Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
latimes.com
latimes.com
But anyway, my question for the Americans here who grok this stuff: I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case?
I don't mean this as a hihi actually sneaky anti-affirmative-action post, I don't understand the subject matter well enough (nor America in general). I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race.
However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power.
But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race?
EDIT: Well the votes on this comment are going up and down faster than an "Essex birds drawers" as the BOFH would say.
Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of people’s skin.
"Name another," was my response.
1. Communal cultures and stronger family structures. White Americans are insanely atomized and individualistic and that is a serious issue
2. Birthrates/Fertility
3. Far better food/cooking and eating
4. Cultural control, especially in music and to a lesser extent in sports.
5. In the case of certain immigrant groups, significantly higher family wealth than the average white american
6. In the case of some ethnic groups, significantly better physical prowess (it's a handful of tribes where many of the best runners come from)
Obviously these are not all that significant compared to the disadvantages, but the idea that there are no other "unfair advantages" is just wrong.
To answer my own question - it's complicated; it did hurt him in some regards but it helped him too. There were a lot of people in the primary and general election who wanted to know they weren't prejudiced and voted for him at least in part for that reason.
This wasn't legal affirmative action. It was something else. I don't know if I'd call it an "unfair right" but for the right person in the right circumstance it can be an advantage. Does it out weigh all the disadvantages? Probably not.
Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
You are incorrect about MLKs assessment. From the LA Times.
It’s intentional. These political footballs are half real, half tactics.
But is there really any better explanation?
Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never really true in the US today.
If you help "all people" with "no regard" to race, you have just participated in favoring white folks over all others, even though you likely don't realize it. The systems by which you choose to "help" all have various types of racism built-in, and you will have racist results as output, even if you yourself never directly try to commit such an act. (This is what systemic racism is, sometimes called 'institutionalized racism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism )
Affirmative Action, while not perfect, is one of the few things ever tried that actually accounts for this. It's saying, "you can't be more racist than X" where X is some kind of objective metric (say, "percent of enrollment by race"), and it does not care which of the thousands of people or systems involved are causing the issue, it attempts to force-corrects for it.
It is an emergency stop-gap, until such a future as that result is already happening naturally, making it redundant. The fact that we still depend on it ~60+ yrs later, is sort of living proof that we haven't really dealt with systemic racism yet. (As if all the other evidence, between housing, employment, police brutality and murders, etc, wasn't already enough)
But let's leave one variable in: America is exactly as racist as America is currently. Ethnic backgrounds and cultures still exist, and there are enough white assholes in "gatekeeping" roles to affect the distribution of people who pass their gates. This is a fact that is a true thing that already exists in America; we're not ADDING it to the model, we've just left it in as the only thing we want to measure.
Structurally, as a society, you want the distribution of people who pass through higher education into roles like "Doctors" and "Lawyers" and eventually "Politicians" to broadly match the distribution of cultures that comprise the society as a whole. Otherwise you create an apartheid state, and an angry under-class that threatens the stability of the system. This is an axiom so simple that even Lyndon Johnson understood it.
So in our Model America, you need to have a law that says "yeah we know that everyone is the same, but because a degree from [Prestigious University] has a ripple effect that affects society as a whole, we want to make sure that graduating classes have at least the CHANCE of reflecting the cultural diversity of the nation as a whole, so we need to have a law that prevents Bad Actors in Admissions from just saying 'Oh, we already let in all the white people in line, wink wink wink, sorry, maybe next year'"
That's the reason you might still want quotas. And given the distribution of test scores because everyone ISN'T identical frictionless spheres, you might want to add a weight to minority test scores to float them overall, so they get in.
And yeah, that might not seem fair if you're in the majority; or if you're in the minority whose test scores are highest, but there's a clear and self-evident purpose to those kinds of weightings. Life's not fair, but it should be equitable, overall.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-o...
I also seem to recall a factory or trade uprising/strike in/around Europe between 1400-1700 where they basically made up whiteness to divide the laborers and get them to argue amongst themselves (successfully), but this may be apocryphal as I cannot seem to find a source.
How stupid do these people think 'everyone else' is. This is the most absurd thing I've read all day.
Humans, who divide themselves along such lines as _what tv shows they like_, had to have the concept of _skin colour_ invented for them. Really think about how ridiculous this assertion is.
In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having fairly diverse schools, and they do precisely what you say - they focus their efforts on lifting up those who come from poor socioeconomic situations, which tends to capture a lot of the same people affirmative action was trying to do.
In that case, can you explain why two schools would've fought for the explicit use of race in deciding school admissions all the way to the Supreme Court?
It has been overturned at the referendum level every time.
They do to an extent, they just try to hide it as "holistic review" or such, make it hard to prove.
There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather than incorporate all those other factors. It might not even be viable to incorporate all those other factors.
We really only have two choices:
1) Wait out the effects of racism, historic and contemporary, which will take hundreds of years.
2) Sacrifice some of our "individual determination above all else" principles to reach some palpable level of racial equality.
I think both are flawed in their own ways, but the world is always imperfect, so pick your side.
If you look at black people's family trees enough, you'll find plenty with specific inheritance claims against their white, slaver ancestors. Black people in America are the descendants of white rapists as well as imported slaves.
Source? I'd venture to guess most have reverted back to mean wealth given downward mobility rates [0] and the time since slavery ended.
[0] https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration...
What about people who's families immigrated here post-slavery? Their tax money has to pay reparations too?
Reparations is a non-starter. Any discussion or endeavor to push for reparations is a naked attempt to buy votes with lies.
For people who are in the military, I point this out in its internship form. The Skillbridge program was designed to facilitate internships for departing servicemen to address difficulties with veteran unemployment, but the spoils mostly go to officers with highly marketable skills, like submarine and cryptography officers. After all, those officers have each been practicing the art of finding and utilizing beneficial programs to their advantage for decades by that point in their lives; why wouldn't they use this one too?
the left: who think that all "people of color" should be compensated for slavery, and
the right: who love to say that US blacks were sold by "their own people." That's like claiming innocence for molesting a child because their parents sold it to you.
(I know you know this:))
Why not just decide on a test scores? Or just grades? Or just sports? Because there is no silver bullet measurement for "how deserving is this kid?"
I'd venture to guess that if you asked 50 people how to measure someone's worth with regard to some goal you'd get 50 different answers.
Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.
So, in other words, lower income.
By that you mean that kids can not choose their school on the US?
(Setting aside private schools...)
But you can move to a better school district but that requires money.
There are however many areas with decent schools and decent prices which could be a destination. And some minority families do move there.
Not true at all. There are many places like California where School funds are distributed Statewide. The results are relatively predictable. California passed the Serrano decisions in the early '70s mandating local taxes be spent Statewide on schools. This was followed immediately by a prop 13 where residents decided that if their money doesn't go to Local Schools they won't pay. As a result California dropped from top five in the nation in school funding to the bottom five.
https://edsource.org/2022/californias-prop-13s-unjust-legacy...
https://publicadvocates.org/our-work/education/access-qualit...
Skew the odds
Pretty much every Black student I see at school is African (immigrant)-American, not ADOS.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
Why is that the case?
For Asians, I don't see what systemic privilege they could have that would need to be compensated away?
1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214221101...
You think you need to work hard to get a high SAT score?
Which is what? Studying is hard, getting academic success is hard, and there is a positive correlation for both of those and career success, as academic success requires discipline, grit, and hard work, which are all useful for career success.
The goal was to actually do a better job of finding the applicants with discipline and grit, not just the ones who have it in an academic context.
Unfortunately, the treatment is even more complicated than the diagnosis is simple.
Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity?
This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue)
The classic opportunity of outcome is proven to be doomed, and is not aligned with your imperfect world assertion.
I can get behind equality of opportunity, which I’d argue affirmative action’s impact was antithetical to this vision.
We’ve come to a point where the new generation is being held accountable for something they had no hand in.
We shouldn’t be trying to treat these diversity reports as a checkbook that needs to be balanced.
I heard something that resonated with me, and will probably get me downvoted to oblivion (if it hasn’t already happened):
those that want to look for racism, will find it.
Once a certain area is solved so to speak, some groups tend to look even harder, and we get to a point now where we have this ever-widening definition of what racism is, the goal posts ever expanding, and this endless loop is our culture eating itself alive.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but this doesn’t imply racism doesn’t exist. But it does imply that our definitions of it have radically evolved, and perhaps is being used for ulterior motives outside of “equality”
Those that advocate for equality of outcome desire to make again a slave state, where they as "superior educated white people" can ensure that black people are "taken care of" by ensuring they all have jobs, they all have housing, they all have healthcare, they all have food, and that they have no freedom.
Another issue is we're talking about group level outcomes here - which means we're already accepting that there will be biases in measurements, otherwise the group wouldn't be a 'group' (unless it's literally just skin color which is - a pretty arbitrary/racist way to group people all else being equal).
Imagine my ancestors stole all of your ancestors stuff and I still get to keep it all and anything I've built using it. We've stopped stealing your stuff now, though, so we have "equality of opportunity."
> <Outcome> is somewhat inherited, therefore there cannot be real equality of <outcome>.
The US used to be a land of 'opportunity' for poor immigrants. They came to the US and worked hard to overcome their circumstances and make a better life for themselves and their children.
It would be insulting and demoralizing to them to say that opportunity is impossible because they're poor, because their uncle doesn't own the bank down the street. The point of opportunity is that it's _possible_ to succeed, the scales are not unfairly weighed against you by law or societal prejudice.
Many things make achieving outcomes hard - poverty, mental health, bad luck - these are sometimes affected by the past too, but they don't necessarily take away opportunity in that the hope in success is still possible. This hope is important to the soul is it not? This is why opportunity is so important, it's essentially hope.
The son of an investment banking executive has much greater opportunity to also become an investment banker than some rando dude from the street, even if it is remotely possible. That opportunity delta is real, and it's largely, almost entirely, due to family ties.
I would not say that I have the opportunity to become a billionaire, even though it is technically possible, but astronomically unlikely.
Immigrants don't have the opportunity to become president of the US because of US law, but any natural-born citizen of the country does have that opportunity regardless of the likelihood. The US has always had immigrants achieve boundless success here which is why it was considered the land of opportunity, not because everyone did - or because it was 'fair', but because it was possible.
There are lots of factors that contribute to an ethnic group's relative success in playing the economic game, some of which are unique to that cohort and not the ethnicity itself. Past results do not guarantee future performance.
One example: the communist revolution expelled professors and academics from China, thus many Chinese and Taiwanese-american immigrants from that generation had scholarly backgrounds which obviously translates well. Compare to a history where your people were enslaved and your cultural background entirely erased.
Another example: getting an H1B as an Indian person today is super competitive / hard, but much easier if you're another ethnicity. What does that mean for future generations of Indian-Americans? There's going to be a selection bias.
There's some variation, but even so they still perform better than "white" people with the same socioeconomic status - even among Filipino and Southeast Asians: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4060715/
Yes, I agree!
But what if my ancestors did not steal your ancestors stuff? Am I still responsible, because I have the same skin color as the folks who harmed you?
This is fundamentally a race-based conception of the world, a conception that defines power along racial lines, which groups and analyzes people fundamentally based on race.
