we observe that birth status has huge statistical significance in opportunities available to an individual.
Well... Some countries have tried experiments with making everybody wards of the state, but the observed outcomes were not desirable.
This may be expected given policies of the previous several decades seeking out minority students and the correlation in the US between minority membership and poverty (though there's certainly correlation / causation concerns with an assumption like that).
You can change the culture of a child by forcibly separating them from their parents, putting them in a boarding school, beating them when they try to speak their mother tongue with other children, and so on, methods that have been successfully applied in Australia and Canada, I believe. Changing the culture of an adult is more difficult, though they may have tried similar methods rather more recently in ... you know where.
You can to a certain extent change your "race" simply by changing your dress, hairstyle and name, provided your physical appearance is roughtly consistent with several "races", which is not an unusual situation in many of the societies in which "race" is a thing.
You're making extraordinary reaches to redefine words and concepts, which is another societal problem.
also:
> forcibly separating them
> beating them when
why is violence necessary? What - specifically - are we trying to change?
1. They had better weapons and better immunity to diseases (Europeans vs Native Americans).
2. There were more of them (British Settlers vs French Settlers).
So it's not like they were some true human achievements worthy of praise.
And they create a better life for their children...
Do you still think everyone should have equal opportunities and that child doesn't deserve anything better than someone who's parents didn't give a shit and wasted their lives?
Well - to the child, it's obviously unfair if the parents didn't care. But to the parents who worked hard, it's equally unfair to blame the child and say they don't deserve a better life.
This whole equity movement seems to always look at the child's perspective (surprise, in this age of childlike narcisim!) and never at the parents perspective, who wants to create a better life for future generations.
But it's actually almost equally unfair to someone in both cases. Except in the parents case if you make it completely worthless to try and improve your child's life, you are taking away a large chunk of motivation for almost all people.
Ever heard of slippery slopes? You just hit the bottom of the ravine.
It's not "completely worthless" to try to improve your child's life and plenty of people have managed to live good lives without going to the absolute best college. Many haven't even finished college. You sound like you'd be very bitter if your kids fail at school, which is not a great place to be in.
Plus, what does this say about the other people who are discriminated against daily? You just don't like it that now you have to give the "college talk" to your kids just like fathers of girls have always had to give the "some men are predators" talk to their daughters and African-Americans have had to give the "suicide by cop" talk to their kids.
Does that mean in the name of equality we should level the playing field for children advantaged by their parents? How will that affect society if you try and nullify the hard work of every parent?
Yes, it sucks for individuals.
But as long as you have entire swathes of people discriminated against, personal responsibility is not enough. You need general principles, laws, policies.
And yes, laws and policies can be blunt instruments and some people get hurt. Yet we still use them because on aggregate they help us.
And no, I don't believe that people will be less motivated to take care of their kids even if they're at a disadvantage. If anything, I'd just make these shadowy ideas in the article actual written policies. "Yes, we only accept new students in proportion to population quotas". People will adapt.
And yes I know it was for a different group, what you are proposing is creating the same situation but in reverse, over time.
Two wrongs make a right?
For example the proportional representation. Just always have it always be proportional, no matter how the distribution changes. That's fair (again, probably unpleasant for some groups).
And these historical example apply to modern America less because of various laws that level the playing field. I' mean cultural differences between modern groups.
The initial land was taken over by Europeans, by force, then the Westward expansion was also by force and the land was given to Europeans.
After WW2 there were huge investments into infrastructure and housing and those were given to... Europeans.
Kind of hard to catch up with people who have everything. You need to be exceptional and large groups of people aren't really exceptional. Most people just stay where they are (geographically and socially).
Can you clarify what you mean by this. Racial Europeans? Does that include the mass immigration of Irish? Or are you talking about the British and other colonial powers?
> Kind of hard to catch up with people who have everything
What people? Europeans? There are plenty of poor whites, and plenty wealthy immigrants who "started with nothing".
Also, it appears the context of this post is wrt to someone who might be Asian - how did those non-European immigrants end up on the wrong side of this? Seems that that group managed to catch up, and are now being penalised for it.