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Comment by skyde | Hacker News Reader

You are basically saying its ok for a white dude from a family of homeless to be doubly discriminated (1- because he does have money to go to college 2- because college reserve seat for non-white people)

And you justify it because statistically if you take a random white people and a random black people the black person would deserve it more.

While this is true this logic is morally wrong because you punish or reward an individual not because of this individual merit but because he happens to have the same skin color as other individual.

It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.

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> It's as absurd as saying there are not enough professional basketball player that are redhead so we should have quota of redhead regardless of skill level.

If the end goal is that after a number of generations we finally have the proportionate number of redhead basketball players that would have existed if we didn't discriminate against recruiting redhead players in the past, then no, the idea isn't absurd at all.

Note the keyword here is the end goal - of creating a equal and just basketball team... or society, if you reel in the ad absurdum.

there is no way to know what the right number should be for the percentage of the team that should be redhead.

So the best you can do is create a new sport “ redhead basketball” the same way we now have “ women basketball” to not discriminate women !

Attend more carefully to what I'm saying please. I said that discrimination is just discrimination. The term "reverse discrimination" is semantically nonsense. Selecting people based on skin color is always discrimination.

That said the situation as it stands is so tilted against minorities in favor of white dudes that this injustice rarely leaves a white guy in the red on net and fixing what pitifully little preference there is before making any dent in rampant discrimination will on average net out to a decrease in justice.

Consider even in microcosm a white man applies to 10 positions who loses one due to preference given to a minority while 7 identically skilled black man fills out 10 apps each and 5 take lesser jobs. It's hard to imagine that the victim here is the white dude. Speaking as a white man white victimhood doesn't really pass the sniff test.

You mention education so lets talk about Harvard. This blew my mind.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

> Study on Harvard finds 43 percent of white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff. The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said.

Almost all the minorities are people who belong their by merit. About half the white people do. Before reading this I was against racial preference in education.

you just confirmed my assumption, by saying “it will on average net out”. I agree that “on average” the white population will still not be disadvantaged.

But it’s still morally wrong because for one particular individual it would not.

It the same thing as laws making it illegal to own a pit bull dogs in some city.

Maybe it’s true the majority of pitbull are dangerous! but is it still fair to the pitbull owner that have a well trained one to suffer the ban because it will average out ?

In my example you can say that affirmative action (banning pitbull) is still discrimination against pitbull !

which is why people call it reverse discrimination. but if you prefer you can simply call it legal discrimination

It doesn't merely average out in terms of population it averages out even in the case of individuals because a single individual in the course of putting out many job applications will deal with far more employers who will give them preference because they are white than those that will give a minority preference.

unfortunately if you are an individual that does not have connection. It will not average out because the business will keep the spot for white people only for people from rich family that have connection.

So your probability of getting hired will become less than a minority.

This is completely fictional and provably so. Distinctively black names on identical resumes are less likely to get a call back. This is classic white victimhood.

i think you don’t understand my point at all.

You are correct in saying the Majority of white (80%) will have better odd of getting a call back compared to an average black person.

But while forcing company to use hiring quota will help the the black population. it will make it harder for poor white people to get hired as compared to poor black people.

you could say it’s acceptable collateral damage but you can’t say it’s not true .

I specifically don't agree as a poor white person that I have it harder than a poor black person of identical qualifications nor do I see any affirmative action policies as applied anywhere changing this even if they became pervasive.

About education, it’s a hard choice.

option 1:No affirmative action: 50% of white are legacy and all other student art there on merits

option 2: affirmative action: 100% of white students are legacy 0% are on merits and 50% of all other race are accepted because of merit

I picked some random number for option 2 but i assume you see the problem.

The problem here is that you think you can come to a reasonable conclusion without actual numbers AFTER actual numbers were given clearly. The current situation is that we have massive affirmative action for white people and no plans on getting rid of it.

one easy way to get rid of it (for university) is to force them to accept new student only on score to a test for example: GRE, SAT ...

If this is done you cannot say the university are racist anymore.

If they decide to do this, there will be a lot more asian at Ivy league university because on average they score much better.

As someone who is not asian I would still be 100% OK with this because this would be they only accept base on merit.

But people will still complain there is an equal proportion of student from each race.

Do you actually believe that there is a standardized test that can fully quantify who the next generation of doctors and engineers will be with no human judgement involved?

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