We have the benefit in the last 50 years to move past this way of looking at the world, many of us have come to the realization that race isn't a useful way to group people, period. Any disadvantage you see in society that appears 'race' based can be better explained via other means. If people aren't treated justly, it's not because of racism except in vanishingly small amounts, in obscure and backwards parts of the US.
'Structural racism' falls prey to correlation is not causation, a misguided explanation for group differences, an oversimplification, and it won't generate progress as long as the cause is incorrectly ascribed.
Here’s a misunderstood concept: race is a result of unfair policies. “Black” as a racial group does not meaningfully exist without the historical racism and oppressive policies enacted on black peoples. Without distinction between groups, there would be unity. But we know, for example, black people were treated unfairly and still are in many aspects today in the US, so the construction of the black race occurs because of these differences. Aka, the marker “black” for a person identifies someone who faces systemic racism in the US. It’s not just about the wavelength of light a person’s body reflects. Racial groups are the result of history, culture, policies, and present day attitudes.
Fundamental issues I have with aiming for basically equal outcome by artificially tipping the scale until some metric evens out:
- Which dimensions do we make adjustments based on? is it just race or do we consider wealth etc?
- How much do we adjust? Black Americans had it tougher, boost by 10, Hispanics by 7? Chinese by -5 because they somehow succeeded without tipping the scales?
- Where does it end? We tip the scale for 200 years and if things are still out balanced keep adjusting?
On an individual level, the obvious answer is opportunity, but how do you measure that? Generally via outcomes. If two groups are equally capable and have equal opportunity, you would expect similar outcomes.
No, because this assumes that different groups have equivalent values. This is plainly false. There are some broad similarities for sure, but each gender, ethnicity and culture values different things which will inevitably produce different outcomes.
This is why obsessing over outcome equity is doomed from the start. It implicitly relies on either enforcing homogeneity, thus erasing cultural uniqueness, or outright discrimination in preferring some groups over others to overcome any cultural values that might impact outcomes so the final numbers look pretty.
Values are not intrinsically tied to your race, they just correlate to some degree like income and geography. Saying we shouldn't compensate for your parents values is like saying we shouldn't compensate for your parents income or zip code. That's fine, and it's not immoral to believe that, but just make sure you're being logically consistent in the things you believe we should and shouldn't control for.
We could reduce harm to indigenous peoples living in the Amazon by forcibly moving them into cities with proper healthcare, but this would destroy their culture and violate their right to autonomy.
Noam Chomsky points out that in poor countries such as Brazil and India, there is much more affirmative action (e.g. to compensate for wrongs of the caste system). It's America--a rich, powerful, and unequal country--that is so ideologically opposed to this.
Understand this. Then you will understand equity is fundamentally about justice and if we don’t seek to establish justice then we have failed.
I understand you think it's ethical, and I disagree for the reasons I laid out in the post you just replied to, among others. It doesn't seem like you've engaged with the points there so I have nothing further to say.
If Someone says that siding with an oppressor is justice, I think they should relearn ethics.
And the methods by which it attempts to do so enforces homogeneity or discrimination. The ends do not justify the means.
The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore. We’ve been legally equal for at least 3 generations. Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations. I have no problems with people coming together to help those communities. But we can’t let racial equity seep into our legal framework or we’ll literally be discriminating based on race all over again and all the way down. No horrors of the past justify that level of wrongness. It’s hopeless and fruitless to try and design a “racially equitable” society, and you’re going to always just be an angry person if you set out on that path.
All that said, as always with these situations, I ask “what is the end goal and how can I help get there”. 9 times out of 10, there is no end goal and that’s where I draw the line in lending my valuable time, my money, my vote, and/or any mental space for stress and concern to a proposed cause. If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers. I would do it because there’s a clear goal (correct for the past) and path to achieve it (pay money).
What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.
That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
---
It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.
It’s subtle but the motives are very different: if you want to maintain a narrative of injustice, then you will find ways to do that. OTOH, if you want to build a narrative of equality, success, and support, then you need to be open to the outcome that racial undertones and the victim status of minorities will fade into history. Thats the entire goal, right?
There are, however, people making the argument that we need to focus on equality of outcome as the solution (vs firing your boss and paying you damages). And followers of this idealogical doctrine have made political inroads in schooling and government. It’s this behavior specifically that I’m criticizing.
Yes, part of the problem is that we’re such a binary society so these nuances get bucketed into larger issues and it’s all really hard to sort out.
- People of color don't experience special violence
- People of color don't experience special rates of poverty
- People of color aren't specially diverted from the pursuit of happiness
We're so far away from this goal that we can only hazily imagine achieving it. For example, white high school dropouts have higher home ownership rates than Black college graduates [0]. Either you think Black people are just bad with credit cards (which would be racist) or you think there's some structural cause.
I think people want a number, like a number of years or an amount of money so we can finally say, "we did it, we made things right." It's even in this opinion. I don't think that's a useful way of looking at it, because no metrics really capture what it's like to be in a marginalized group. Hell we can't even agree on metrics for software engineers; we definitely can't get it right for this.
What we should do instead is create race conscious policies that address inequalities when we find them. We should do this for everyone btw: white people who have been victimized by the opioid epidemic, women who've experienced violence, etc. etc. Race-conscious admissions programs were doing this work for college admissions, but sadly not anymore.
[0]: https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Umb...
> What we should do instead is create race conscious policies
Of course, the goalposts you mentioned are good goals. But it’s far from clear that face conscious policies are appropriate or effective.
Appropriateness is, of course, a matter of opinion, but the Supreme Court has decided that the policies in question are unconstitutional. But effectiveness is an empirical matter. For example, in 1996, California banned most affirmative action in public universities. (To be clear, a lot of very well intentioned people at the universities supported affirmative action. Source: personal knowledge.). It took a few years for the situation to settle down, but the results of removing affirmative action seem to have been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the University of California campuses.
It turns out that, just because a policy is well intentioned, it does not follow that it is effective at achieving its good intentions. I could rattle off quite a few examples of policies that fail in this regard.
This is incorrect; removing affirmative action was real bad for Black students [0]. The article you cite references the discredited "mismatch" theory also pushed by Justice Thomas. Mismatch theory was never supported by data, and the studies that do seem to support it have huge problems [1]. No serious person thinks it's real.
Race-conscious admissions were an unqualified good for millions of minority students. They're probably only second to Social Security as a US anti-poverty policy. There's no amount of weirdo reasoning or fact twisting that can obscure that.
[0]: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/115/6360982?guest...
[1]: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/studies-supporting-mi...
I admit I’m dubious about the study [0]. It says:
> I show that ending affirmative action caused underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality colleges.
This seems like a potentially problematic metric. Drawing conclusions from this depends on the assumption that the applicant pool did not change. It appears that much of UCLA’s post-Prop 209 strategy involved programs to improve their applicant pool. I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.
IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in. (Of course, any admission scheme whatsoever ought to benefit those who are admitted, at least so long as second-order damaging effects from a problematic admission scheme don’t make going to the university in question worse than the alternatives and so long as the university is worth going to in the first place.)
It does appear to be the case, based on terrible but official data that I found, that the fraction of the UCLA student body that is black is similar now to what it was before Prop 209. But I could be misinterpreting what I found. (The recovery was very slow, which is unfortunate.)
> By eliminating racial preferences, Heriot wrote last week, the 1996 amendment did away with the pressure to admit minority students to competitive institutions their credentials hadn’t prepared them for.
> I haven’t found good data, but it’s entirely plausible that the outreach works, the applicant pool has a larger (and less under-represented?) fraction of “URM” applicants, that a comparable number but smaller fraction are admitted, that a larger number and a larger fraction go to the lower-tier schools (Cal State and community colleges, for example), and that this is all a good thing.
The paper is more or less about minority enrollment going up at non-UC schools, so UCLA's outreach is irrelevant here.
> IMO, society does not benefit when a too-small proportion of qualified minority high school students apply to top-tier schools and a too-large fraction of the applicants get in.
Why?
Agreed, but as the parent comment said, what's the end-goal? What are the metric(s) whereby we can say "things are now right", or even, "things are approaching the direction of right-ness"?
How does this work, in practice? Look at the comments here; do you think one half of the population is going to vote for politicians who want to implement a special tax that sees money from their pay check going to their neighbors, based on race? That will never happen.
Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police?
> If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers.
The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.
There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden).
> The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore.
Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you.
- Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average.
- People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound.
A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.
> What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.
As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance.
More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race.
I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.
Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.
Of course you can measure this stuff, that's the point!
> The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.
I presented that hypothetical solution rhetorically. I actually don't think that paying money is a real solution. But I want to get to the point where someone advocating for the cause can say "these are the acceptable end conditions".
> In college one of my black friends went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.
I had white and black and brown and yellow friends in college from low income neighborhoods who all experienced this. Yes, it's something I'm able to consider compassionately.
> I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.
I am well aware of the dynamics of AA.
> Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child.
Where's the framework for evaluating as much? Where's the audits to confirm that any temporary cheap discrimination is actually priming the pump and not causing more harm (and yes there is evidence that affirmative action isn't all that you're cracking it up to be). All I'm asking for is to be objective and calculated about these things and not emotional and sloppy.
---
Look, you and I are different people with different tolerances for discrimination.
I am hypothetically okay being discriminated against in the short term (as you are) if it provably corrects a clear issue and we have an agreement in place to evaluate the program as it's happening, make sure it's contributing to the desired outcome, and to stop the discrimination once clear end conditions are met.
Of course I'd rather not be discriminated against explicitly since I think that's a sloppy proxy solution and instead I'd rather address the actual problems even if they're more expensive and more difficult programs to execute--everyone should share the load of building the society we want to live in.
In general, you're okay hearing about the atrocities of the past and allowing yourself to be discriminated against on the loose grounds that any discrimination serves to correct the atrocities. You feel guilt about the wrongs of the past and are thus able to justify discrimination as a form of atonement.
On the other hand, I am not okay allowing myself to be discriminated against because of past events I had no control over or participated in, despite arguably indirectly benefitting from them loosely based on the color of my skin. I do not feel guilt or the need to atone for those previous wrongs. I do feel responsibility to contribute to correcting any outstanding issues that still exist today.
Therefore I am not phased by an argument that lists all the bad things that happened and concludes "oh you must still atone". And it is not justification outright for introducing discrimination to me or my children today.
I am swayed by logical assessments of the current situation and well thought out proposals on how to address remaining problems. I want equality of opportunity and I very much disagree we'll achieve it by focusing on equality of outcome. I don't think that's the right path. AA has primed the pump as you say of the opportunity engine for generations now. Let's assess the situation and move on.
We share a desire for the same goal, but we are different in our approaches. If that makes me an asshole and you not, well that's outside of either of our control. I can assure you my stance isn't some cheap sensational response to this headline or something. I have spent more time than I'd wager most have considering these issues and determining how I wish to engage.
Do you consider it discrimination that disabled folks get to park in special spots? I don't consider discrimination. Some people just need more help to get where they're going, and some of us will be just fine using the legs we were born to walk with. In the same vein, I don't feel like I'm being discriminated against by affirmative action. And I'm not worried about my kid even if those policies remained in place.
Nobody thinks affirmative action is perfect. For example if I could make a change myself I'd focus on the economic part of socioeconomic more so that it's not mainly privileged people of color getting priority. But you have to start somewhere. With systems governing people it's just not that realistic to ask that everything be perfectly measurable or that there is a neat objective function to optimize.
