Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these affirmative action policies are attacking the wrong aspect of scholastic achievement that doesn't need to be addressed as urgently as other problems in the system. These policies benefit students that are already having some degree of success, but they don't help the students that really need help, the students that have serious trouble with their education like those described in [1]. Those students are basically pushed through via no child left behind and then graduate (or drop out) and immediately fall through the cracks of society into a poverty trap that is very difficult to escape without a real education, skills or opportunity. I think this is the place where the most gains are possible which can then lay the foundation for improving communities that seem perpetually stuck in poverty. In comparison, those getting into a top institution via AA would most likely experience some degree of success even if AA didn't exist.

For those that benefit from AA to get into elite institutions, this can paradoxically end up being harmful as they are often thrown into the deep end where they have to compete with peers that are the brightest in the world since they have had to go through all of the supplementary development necessary to compete with the best of the best to get accepted [2].

[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...

> In comparison, those getting into a top institution via AA would most likely experience some degree of success even if AA didn't exist.

An extremely disproportionate amount of the benefits of attempts to fix the damage done to black Americans goes to black elites. It's a colonial pattern, where the goal seems to be to generate a tiny clique of representatives who can be treated like diplomats/negotiators for the entire group. The problem is that black Americans are a group only to the extent that they face the same racial treatment by the US, but not through being actually coherent or deeply obligated towards one another. The bulk of black people are supposed to see "representation" and "role models" as some remediation through some trickle-down of inspiration and drive. Black people have plenty of inspiration and drive, what they lack is family wealth; paradoxically, efforts to fix that have concentrated on black people who do have family wealth.

It's annoying but obvious why Asian people would be upset; they're seeing top 0.5% privileged black people getting a benefit from a historical discrimination that has affected them the least (as compared to other black people.) But that's really what meritocracy is: the people who have the most get the most.

It certainly doesn't help that fictional depictions of black people in television and movies tend to depict them as wealthier and more educated than the white people on the same programs, and disproportionately likely to be in management positions. People are bathed in images of black elites (produced by other white people), and when hearing about Ivy League discrimination have to know who that benefits.

Agreed. People in this thread seem to want to throw out the baby with the bathwater just because it is obvious that any kind of equity solution isn't going to be solved by changing the demographics of Harvard grads.

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