> Therefore I am not phased by an argument that lists all the bad things that happened and concludes "oh you must still atone". And it is not justification outright for introducing discrimination to me or my children today.
You're very focused on yourself. Nobody is asking you as an individual to "atone" for anything because you didn't do anything. What we are discussing is _systemic changes_ designed to help folks who are disadvantaged _also without having done anything_. Broad, high-level changes like affirmative action just don't have the impact on individuals in the majority that you are making them out to have. They do however have outsized impact on folks in the minority.
In general I find it gross to be so focused on what you're calling your own discrimination when it totally pales in comparison to the experiences of folks who face actual discrimination. You say you're able to consider others' experiences compassionately, but that's clearly just lip service, otherwise you wouldn't be calling affirmative action "discrimination."
This is exactly the issue at play. There's a fundamental difference between _unending_ affirmative action and temporary 'help'. If you believe in equality of outcome then you will never be satisfied and we will always be 'helping' the disadvantaged group achieve various metrics forever. Eventually people deserve the dignity of a level playing field, otherwise you seem to be saying they're incapable of handling a level playing field which would be.. racist (by definition).
Your example of handicaps is disturbing, I know you didn't intend it in a racist way, but read what you wrote from the perspective of an African immigrant. Just because a person is black does not mean they're 'handicapped'!
Being born a certain race is a disadvantage in the same way being born with physical disability is a disadvantage. They're not the same but that was the point I was trying to make: we look out for disadvantaged folks in some societal contexts. Why are y'all complaining about systemically disadvantaged people getting some help? Is it because you can't trace the taxpayer dollars we spend on things like Section 8 housing back to your wallet, but you can trace back your rejection letter from Harvard to accursed affirmative action?
> If you believe in equality of outcome then you will never be satisfied
If you re-read what I wrote earlier, I said equality of opportunity is the north star. But just because you believe in that north star doesn't mean you can't see the value in skewing the current state by other means until you're there.
There's another thing here: affirmative action isn't something that keeps going much past your college graduation, and it doesn't directly remedy the brokenness of the K-12 education system, where de-facto race segregation is commonplace and you can start 3 grades back just by being born in the wrong town. Even diversity programs at big companies are typically only aimed at new grads. These are limited programs that just try to boost folks who typically haven't had the necessary support to achieve their full potential. At the end of the day the free market will do its work.
Folks claiming the little boost from affirmative action is "discrimination" need to get their heads out of the sand.
> you seem to be saying they're incapable of handling a level playing field which would be.. racist
No, I'm saying colored folks _are_ capable of achieving the same things as white folks if given the same advantages and privileges. But they don't get those advantages and privileges because society is broken. Affirmative action is one tool we can use to help put more colored folks in places of power in society. Without this, we will never sniff equal opportunity -- the north star we all seem to agree we want. Having people who look like you in places of power is important because they can advocate for you and surface areas where the opportunity is decidedly _not_ equal.
The comparison to how we treat the physically handicapped is just asking folks to consider why we are okay with helping people at cost to ourselves in one case and not another.
You're sick and your mind is diseased. I'd like to see you try to tell this to a black child.
We’re okay helping handicapped people because it’s not racist. Duh. I’m okay helping disparaged kids get into college by subsidizing them with financial aid programs and creating compassionate admission standards. Why limit it to black people?
The supreme court seems to agree that it’s time to move forward and focus on the real issues, not the racial scapegoat.
First of all, I'm not going around talking to random children. Secondly, black parents _totally_ have to say at some point to their kid, "hey you have to be careful around cops because they won't treat you the same as they treat your white friends."
I don't understand where you got this "you're sick and your mind is diseased" bit. The point was just that the playing field's not level and you're willfully missing it.
> Why limit it to black people?
Because the scale of systemic injustice to black folks is so big that it should not be controversial. The legacy of slavery in this country looms large. To be clear I also fully support measures to reduce overall economic inequality as well, it's just not the topic being discussed here.
I'm anon and not even white (my parents are immigrants) -- who am I signaling to or guilty about? The only effort being made is an effort to reason with other anons on the interwebs, so take it or leave it.
You can also keep calling me racist for pointing out systemic racial inequity but last I checked racism is a byproduct of ignorance, and I'm sensing a whole lot of that from you. So, right back at you.
> I fundamentally believe your worldview and savior complex do more harm to the very people you think need saving than good
I get that this is a difference between us. I fundamentally believe that your worldview is faulty because it turns a blind eye to how tilted the status quo is and doesn't consider the status quo to be unethical. Characterizing a desire to level the playing field as a "savior complex" is unfair -- it's not a savior complex to feel that something is wrong and want to fix it, it's just called being conscientious.
> I don’t feel one ounce of guilt over the history of slavery in the US.
Dude nobody cares if you feel guilt or not, you're missing the point. Guilt doesn't help anyone, systemic policy changes do. Why are you making it sound like anyone cares about what you feel as an individual?
> All I can do is treat people equally moving forward and help people in need.
You can also acknowledge the legacy of past inequities, how they persist in the systems we live in today, and work to remedy them. If you step into a colored person's shoes and think about what bullshit they STILL have to face today (which you don't have to, as a white person), you might begin to see the desire for reform less as "identity politics" and more just "advocating for equal ass treatment."
Anyway, I’m talking over your head because I assumed you have explored the structural foundation for your assertions that dominant cultures are systemically problematic. Ignore my comments about white guilt and the like, they’re not really apropos, we both agree.
(If you care: see it’s a problem in and of itself that you responded to my argument with a long speech about how black people are victims and should be treated differently even still today and about how I simply don't understand and empathize with black struggle enough. And how my morally bankrupt white culture is unjust and needs dismantling. Oh and we should listen to this anon because they’re asian. Like, you’re already talking past me. I never said anything to that tune. And it’s why I responded so harshly, because 1. i think race-based laws are racist despite past struggles agree to disagree, and 2. it comes from a place of arguing that whiteness confers guilt, whether you’ve explored it that deeply or not.)
Let’s be clear: nowhere did I say we shan’t acknowledge the legacy of past inequities or do our part as humans to make a better world. I simply said that the solution to any remaining problems today must be colorblind. The court agrees.
You said, well no they can’t be colorblind because black people are (charitably) “disabled” because of history and so they must still be propped up.
We can just leave it at that.
Personally I’m only interested in engaging further on these topics when the dialog is not about atoning for past sins via identity politics and race-based policy, and instead the solution is a burden carried by all, not just white people. Come what may.
If you want to support good goals and justice, you must be in support of policies to combat this injustice. And it begins with acknowledging that by being part of a dominant group there are benefits, and being part of a marginalized group there are disadvantages. If you refuse to acknowledge these things, it’s similar to choosing to ignore injustices happening currently.
I think we're equivocating with kajecounterhack on what 'disadvantage' means, and they chose an unfortunate analogy to illustrate their idea of disadvantage that is perhaps more fundamental to the disadvantaged person than they were going for.
The point is that 'disadvantage' does not take away opportunity, and disadvantage in the US no longer comes purely on racial terms, at least not when it comes to opportunity for education and financial success. You can get a degree by studying hard for the SAT and better your circumstances for a well placed $20 in high school, or you can join a trade school and say screw it to higher education and still better your circumstances. These opportunities exist for pretty much every black kid as long as they don't break the law and avoid addiction. They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
Yeah I do regret drawing this analogy even if I still think it's apt, since it's distracting from my point instead of reinforcing it.
> These opportunities exist for pretty much every black kid as long as they don't break the law and avoid addiction. They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
I wasn't saying black folks are disabled. I was trying to express that some folks have disadvantages in life that start from birth, and color qualifies as one of those because of the way society at large has and continues to discriminate against folks with darker skin. This particular discrimination deserves addressing through efforts like affirmative action because its impact on life outcomes is profound.
You could say that the ability to buy an SAT book is all it takes to get a degree, but this doesn't track with reality. Preparation for college education starts from youth, and in the US public school quality is related to where you live. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow extend to where we live today. An emphasis on education as a means to better yourself is also commonly handed down by your family -- but what if your family traces back (it's not that far) to an era where black folks were discriminated against when it came to education?
There are other interesting ways to slice it (e.g. how many of your parents went to college is a predictor of whether you'll go to college and also whether you succeed if you go; being poor at harvard means you actually don't get the same experience as folks who are better off).
> They are in no way 'disabled' and have agency over their own destiny.
I 100% agree with this statement, I just think that agency can only get you so far. You need supporting infrastructure, otherwise in the aggregate we will continue to perpetuate inequities (which unfortunately also reinforce discriminatory viewpoints).
1. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a time frame. This is tricky because any time you come up with will seem pretty arbitrary.
2. Say that the affirmative action policy is temporary based on a metric. This is also tricky because that metric is arbitrary (worse - it may never be accomplished).
3. Say the affirmative action policy is merited indefinitely which is in my opinion racist, because this is saying there's something fundamental about this group that makes them incapable of handling a level playing field. I simply don't believe this is true.
I think we need to come to terms as a society with the hard reality that all three above cases are morally and logically bankrupt, for any meaningful length of time. Arbitrary race-based criteria for determining 'disadvantage' just don't work. People have to be given the dignity of mastery over their own fate and it's patronizing (borderline racist) any other way, unless extremely limited in scope.
No it's not! That's the most goddamned racist thing I've ever heard. Holy shit.
You should listen to Thomas Sowell, a "disadvantaged" black person, respond to your argument since you clearly won't listen to me: Discrimination and Disparity https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36222735
To summarize Sowell: telling a bunch of young black children that they're handicapped is the exact opposite of lifting up and supporting those in need. Perpetuating victimhood is not the solution. This worldview is poisoning kids minds and fucking them beyond repair. It is so goddamned unhealthy it's destructive and only serves to reinforce the false narrative that minorities are victims.
_That's_ racist.
Oh and I'm not going to read a book by a guy who defended Trump as being "not racist." While we're out here recommending books, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me exemplifies my point: a father telling his son the hard reality of our broken system.
There's too much bullshit out there for me to read every jamoke's book without doing some filtering based on whether this person is likely to be credible or improve my understanding of a situation. It's not identity politics, it's self-preservation.
Maybe not broad impacts, but there are definitely impacts on the margin. Lowering the admission bar for one person means that, all things equal, someone better qualified is excluded. People want the best for their children and will generally prioritize their outcomes over others', regardless of past or present ill treatment of those others.
AA is a violation of the 14th as judged by Scotus. There may well be a 5th Ammendment case if folks are looking for compensation (iirc the amendment that abolished slavery explicitly stated no 5A compensation would be granted to slave holders), but whichever solution is chosen still needs to abide by the current laws that prohibited the past behaviors.
This assumes there's some objective way to stack rank high school students by potential, and there's not. At some point exclusive schools like Harvard just shape their student populations to an arbitrary standard. How do you compare GPAs at 10,000 different schools for example? Is a 1550 student who started a company more or less valuable than a 1600 student who won a science fair?
Any prospect can achieve either of your two examples. People can't do anything to boost their chances if we boost based off of skin color.
I think it's interesting that no one is willing to address this part.
I can’t follow your math at all.
Something like 30% of the student body, per the opinion, is black or Hispanic. If you assume that all of those people were admitted solely as a result of affirmative action (which is obviously not the case), that creates a 30% reduction in available slots, which will reduce the admission rate of everyone else (assuming the same people apply) by 30%.
This is made up, but I don’t see where your 10% comes from.
30, 10, it doesn't matter, my point is your chance of getting into Harvard is already vanishingly small (4%) and even if it's a 30% reduction in slots, your chance goes from 4% -> 2.8% which is a similar order of magnitude.
It's also a biased process in a thousand other ways even without affirmative action, so why are we sweating this small thing. You're likely to be squeezed out by some ultra-privileged person whose parents could pay for essays to be written, SAT coaching, and exclusive extra-curriculars to pad the resume. Not some poor hispanic kid who grew up with nothing and would have scored 200 points better on the SATs with the right coaching.
> Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations.
And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains.
Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.
I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome".
Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?
We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.
Do Indian people massively disproportionately own hotels because other ethnic groups don't have the same opportunities? Is there something fundamentally wrong with non hotel owning ethnic groups? It's not systemic Indian supremacy, it's just historical accidents compounded through network effects. Noticeable differences between populations frequently occur by random chance, they're usually evidence of nothing at all.
And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome.
Example: assume that a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born and b) how rich your parents are affect your opportunities for success.
These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them.
In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation.
More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline.
Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich.
See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard.
Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities.
In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity.
I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.
Now, I'm personally against race-based affirmative action, but I also recognize that a freshman class composed entirely of students of the same skin color is not an ideal outcome. The fact of the matter is that everyone in that class would have some degree of similarity in their life experience, because their skin color is unavoidably something upon which people notice and discriminate (e.g. dating preferences, subconscious stereotyping, etc.).
I think the ruling also understands this, and it emphasizes that university admissions offices are allowed to consider upbringing in their evaluations of applicants. So if they want a class with some poor kids and some rich kids, and some musical geniuses and some athletes, and some boys and some girls and some gay people and straight people, then they should be allowed to consider all those factors. And perhaps naturally this will result in a class with a heterogenous racial makeup. But what they can't do is work backwards from that, and assume the racial composition of their class must be a proxy for all the other axes along which they want to minimize its homogeneity.
I'm not sure about the underlying logic, and I think it's possible it just shifts the problem - because there is always some human element in admissions, and I'm not sure it's possible to minimize group homogeneity along an axis without discriminating along that axis when evaluating an individual - but I do feel that explicitly discriminating evaluations of individual applicants based on race is clearly wrong.
As a final point: It's also worth considering that even when discriminating on race, the universities were still discriminating along other axes arguably not "in the spirit" of affirmative action - for example, a black person from a boarding school would receive more "benefit of the doubt" than a black person from a public school. And isn't that institutionalizing whatever biases led one applicant to a boarding school but kept another at home? Maybe a positive outcome of this ruling is that it will force universities - who rightfully strive to minimize homogeneity of their incoming classes - to actively seek metrics for measuring diversity instead of lazily depending on skin color while ironically institutionalizing the same biases that affirmative action sought to eliminate.
No, accepting federal funds doesn’t make them government actors, nor does it subject them, particularly, to the Constitutional provision here (which binds neither private parties nor the federal government, but only the states.)
They are bound by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though, and the Court has a history of interpreting the language of that statute through the lens of its 14th Amendment jurisprudence regarding similar language, which it followed (while altering the guiding jurisprudence) in this case.
Not one affected by the restriction on state action in the 14th Amendment.
> and cannot continue to give funding to these schools if they continue to use affirmative action.
Yes, it can (this is obvious, since the decision itself explicitly allows the federal government itself use race-based criteria in its own admissions at the schools it runs, notably, the military academies) and it can change the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 so that the interpretation of the 14th Amendment limits on state action that the Supreme Court imported to it due to textual similarity are not imposed on recipients of federal funding.
Either way I'm happy with today's ruling and look forward to everyone getting a little more equal treatment under the admissions process.
Standardized metrics are one of the constraints that made affirmative action a problem in the first place, because when evaluations are limited to standardized metrics like test scores and GPA, the top universities have enough applicants to fill their class a dozen times. So they need to discriminate on some attributes. Maybe one alternative is a standardized baseline and a lottery system for the remaining spots. But when you're at the point of removing discretion from the process, and imposing government designed rubrics on every school, the process starts to look a bit Soviet...
I understand completely that life is harder for some than others, whether due to race, religion, financial history, etc. but to allow for a selection process to use any combination of that and intentionally exclude people due to their race is wrong. This is America, some people have it easy and are born with golden parachutes, but those people are actually few and far between and everyone has the chance to work hard here and succeed. Again the effort involved will vary but the opportunity is always there.
For example, my (white) dad got into Yale and Princeton, and it probably helped that he was from a podunk town in Wyoming.
For a lot of poor white kids though, their situation isn’t obvious from their application.
So yes, poor people, but also very much non-whites.
Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether people who had been legally discriminated against all their lives should be compensated, as if they had been wronged in a tort sense. This would obviously be extremely expensive, and anyway impossible to quantify, so it never happened.
Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. Can it balance exactly against the disadvantages of discrimination? No.
> I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
(It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down?
> America is not in the least social-democratic,
It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.
Ask any black person and there's your answer.
Are you saying rich black people aren’t as black as poor black people? I seem to remember a presidential candidate saying something similar.
Why would you punish someone for their success despite the disadvantage you insist must be accounted for?
my point is that looking at the outliers of any context aren't going to be the ones that give you an accurate picture of reality.
The issue is this has nothing to do with the goal of educating someone in a certain subject based on their academic proficiencies.
Go ahead and give poor people money, but no reason to make other processes and institutions less meritocratic. I know legacy/bribed via donation admissions exist, and those are obviously also a problem too.
You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.
Getting into the weeds of defining who is and is not deserving of wealth redistribution is just going to waste society’s resources by pitting tribe versus tribe, and ironically mostly helps those at the top.
“Poor” is easier to define and rectify, and at the end of the day, I think the goal should be to provide a floor to members of society and maximize opportunities to all.
South Africa is also a good example of what happens if people decide to go back and reopen that box (and tbf, when it came to money the initial movement was quite short-lived, the current President of South Africa got very rich very quickly).
Staple an endpoint on it then move on. The trick is doing SOMETHING meaningful and country wide is whats missing.
Instead, just offer free college to everyone.
I would rather no one bear the economic burden of the myriad of diverse injustices committed by our society in the past than that only specifically the descendants of those enslaved in the past be freed of the economic harm of that particular injustice, even if its effects could be fairly isolated, computed, and compensated.
I'd argue that slavery made a small % of influential plantation owners very rich at the expense of the suffering of a large number of people, and less importantly the economy.
Places in the U.S. that didn't have slaves are richer today than places that did.
There is a lot of research on this subject but it is worth remembering that slaves were capital that had a price too. So it wasn't "free labour" in any sense.
Most plantation owners didn't end up rich either, there were economies of scale and the price of cotton collapsed over the 19th century.
Over the long-term though, slave labour has typically inhibited economic development.
American slavery in the U.S. South was threatened more by the invention of the cotton gin and the global floor for cotton prices dropping. This was diversified away somewhat with Tobacco, but still a major factor in the economics of slavery.
The sad part is that the US South was fearful of this economic reality - up to runaway slaves and illegal slave trade decimating the profit margins - which meant the powder keg for revolt was ready. But as we can see from the Southern "Tax" men stealing from the citizenry, the French less incentivised because of global cotton prices; the future in American slavery was futile.
Just last week, a woman was arrested in Germany for practicing slavery whilst living back in Syria. It shouldn’t be hard to find news about people being sold on WhatsApp in the Middle East. BBC did a special on it. This isn’t even going into the obvious slavery, and the market for it, that persists even further East.
There are plenty of books on this subject, I think "Capitalism and Slavery" goes into this well, but it's pretty well documented. Slavery was a huge part of the southern economy, it wasn't just a few individual slaveholders getting rich; it was embedded in the very way of life in the south. It's akin to saying "America isn't rich because of Apple, there's just a few wealthy executives at Apple" - it totally ignores how embedded Apple is in our economy - from the app store, to digital payments, to the entire businesses that live on that platform. It's not controversial at all to say the country was made richer because of slavery.
It's not to say that every plantation owner was massively wealthy, or America was a super power due to slavery, but America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
The part you’re leaving out is that, as a direct consequence of this practice, the South was a backwards and impoverished part of the country for that entire period.
> America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
That Industrial Revolution started not too long after American independence, but it only happened in the North, not the impoverished slave economy of the South. That’s one of the fundamental reasons the North won the war. Slavery didn’t make America richer; it made America significantly poorer. And the Northern capitalists knew it at the time, which is why they were a major part of the antislavery coalition that ultimately formed the Republican Party.
The part that you're leaving out is that they were backwards and impoverished BY CHOICE. They could have automated just as much as the North did. They chose not to, because it was politically advantageous for land owners to keep their slave populations, which effectively also kept wages low for non-land owning white folk.
The abolition of slavery was economically good - if not for the fact you freed up a massive labor pool out of what was essentially farming into working in factories. But that initial suppression, combined with with the continued discrimination that led to plenty of African Americans (and Natives, and arguably the earliest asian settlers) to be regularly robbed of whatever the could build contributes directly to the reason that we are still circling around the reparations concept today.
Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad", the effects of slavery prevented the entire demographic from building wealth; and a lot of was stolen in a government sanctioned manned, e.g. the Tulsa bombings in 1921, 50 years after the abolition of slavery.
Also,
> Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad"....
What on earth gave you the idea I would believe such a thing? That's the exact opposite of what my argument would imply.
Or conversely if a large nation today enslaved a substantial portion of it's population do you believe that their GDP would increase or decrease?
And most of cotton generated by slaves went to Britain, whose textile mills also captured most of the profits off of that industry. Should the USA therefore demand reparations from Britain?
But we could go the other route, and tax the descendants of the slave owners. Unfortunately, the largest and most easily identifiable group of descendants of slave owners are blacks themselves! (You can thank a common practice of raping slaves for a lot of that.)
The best solution that we ever came up with for this mess was school busing. Since we got rid of it, the black-white income gap has been rising. But nobody wants to talk about it. Instead, let's focus on the token gesture of affirmative action, which never made a difference in the lives of most blacks. And which tainted the success of blacks whose success was not because of affirmative action.
https://www.historynet.com/the-day-new-york-tried-to-secede/
If anything, this is an argument against reparations. Slavery has been around and accepted since before the Bible was written; we just keep finding ways to redefine it. An entire war was waged in which people died fighting to restore slaves' freedom. The debt has been paid.
What reparations should be paid out for is the systemic effect of abusing the justice system to keep blacks in cages long after slavery ended. The war on drugs, the war on crime, the wrongful convictions from both, BLM...that much is extrajudicial and occurred in our lifetimes. They really get/got fucked by the system in a not-so-legal way, which merits correction.
It does not matter how long slavery has been around. What matters is that the nation accrued gigantic collections of material wealth on the backs of American slaves. The American Civil War was NOT fought to restore the freedom of slaves. The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
No debt has ever been paid. Those union soldiers were never fighting to end slavery. They were fighting to maintain the union. Those are fundamentally different objectives. Your perspective is not held by any scholarship on the matter past jingoistic elementary school textbooks.
> The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
You just made the argument that the South seceded over a single issue-- slavery. The North responded by declaring war on its own countrymen (it was the North that declared war, remember)-- and not because they wanted to keep slaves, but because the South was out of line.
Were that the case, we could have avoided the bloodiest battle in American history by simply negotiating an outcome where the South was allowed to keep its slaves. We don't care about ending slavery, anyway, so who gives a fuck? Keep your goddamn slaves. Surrender your arms and apologize.
At any point during the war, the Union could have ended it by making the same concession-- they didn't care about ending slavery, right? We'll just keep throwing our sons at the problem and have them shipped back in neat little boxes though.
Once the rebellion was over, the Union could have packed up and went home and still let the South keep its slaves (because it was never about slavery!), or left the slaves to their fate as abandoned property, but instead they were emancipated and had their personhood recognized by the Union that you claim only got involved to big-dick the South.
So the Civil War was entirely about preserving the ego of a bunch of Narcissists whose progressive social values and efforts in abolishing slavery in their own backyard somehow translated to a lack of interest in going to war with a clique of rebels that refused to adopt the same principles, until someone cucked Honest Abe. That much could not stand. We were totally cool with letting the South continue having slaves-- they just needed to be taught a lesson in respect.
Come on. This isn't how politics or statecraft works. The situation is more nuanced than either of us is getting into (economic advantages to war, slavery, etc.) but this is more histrionic than history.
The Union soldiers could and did fight for both things. I reminder that this one one of the most popular marching songs for Union troops at the time:
John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back!
His soul is marching on!
His pet lambs will meet him on the way;
They go marching on!
They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!
As they march along!
Now, three rousing cheers for the Union;
As we are marching on!
Then we'd have to address every single group that has been discriminated against in US history - including Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, Mexican, and more.
Turns out - every group has been discriminated against at some point in history.
So the very idea of reparations for one particular discriminated group - out of all the rest - is racist in and of itself. Additionally, it solves nothing except give people a temporary shopping spree.
You cannot right history's wrongs by throwing some money around.
Let's, collectively, put on our grown-up pants and work together to ensure the future holds equal opportunity - not equal outcome - for all.
This is staggeringly incorrect.
> we are able to sustain several Government Bureaus and Departments, and accommodate Tribal Autonomy, Courts, Casinos, and more as some small measure of respect
In no small way are these "tokens" responsible for the unacceptable conditions many native Americans endure today. In so many ways, these tokens turned out to be the most cruel act against these people.
> Reparations can be non-monetary too
They are always monetary demands. There is no reparation available that restores any injustice, nor does not punish those who had absolutely nothing to do with any injustice perpetuated in history.
Reparations are about buying votes, exactly in the same way dangling student debt relief buys votes. It's pretty simple... and in non-trivial ways is discriminatory in itself.
if you think that's true, then do it, instead of complaining that another group of people are compensated for past wrongs
it sounds like a "perfect solution fallacy" to me, anyways: we don't actually need to, you just personally feel we should as a result of your one individual sense of morality
relevant, I don't think so, but again, you're free to advocate for whatever for whomever, nobody is stopping you, as long as you aren't cynically using discrimination against 1 group to justify not dealing with the discrimination against another
otherwise, again, that sounds like a perfect solution fallacy: 'we can't fix everything at once so we should do nothing'
For example, apparently not all the slave owners were white:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/applied-and-social-s...
That's likely to complicate the heck out of things.
Which is directly tied to the above mentjoned issues.
In the US, isn't that the case regardless of people's skin colour?
This example springs to mind for me anyway:
https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/verdict-in-polic...
Unfortunately, statistics don't really bear out a lot of popular claims about the impact of poverty. For example, per-student funding does not make as big a difference in academic performance in schools as demographics and the local social environment: there are a lot of schools with bottom barrel funding that perform great and schools with exorbitant funding that perform miserably. And family income is not the strongest predictor of SAT scores.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1903856116
Deaths per capita are higher, but their police encounter rate is also higher. The higher encounter rate is possibly due to discrimination, but it doesn't match with your story about calling the cops and then getting shot.
The authors wish to note the following: “Our article estimated the role of officer characteristics in predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police. A critique pointed out we had erroneously made statements about racial differences in the probability of being shot (1), and we issued a correction to rectify the statement (2).
Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.
While our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot.
Everyday there is a non-zero chance of being shot by police whether you intiate the encounter or not.
It hasn't but it should be. One thing I know for sure is that the first step to ending that discrimination shouldn't be to add more. Why not start by removing that?
Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. The "last chattel slave" was only freed around September 1942. I've seen this reference in several places, but the most direct one is a footnote on a wikipedia page [0].
Regardless, it is probably not worth putting a time limit on suffering. The children and grandchildren of enslaved black people are still alive today! Waving it away with "time has passed" seems more an attempt to bury the issue than to approach it with some semblance of acknowledging the wrong done.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeville,_Texas#/media/File:Be...
I'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically?
To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc).
What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.
Yes and: What is justice?
> You would need to examine history for winners and losers...
That'd be a good start.
Until something better comes along, I support the "truth & reconciliation" strategy. With a splash of sociology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
Another good step would be to enfranchise people. Like giving the all the people impacted by a new freeway some say in the planning process.
As Ibram X. Kendi says: "The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." Under your and his vision, there will never come a day when people aren't discriminated for things they had no control over.
The default action today is "do nothing and don't acknowledge the problem." Suggesting any action be taken against that status quo does not in any way suggest that it is a permanent inviolable law that society must continuously optimize for nor does it suggest that it can't be done in tandem with other "progress" society may achieve.
Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so. The world presently has 10e9 people. Historically, something like 10e12 people have ever existed (I'm estimating). If you were to somehow feel the sum total of human suffering in just one instant, I daresay it would destroy you. We ALL pick and choose what suffering to acknowledge, for the simple reason that to do otherwise is impossible (and deadly if it was possible). Heck, we ignore entire categories of suffering in every discussion, like that caused by disease, heart-break, ostracism, bullying, or old age.
You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it. This is absurd. It is vain virtue signaling. Your position smacks of an ignorant pride, wrapped in a claim of impossible compassion. And this sin of pride extends to your "solutions" - you assert that you can accurately assess the suffering of all humans throughout history and take just action to make it right. That's even more absurd.
We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering. It means we must (must!) be highly selective. We must let (almost) everything go. We deal with what's in front of us. We must acknowledge how human life is twisted: Rape and plunder...that yields good kids. Civilizations collapse...to make new for the next one. Rampant exploitation...that yields just and fair societies. Cultural appropriation...that yields great ideas and art. Slavery and dehumanization...that ultimately leaves the descendants in a better position than the descendants of those that weren't taken. It's twisted, messed up, and that's life. (btw the most twisted thing I know of in nature is the life-cycle of this slime-mold/ameoba life cycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlANF-v9lb0).
Yeah, there are plenty of structures that need to be dismantled in the US. The police are out-of-control and there is no meaningful separation of powers at the local level; the health-care system is plundering us all for profit; wealth inequality continues to get worse; money in politics has ossified our power structures. And yeah, America has a profound and unique history of racist dehumanization rooted in southern slavery that continues to this day and negatively impacts many American black people in profound ways. But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK. That's just fucked up.
> Ambivalence is the human default, and logic requires it must be so.
You'd do well to do more than assert it. This is ideology.
> You loudly proclaim your aversion to all human suffering, past and present, and claim to know how to fix it.
I said no such thing, and the remainder of your prior statements are also asserting I made any such claim. Making efforts to fix wrongs is not itself a moral failure, nor is it some kind of foolish pride.
> We can't address ALL suffering. That doesn't mean that we can't address ANY suffering.
What is odd to me is that this is exactly my point. If you somehow think that racism isn't still "in front of us" as you so boldly claim, I encourage you to prove that substantially and convince the people who to this day still feel victimized by it.
> But the solution to the KKK (the original recipe anti-black version) is not to invent a ~KKK (the crispy anti-white version) and tell whites that if they don't join ~KKK then they are in the KKK.
I haven't claimed this at all. For what its worth though — you are in some form invoking the paradox of intolerance here. I'm not sure why you felt the need to write this screed, it is entirely separate from anything I've said and completely off-the-rails.
Tangential, and doesn't detract much from your well-defended point, but the percentage of people alive today is probably much higher than your estimate. The population has gone up so fast in recent years that the total number of people who have ever lived is closer to 10x current population than 1000x:
Given a current global population of about 8 billion, the estimated 117 billion total births means that those alive in 2022 represent nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived
https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived...
You know me so well.
> ...there will never come a day when people aren't discriminated for things they had no control over.
Um, what?
While I'm ambivalent towards Kendi, I have zero doubt you've got him wrong.
Maybe you're thinking of McWhorter?
To you. There's almost certainly more genetic difference between two people randomly selected from two African tribes than two people randomly selected from different self-identified racial groupings in a Western country. And a much longer history of conflict between tribes vs races. I'd note the fact this is true goes some way towards explaining why Africa suffers the levels of violence and poverty today that it still does. As for the rest of your post, while AA clearly is a strong form of racial discrimination that does little to help us achieve an ideal world where "race" is no longer a thing, it's also a policy with an underlying philosophy of "let's provide help to other people different in appearance/ethnic backgrounds" , which is rather obviously a massive improvement on "let's actively discriminate and/or commit violence against such people". And hopefully a step towards a policy of "let's help other people when they need help, regardless of their appearance or ethnic background".
No, to them. I was thinking specifically of the Rwandan Genocide[0], where there was and is no visible difference between the Hutu and Tutsi. The difference was via a field on their national id card [1].
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
1 - http://www.preventgenocide.org/edu/pastgenocides/rwanda/inda...
Taller men tend to earn more money on average so in those terms both the average Tutsi, Hutu and outsiders should be able to make a better than random guess about who is Tutsi or Hutu.
"Prior to the arrival of colonists, Rwanda had been ruled by a Tutsi-dominated monarchy since the 15th century."
"Rwanda was ruled as a colony by Germany (from 1897 to 1916) and by Belgium (from 1922 to 1961). Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government. Such discriminatory policies engendered resentment."
"When the Belgians took over, they believed it could be better governed if they continued to identify the different populations. In the 1920s, they required people to identify with a particular ethnic group and classified them accordingly in censuses."
On the other hand, a great many people today all around the world, and of many skin colours are descended from slaves. I am mostly familiar with this history in Europe and Africa, though I have no doubt it went on to a greater and lesser extent elsewhere. Supposing that the average reader here, who does not consider themselves to be "minority", is a "white" American, how confident are you that your ancestors do not include many slaves? Slavery in Europe still exists, but in the traditional sense with open buying and selling and large-scale enslavement it was openly and widely practiced in England and Germany and Poland and wherever you trace your ancestry no more than a thousand years ago.
You may consider it inappropriate to put a time limit on suffering, but in practice it's implicitly done all the time. The US is exceptional in having so many people who bear clear marks of historically nearby enslavement. Other parts of the world have been more successful in forgetting.
If I proposed to some Ivy League admissions panel that the descendants of biblical Jews should be favoured over those of Egyptians on account of enslavement would anyone listen?
You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. The people who had been harmed by those policies are not the ones seeking admission to Harvard. Everyone seeking admission to Harvard has been born into circumstances through no fault of their own, so just help the financially less fortunate to provide more equal opportunities across the board. Black people are disproportionately represented among the poor, so this would disproportionately help them anyway.
IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out.
Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.
How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period).
If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.
I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world.
> and the same schooling prior to college
This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps.
> The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.
Medicaid attempts to accomplish this. I'm not sure how well. Careful when you say "same," the solution might end up being equally bad for everybody.
>same schooling prior to college.
Stop funding by zip code, that's the cause of it. Fund by either voting district or entire state.
What is your basis for saying this?
Info I have come across suggests the opposite: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wis...
Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized.
Why?
Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?
As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.
Now, some professors have actually started grading differently according to racial criteria. This will further wreak havoc, because the students know quite well how they stack up to their peers. It makes the "helped" student dependent on being given advantadges, which I think is by design. If your success in life depended on a gigantic bureaucracy of discrimination, would you be in favour of abolishing it?
It's a real problem, and you can see why nobody is addressing it honestly when these are the consequences of doing so.
> And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students?
Yes, very much so. It's no secret that we're starting to see a bi-modal distribution of outcomes for top school students. Contrary to the myth, graduating Harvard isn't (at least, no longer) a ticket to an exceptional career. Plenty of graduates proceed to have a normal (or worse) career that isn't better from what a graduate of a lower-tier school would achieve.
In tech, that means that while some top school grads end up in high-flying unicorns and desirable FAANG positions, others end up in sleepers like Oracle.
> Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.
The book Black Rednecks and White Liberals explores the cultural dimension pretty extensively.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but this comment is actually pretty disgusting, part of this new type of thinly-vailed socially acceptable racism that is justified on the basis of being on the "right side of history".
The real reason is because they want equity - equal outcome for all. That means penalizing the overachievers and redistributing the outcomes they deserve to the underachievers.
Race and other grievances are just excuses.
I think you should assume most people act in good faith and are just trying to be nice to people they care about, but because human systems are, like humans themselves, complex and flawed, this can create more harm than good.
There has, as far as I can tell never been a "them". Furthermore, assuming such a "them" exists tends to lead to all sorts of bad behavior.
It's likely that individuals that support the social justice cause have good intentions, however, the cause itself as a system is leading to paradoxical outcomes that are different and sometimes the opposite of what it pretends to promote.
I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. There will never be a consensus on what is "made right" and "fair". And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way.
Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more.
I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found.
Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.
I have family who recently immigrated from Liberia, and their general sense is that the black slave descendants had their family structures so incredibly destroyed that it makes sense to focus on those descendants instead of all Black people.
In their communities with strong family networks and more fathers in the home, they don't see nearly the same issues as the mostly fatherless slave descendent families.
It's my understanding that this one is less about the legacy of slavery per se, and more just a feature of poverty.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...
But one wouldn't reasonably expect that to continue, no? The critics who say "slavery was a long time ago" have a point on this one. Humans getting married is very normal - if you disrupt that for a generation or two, you'd still expect it to resume. We are many generations past slavery.
Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.
Maybe they were discriminated against because they were Irish 100 years ago, or Italian 70 years ago, neither of which were considered "white" at the time either. I'm sure we can play this grievance game back to the first humans, but I'm not sure what that would accomplish.
The question you have to ask yourself is: is it more important to help people who are suffering right now, regardless of their race or ethnicity, or is it more important to try and fail to solve some nebulous, poorly understood "inherited grievance" problem.
There's a large difference of degree between the problems faced by those groups.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
For individual humans, that works. Applying that opinion to society at large is at the core of the social justice philosophy, but in my opinion is misguided.
When people are focused on the past, they aren’t focused on the future. It becomes a never-ending argument over history, trying to divvy up blame and virtue and money among people who weren’t even present at the time the evilness happened and who themselves have a mixed heritage.
Should students whose parents arrived from China in the 80s be discriminated against so that you can discriminate in favor of someone whose parents arrived from Kenya in the 80s? There are a zillion scenarios like that, and when you add them up they aren’t the edge cases, the complexity is the normal case. America is a place of immigration and mixing.
History is history. A lot of it is bad. You can only fix the future, and a never-ending argument about history isn’t going to do that. We know discrimination based on race is bad. If an individual needs help, help them regardless of race.
Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.
50 years later after a bunch of people have been born, died, and moved in and out? No way.
This is not math, no matter the answer it’s clearly opinionated, hence this Supreme Court case.
There could be a discussion about one year vs ten years or something, I don’t know. But it’s irrelevant to the current topic.
Just do what’s right based on individual circumstances. If person A is poor, help them, don’t discriminate against person B. That just feels like a government trying to pass blame for its own failed social policies over the last 50 years.
If you can find the individuals and draw a straight line, then you have a case. If not, well, not fair, but welcome to reality.
It may have made sense at one time, but that time is passed and it’s incompatible with our Constitution, so it needs to go. From now on, help individuals who need help and ignore their skin color.
— As uttered by quadrillions of philosophers of varying repute
Unless you suggest an omnipotent being intervene, I'm not sure how you intend to enact perfect fairness. Circumstances change over time. With some help from other nations, I imagine Ukraine could recover quite nicely from the war in time (once it's over). People won't come back to life, sure, but that's been true for eons. Unfortunately, African-Americans generally don't have the potential for such a positive outcome, which is why reform needs to happen. To go back on topic, I just don't think AA is the solution (or, at best, it's an aspect of the solution to be phased out eventually). I've said my ideas of reform elsewhere.
Feel free to correct this with Bitcoin.
3NCnMCNjccBgpKTv35UueMRMVjEfoXGNX9
Because the alternative is to be forever stuck on all possible grudges of yesteryear, never moving on.
Personally, I am not going to start hating random contemporary Germans only because Nazis killed three of my relatives 80 years ago and, well, burnt and pillaged their way across Central and Eastern Europe.
I just refuse to be a mindless slave to the past, whipped up by nationalist politicians, no matter how horrible that past was.
Is it the same if you wait five or six generations instead of a year?
As is widely discussed and intuitively obvious, "the past is prologue."
What happened in the past is relevant to the present because the past quite literally creates the present.
As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]:
...we are going back to the old country. We're going back to where many of
our ancestors came from, to see where their stories came from, and their
memories, and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we
are.
This is what history is about. Where we come from, what lies behind the way
we live and act and think. How our institutions, our religions, our laws
were made.
Because we don't exist in a temporal vacuum (thank you, Second Law of Thermodynamics). Rather, our pasts and the impact of the events of those pasts inform and shape the present. Ignore it at your own peril.
But the people and laws that caused evilness in the past are largely gone.
What we are talking about here are the effects. But the effects are not cleanly separated by skin color, and the burden of addressing them should not be assigned by skin color, either.
Affirmative Action is just a bad solution from all angles, created by anthropomorphizing groups of people as though they were individuals.
Who said anything about Affirmative Action?
You dismissed the importance of history. That's what I objected to.
And you just dismissed it again. And you're still wrong.
Perhaps you and others are/were. But I didn't. In fact, I never voiced an opinion about Affirmative Action at all.
Rather, I pointed out that ignoring history is a bad idea.
Feel free to disagree with that assertion, but I didn't discuss AA, nor was my reply related to the recent SCOTUS decision.
Are you suggesting that I keep my big mouth shut if, in your estimation, I'm not sufficiently "on topic?" Not saying that's what you're implying, but it's definitely something that could be inferred -- and I did.
If I misunderstood, please do correct me.
Here's where your thinking goes askew, you can't simply draw a boundary around a subset of people and declare that an agentic thing. Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.
Thinking of very diverse groups of people as single entities is how you get sentiments like "Muslims did 9/11 and they must pay" without considering that the tendency-towards-9/11-ness might not carry over to the entire set of "Muslims". Less than half of Americans were even alive in 1971 and no one is alive from the days of US slavery.
Thinking "those who have inherited benefits due to negative treatment of African Americans should transfer wealth to the descendents of those African Americans" is a separate idea to race based affirmative action. Race based AA would see the children of a pair of Ukrainian immigrants put below the children of a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even though neither group has anything to do with slavery.
A small group of extremists cheered on by a vast number of international Muslims worldwide and domestically.
I don't know where you get the idea that there was broad support for those assholes in my community, but people who said the things that you say caused a lot of harm to me and my family. I thought you should know that.
I'm happy that you're a bright and honorable person but the Muslim community has a long and sustained history of violence and calling for violence against those who don't deserve it. Your choice to continue associating with it will naturally draw the ire of those wronged by the Muslim community.
And before you say that it's not just Muslims or that Muslims aren't the worst offenders - I agree. That's why I chose to leave the Christian faith years ago.
I also have nothing but respect for people who conscientiously leave their faith, whether it's Christianity or Islam or anything else. It's not easy to leave a community and I find it courageous and admirable. Thank you for sharing your journey.
Your understanding of Muslims is a narrative that I don't agree with, but nevertheless I won't say that my understanding of world is better than yours, only that I come to different conclusions, and you must at least concede that Muslims do not feel that they subscribe to a violent and hateful ideology. But even understanding the world as you do, it is not inevitable to reach the conclusion that it is acceptable to collectively punish all of us.
I have the privilege of living a happy and fulfilling life, and the ire of strangers who are prejudiced against me is not likely to change that. I am mostly objecting to the idea of collective punishment which has caused, is causing, and will cause countless suffering to undeserving men, women, and children. Even people you hate are capable of feeling as much pain as you are.
The notion that people shouldn't be judged by their voluntary membership of a bigoted organisation in 2023 is nonsense.
You're an adult whose continued support and membership enstrengthens a group which has subjugation and discrimination against large swathes of people based on medieval culture at their core.
Please stop feeling sorry for yourself.
How much in reparations should be paid for anyone to consider the problem solved?
What dollar amount should be paid out so that people feel they are satisfied and never ask for reparations again?
Then the words “accomplice”, “collaborator” and “facilitator” would not exist.
I believe countries, families and things in between can be guilty of stuff.
there’s only one United States of America but there country refers to the people that live in it.
“Italy was an accomplice to Nazi Germany during WW2”
Sure. When those things have internal organization and hierarchy and structures that lead to them making a consensus decision and acting as a whole, then yes, they can be "guilty" for some values of guilty.
Where's the decision-making system for all white people?
And yes, a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even in 2023, face structural racism over and above their Ukrainian friends, alas, arising from America's legacy of slavery -- hence affrimative action.
It's like you're saying you hit me, hitting is wrong, so I'm going to hit you back ... and you think that will end hitting for good. Er, if it's wrong, stop doing it.
maybe, maybe not - the goal, however, is not to "not keep the 'identitarian' mindset going", it is to right past wrongs, make those wronged people whole, and only then ignore identity, as long as everyone else can do it too.
I wonder about that. Unfortunately, neither of us has evidence and is just spouting opinions. I'm not being snarky; the space of "maybe this person has a different goal, and maybe they don't even realize it" is a quagmire. I agree with the rest of your statement, and I think that's the only part necessary to drive progress. Who cares what others hold in their psyches as long as actual problems are solved? (I care, but I don't believe in thoughtcrime, so I won't force the issue.)
I don't: it's pretty clear if you look into the history and explanation of it.
> Unfortunately, neither of us has evidence and is just spouting opinions. I'm not being snarky; the space of "maybe this person has a different goal, and maybe they don't even realize it" is a quagmire
you are correct that different people have different goals, and the ones who are in favor of affirmative action have the goals I described in the post you responded to.
I have no doubt that people who oppose affirmative action may have different goals, ones which lead them to oppose it, but luckily, I do not require evidence to be convinced that wrongs should be righted before calling everything even.
Ok, so what’s the dollar amount? At what point can we say the past wrongs have been righted, and that everyone should stop talking about identity now?
e.g. it should be at least 1 dollar, so we can start with 1 dollar without needing to decide the upper limit
indeed, it seems like a question intended to stop the action entirely, rather than one intended to discover the right magnitude of action
as for when everyone can stop talking about racial identity: the racism ongoing today itself is an example of this, so when racists stop doing so first, anti-racists can, second
If you can't define a target upon which reaching it would allow us to consider the problem solved, then suggesting that anyone will move beyond identitarianism after the problem has been solved is totally disingenuous.
To suggest that there is no need to define an upper limit to reparations implies that you don't believe the problem ever can be solved, and that these kinds of multi-generational grievances should persist perpetually.
I don't agree that "0" is unworkable. I'm obviously not thrilled that my not at all distant relatives were slaughtered by Nazis, but holding my breath for reparations is only going to do me a disservice and isn't going to bring those people back or undo that suffering.
The suggestion to "start with 1 dollar" is frankly bizarre. Is that all my dead relatives are worth? A dollar?
the goal isn't to "move beyond identity" yet, it is to right past wrongs. Once we've done that, we can move onto another goal like the one you suggest there.
how will we know when we're at the finish line? It isn't actually necessary to figure that out upfront (that's what agile planning is about, for example). All that's necessary is to ask "are we there now?", and we aren't, so more effort is required before reassessing
when slavery was instituted, the people who supported it didn't ask "when will it be too much slavery?", so we don't now need to ask "when will we make up too much for it?"
> I don't agree that "0" is unworkable
I do, so maybe you can suggest another number, and we can compromise, try it out, and reassess afterwards: after all, it's not like giving 1 dollar would be worse than slavery!
I’m sorry, but this line of reasoning is so utterly insane that I can no longer continue to engage.
is it? I'm not so sure.
this response sounds like when advocates of the former president similarly thought themselves above engaging with what they similarly believed was the "insanity" of the american people, and said former guy lost as a result.
[1] https://news.ku.edu/2020/06/18/study-shows-african-immigrant...
I haven’t seen studies looking at Ethiopians specifically. But Nigerian and Ghanaian immigrants achieve comparable or better economic outcomes compared to whites. https://paa.confex.com/paa/2017/mediafile/ExtendedAbstract/P... (“Among persons aged 25 to 54, Ghanaian men do not differ from white men while Ghanaian and Nigerian women do not differ from white women in terms of occupational status after controlling for education, age, marital status, and the presence of children, but Nigerian men achieve higher occupational status than comparable white men.”). Note that this is controlling for education, so can’t be explained by saying these immigrants have higher education levels. And of course, racists can’t tell a Ghanaian person apart from an Ethiopian person.
Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.
Lifting one group up is almost always at the expense of other groups, which is isomorphic to punishment.
If you have a way to lift some up without any disadvantage to others, we should probably just do that to an infinite extent to everyone.
Absolute Majority (>75%) of beneficiaries from AA at Ivy League are kids of rich black people and rich immigrants from African continent
1. https://www.aei.org/op-eds/affirmative-action-helps-black-im...
2. https://www.jbhe.com/news_views/52_harvard-blackstudents.htm...
My point was that simply saying there is a cost for programs that benefit black communities is not an argument against those programs. There is a cost to all regulations. We should keep the ones that are net beneficial and discard the ones that aren't.
Typically, the argument against these programs is about fairness, which you might call a "crybaby argument." Life isn't fair. These people should have learned that when they were three. The only correct arguments relating to policy are about whether they benefit society.
“75 percent of the black students at Harvard were of African or Caribbean descent or of mixed race. According to Professor Gates, more than two thirds of all Harvard's black students were either the children or grandchildren of West Indians or Africans and very few of Harvard's black students were the descendants of American slaves. ”
I presented facts that >75% of AA recipients have nothing to do with inner city crimes and poor blacks.
If you think this is ok, I dont agree with this, and neither does Supreme Court
Are you unable to do math? If the net effect of the fraud is -1 per person and the net effect of the non-fraud is 5 per person, is the policy net beneficial or not? You have to show net negative benefit, not >50% fraud for a complete argument.
> If you think this is ok,
I don't think this is OK. I'm actually somewhat disinclined to believe AA for college admissions is good policy, preferring earlier interventions like better schooling and childcare in these communities. I am merely explaining what a complete argument looks like.
> I dont agree with this, and neither does Supreme Court
The Supreme Court didn't rule on whether the level of fraud is OK. It ruled on whether it violates the equal protection clause. Please read more carefully, both the comments here and the Court's opinion, both of which you have failed to understand.
Exactly. Your argument is incomplete and therefore wrong. If you were denied admission to a university you applied to, it is because you are incapable of making a complete argument, not just due to AA.
> it is on You to provide proof that few percentage of native born Blacks at ivy league create any benefit (that exceeds the damage caused by fraudulent 75% )
Why? I am not arguing for AA. Once again, please read and understand the comments.
I need to see proof to be convinced that your claim has any merit
And your ad hominem attacks do not make your claim any more credible (I did go to ivy btw)
One of the lower ones, not the one you wanted, if your comments are representative of your thought processes.
> Your baseless claim that my argument is incomplete is itself without ground.
All policies are evaluated based on net benefit to society. I explained why your argument didn't meet that standard. If you didn't understand it, I can't help you. There is no simpler way to state it.
Net benefit - is your made up argument.
Is this “net benefit” in the room with you right now? Perhaps you could quantify it, if you could find any
I already explained that this is how all policies are evaluated, not on arbitrary fraud thresholds. I cannot make you understand it any more than I can make you smart enough to have been accepted at your preferred university.
Not necessarily. Life is not a zero sum game.
Who is hurt by better funding for schools in poor neighbourhoods? Who is hurt by training cops to not shoot first and ask questions later? Who is hurt by encouraging home ownership by black people?
Whatever that money would otherwise have been spent on is harming the recipient of that now foregone benefit. If you raise taxes to do it, taxpayers are harmed.
> Who is hurt by encouraging home ownership by black people?
If home ownership is a good thing, whoever would have otherwise bought those marginal houses is harmed.
An economy would become zero-sum if we ran up against the limits of the universe. Until then, rest assured that opportunity can grow for both sides in a transaction.
This would only make sense if the amount of welfare for rich people weren't outrageously high in the form of regressive income taxation, non meaningful wealth taxation, corporate tax breaks and subsidies, loan forgiveness programs for business owners etc etc all that on top of a nearly trillion dollar budget for military kit that sees what 40% usage?
Great and all but we really can’t afford any of this.
There’s no practical sense in which we’re paying it off nor even paying it down.
In 2012, the US was fighting two wars, so the fact that DoD spending didn't go down by 2022 is indicative of the problem.
It's also misleading to use the few years when there was substantial pandemic related spending as indicative of the US's normal spending habits.
Your information is out of date. Costs have exceeded tax income since 2010 and have exceeded total income (tax plus interest) since 2021.
The OASI trust fund that pays social security retirement benefits is projected to have a $53B (3.8%) actuarial shortfall this year, up from $40B last year. The trustees project this shortfall will increase every year thereafter until the fund is completely depleted ten years from now (assuming no change in law)
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/tr23summary.pdf
To become solvent over 75 years the SS tax rate would need to be increased by 27.7%, from 12.4% today to 15.84%. Eliminating the payroll cap (currently $160K) would buy 25 years, but only if the corresponding benefit cap was not also raised.
Social Security (OASDI) is not very sensitive to inflation since the salary cap on contributions is indexed to average wages and adjusts yearly. The benefits paid out are also adjusted by periodic cost of living adjustments. So when inflation goes up both contributions and withdrawals rise by roughly equal amounts.
The military spending that really added to the debt were primarily the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is not true. If I, a taxpayer, want my taxes raised for the sake of extending equality to a historically and currently oppressed group, then I am not harmed.
If you, a taxpayer, disagree with the notion of restorative justice, I posit that your overall happiness would be helped more by empathy and less by "lower taxes".
If you want your money used to pay for reparations you can donate to a charity with aims aligned with that desire. No one is arguing about what you do with your money.
> If you, a taxpayer, disagree with the notion of restorative justice, I posit that your overall happiness would be helped more by empathy and less by "lower taxes".
A functioning society requires accepting other people have different priorities and values from yours.
I can also advocate for the state to do it on my behalf. I prefer that solution, because a larger amount of resources can be allocated.
> A functioning society requires accepting other people have different priorities and values from yours.
I accept this, but the values expressed disturb me.
The only reason a larger amount of resources can be allocated is because you are advocating for using state violence to force people who don’t agree with you to also pay for your ideas. That’s what taxes are, fundamentally.
a functioning democracy requires accepting that, in the event that your values conflict with those of the majority, your values lose and theirs win
we saw on January 6th in the US what happens when a loud minority can't accept that
unfortunately, some are under the misunderstanding that democracy means all ideas are equal and have equal value, or indeed universally have positive value
it does not, and they do not
If the majority says, for example, some race is inferior, that's not sufficient to anchor the law and we have a 14th Amendment to protect against such abuse.
if the minority says, for example, some race is inferior, that's even less sufficient to anchor the law, and insufficient to overrule the majority saying it isn't
Dissent from your politics does not require a lack of empathy, and having your politics doesn't automatically mean having it.
When more people are capable of buying houses, more houses are built to meet the demand.
Life is a zero-sum game in way more ways than it is not, especially on the scale of a typical human life-span or important decisions that people make.
This is a bad trope that just won't die.
In fact you can see a lot of negative outcomes in spheres like housing and medicine precisely because of zero-sum issues.
Your argument (A) implies that by raising one group another is lowered. Another poster here (B) states that if we can't raise one group, we must lower the other.
These are both Manichaean positions that obfuscate the mutual gains added to economic society when one group is raised and the mutual losses sustained when one group is reduced. [The counterpoint to both positions is "A rising tide lifts all boats".] I'd argue they both arise from a sense of group identity that is anathema to both universal identity and individual liberty; at root they are the pathologies behind (A) fascism wherein the group identity is based on a threatened victim race and (B) communism where group identity is based on a threatened victim class. That's why switching from one to the other is so easy; they're both simply material grievances, elevated through propaganda into mythic group struggles.
They achieved this by promising to repay slave owners for the "loss of chattel".
The UK Government repaid slave owners and carried the loss forward over the next 200 years until just a few years ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/treasu...
What would have made it much better was additional compensation to those enslaved.
What was a good outcome for society, other than the obvious end of slavery of course, was the relatively vast amount of money freed up to reinvest in other massive capital projects, rail, canals, free colonies (no prisoner labour | slaves) for agriculture, wool, timber, etc.
What was a poor outcome for broader society was that ownership of and direct benefits from all these new projects were largely concentrated in a small group of former slaveholders.
Such is the ebb and flow of reality which rarely examples purely black and white expressions of some particular notion of absolute right.
I don't think people realize how dangerous trying to "repair" or "correct" history can actually be. It could literally go on for thousands of years, look at the Israeli's and Palestinians. While I'm fine if people who committed discriminatory acts are held accountable in the law, it's a period of time we should be ashamed of and need to stop revisiting.
In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.
> We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.
doesn't it make sense that nation-states that have done direct damage to communities should be held liable, just as individuals?
One can I think reasonably ask how this government was able to find the resources to pay people for losing their slaves and not the resources to compensate slaves for the years of freedom stolen. Although it is almost certainly too late to reconcile that particular wrong directly as those slaves are now all dead.
The slaves had no power, and this would not pose threat of civil unrest.
Interesting, and worth considering the next time there's a riot.
No I don’t think people getting their land stolen in the past 100 years is okay to let go. Same sort of people usually think Taiwan stealing the island from indigenous or America stealing Puerto Rico or Hawai’i is okay too.
Stolen land is stolen land.
The ridiculousness of the reply enhances your argument though.
How much am I owed in reparations?
https://lasc.libguides.com/mass-lynching-italian-americans#:....
I'm expecting my reparation checks anytime now.
Other commenters do not need to engage with you to refute this racism.
Clearly, people, regardless of their race or class, have the ability to observe, to evaluate evidence, and to think critically. This is not a quality that's exclusive to "sacred victims". Surely it's possible that someone's race and class could introduce blindspots to their perspective (which extends to "scared victims" as well), but assuming that to be the default flaw in someone's position as opposed to actually finding that flaw in that person's position is intellectually dishonest.
Conversations about race breakdown because ideologues are more interested in enforcing their views as opposed to finding out the truth. Smear tactics like accusing someone of being blindsided by "privilege" is the modern day equivalent of writing off your opponents without actually addressing their actual points.
For thousands of years people of several religions and cultures (Jewish, Muslim, Roman, Druze, Armenian) lived together in that area; like most such arrangements there weren’t clear lines that differentiated cultural groups.
The lines on the map are and were always arbitrary. Same every time and every where the west has tried to draw lines on maps.
Let what go ?
If someone was wronged by a corporation should they let it go ?
Even forgetting slavery, black people were wronged for generations by the state, municipalities, armed forces, banks, schools, restaurants, law enforcement, sports teams - and these were not random one off situations but discrimination by a system of racists.
A whole race collectively screwed over.
They wouldn’t let people into restaurants based on skin color alone - no one considered the individual
If you remain attracted to group guilt as being valid, some thought games. Does someone white who migrates to america thereby adopt guilt for wrongs? Does that person become liable due to the move? What about someone black who migrates? What about their child? Should the child be guilty or half guilty? Should the tax system be adjusted to compensate? What about descendants of former slave owners who are not american citizens? What if their parent was disinherited along the way? How about for gender issues? Does a man inherit responsibility for past wrongs done to women?
If you accept group guilt or intergenerational guilt you are constructing a cast society, where people are defined by their lineage and physical characteristics, rather their actions as an individual. This entrenches social divisions and undermines individual agency and freedom. Western culture, nations and law are grounded in individual responsibility not group identity and are the better for it.
Read my comment again, I never mentioned guilt.
Consider the opposing argument - groups have no responsibility for anything.
Does that seem like a reasonable position?
Consider an expansion of the argument - are there still situations in which one group consistently discriminates against and abuses another?
People are already in castes, defined by their lineage and physical (and economic) characteristics.
You don't break down the walls between castes by pretending they're not real.
Only those that have proxies to accountable individuals, as in the example of the corporation, and with its exceptions such as with limited liability. Or an association, which has a board and a charter.
> Consider the opposing argument - groups have no responsibility for anything. Does that seem like a reasonable position?
Apart from formal corporations/associations, that is the reasonable position. In the context of the case, "Asian Americans" have no moral or legal responsibility to give up opportunities to "African Americans".
Westerners are not in castes.
One quibble with the word 'group' there, too: Ethnic groups are reference categories, not groups in the sense it'd make sense to think of groups as eg. decisionmaking entities that can be responsible for something.
That of course, is a racist idea, because it assigns group responsibility to the murders committed by individuals.
When we can treat corporations as legal individuals, then groups also have guilt.
And for all their shrill protests about reverse discrimination and communist Democrats handing out welfare to black people for votes to keep them "on the plantation", the red states are MUCH more reliant on federal government handouts that the blue states have to pay for, BECAUSE of their "conservative" policy choices.
https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxe...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican leaders have spent months promoting the myth that red low-tax states are subsidizing blue high-tax states because of the deduction for state and local taxes.
An Associated Press Fact Check finds it’s actually the other way around. High-tax, traditionally Democratic states (blue), subsidize low-tax, traditionally Republican states (red) — in a big way.
Do you have any economics paper indicating that? The much more likely explanation is that red states are more rural and blue states are more urban (so have higher income). Florida and Texas' economies are doing great. Notice even California had a Republican governor until 2011.
Not only you are wrong, you are wrong and arrogant.
The GOP was much, much different when Silicon Valley was being built.
Facing facts ≠ arrogance.
> Notice even California had a Republican governor until 2011.
And? California has long been a leading indicator of societal trends. (And 2011 was a dozen years ago.)
"Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy." [0]
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/biden-voting-counties-equ...
We need to keep revisiting the shameful times lest they are forgotten instead of forgetting about them and moving on.
I'm sure I'm the descendant of people that at some point were treated brutally by someone else, but it's far back enough that the memory has been lost.
I'm all for fixing THE EFFECTS of racial discrimination in the US, but it can't be achieved by sclerotizing that incorrect view of life and dragging it into the future in perpetuity.
Many people alive today in the USA were directly harmed by legal discrimination against black people. Explicit legal discrimination stopped in 1971, not in the history books. And of course, significant administrative discrimination continued long after, probably persisting today in some places.
Most histories of WW2 end on the day the Axis surrendered. I was curious about what happened "the day after" and went looking for it. I discovered that with the collapse of government and institutions, the veneer of civilized behavior stripped away. People took revenge on old grudges, stole from each other, murdered each other, neighbors against neighbors, everyone with an axe to grind. It was savage.
It took maybe a year or more for the government to begin functioning, and found they were faced with a horrendous list of crimes. Upwards of half the population were criminals. What were they going to do about it? Put half the country in jail?
What they did do, in country after country, was to simply do a general amnesty for any crimes committed before 1947 or so. The slate was wiped clean, and things just started over.
This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.
Have any reading materials off of the top of your head that you can point me towards with this?
That is a great baseline to compare reality against. One of the many reasons reality deviates, is because of racism and discrimination.
Both need to be addressed at the same time. (Leaving one, allows the other to recover)
instead of fighting for limited number of seats at Harvard and blaming AA - we should create AI technology to give Harvard quality education to everyone in the world for (almost) free
This is still an open question. LLMs will certainly help to improve teaching. But education is more than teaching. And LLMs have at best a mediocre track record of being correct. So if you are lucky you are taught something correct by an LLM.
Going to university to meet other people with which you can learn together by helping, criticizing, or correcting each other is extremely valuable. That cannot be replicated by an LLM at home. Even the experience of just moving to another city, leaving home is a part of education.
Education will always cost time and hard work. Because oneself has to change to become educated.
Perhaps your local state college could create local learning environment good enough to teach your cutting edge research and subjects, with the assistance of AI. And mobilize your local community and find peers to accompany you on your student journey.
Top tier education wont be available only to ivy leagues students, but any state school student. And this policy is strictly better than any Admission hack hatvard coukd ever do
Why have thousands colleges and employ thousands of professors (and useless admin people) who teach the same textbook subject and gove same homework assignments? Not even mentioning completely useless and unrelated to higher education industry of “college athletics”.
Something decentralized and local, with focus on self-learning, group learning, peer tutoring, and AI will make Harvard quality education accessible and almost free for anyone. It will be a matter of personal effort and skills to learn and obsorb such knowledge
This will be possible in a few years 100%
A knowledgeable specialist with experience will have strong local connections and can have his name popularized globally on Internet, just by getting good visibility online projects/blogs/research/etc.
You dont need harvard connections to create value for the society.
AA is such a silly band aid solution that only benefits rich, while the optimal solution should be to lift lives of all poor people across the board.
Institutions such as harvard will lose their relevance over time, for example nobody cares about harvard CompSci people.
Black Americans were not. American descendants of slaves were. Black immigrants do very well in American society. “Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...). That’s a critical distinction. Obama did not suffer the generational effects of slavery and segregation any more than Trump or Biden.
Affirmative action at places like Harvard is mostly not being used to help the people—the descendants of Americans an slaves—who are invoked to justify the policy: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/17/michaela-harvar....
Innocent people who just happen to look wrong, who get discriminated against so the favoured people can be quotaed in. Many companies refuse to fulfill positions even if they have qualified candidates if none of the candidates checks the right identity boxes.
Microsoft, for example:
https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-me...
Harvard's admissions rates which are hilariously weighted against Asians: https://i.imgur.com/eB92to4.png
You're kidding yourself if you think people who have nothing to do with the bad conditions the policies ostensibly try to correct for aren't being hurt.
Of course, insistence on policies like that doesn't come from nowhere. The education system is absolutely rotten:
A couple samples of the blatant racist rhetoric the universities spew against white people daily. You can write fun shit like this and keep your job since the target is acceptable:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/
Or Zeus Lombardo, who's a professor of education and has been spreading this shit for at least ten years. His recommended reading is "fun":
https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/14500834637265182...
"Whites learn to be white. That suggestion by Thandeka is that whites are not born white. They have to become white. And her suggestion is that white children who were not white originally - they were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. And this abuse is sometimes physical - of being physically disciplined into whiteness, such as being bullied into whiteness. That's a phrase I like to use, whiteness as bullying, but it's also psychological and cultural, and it becomes with caretakers and guardians. Not the least of which - the more important caretakers are of course the white family, parents etc. but it extends to the white nationhood as a caretaker, the white social system, the white social welfare, the white governance system. They also discipline and abuse white humans into whiteness."
I don't know about you all, but to my 90s brain that looks just a wee bit like blatant racism, but what do I know. I'm just an acceptable target.
Humans are a eusocial species, and history is full of group guilt, plight, dominance. I do agree with the direction of your thought though. We should strive at the individual level.
I think this is specious reasoning. We accept this just fine in other tort circumstances e.g
1) lawsuits against a city after miscarriage of justice
2) lawsuits against corporations when X happens.
Often individual responsibility will be a portion of the trial but to my understanding it is
1) a secondary or even tertiary concern
2) used to deflect blame from the group
I think in general not allowing blame to be allocated to individuals will lead to poor results. We need methods to call systems bad and curtail them in addition to individuals
Racial groupings are not even natural categories (there are tons of ways to divide people up by ethnicity).
No but class action lawsuits do give us two categories.
1. Life jackets are banned for anyone with brown hair.
2. A very large boat hits an iceberg and sinks. There are a lot of people in the water. None of the brown haired people are allowed life jackets.
3. There is a (for the sake of this silly analogy) rapid discussion, people realize this was probably not a good way to do things, and a new law is passed: people with brown hair are now allowed to wear life jackets!
4. No one gives life jackets to the brown haired people currently in the water.
Just because an unjust law is changed does not mean the people who were previously injured by the law are magically no longer injured.
Companies and governments can be found guilty of wrong doing.
ChatGPT:
Yes, both companies and governments can be found guilty of wrongdoing. The extent and process of holding them accountable can vary depending on the jurisdiction and the specific circumstances involved. Companies can face legal consequences for actions such as fraud, environmental violations, or antitrust violations, among others. Similarly, governments can be held accountable through legal means, such as investigations, impeachment, or legal proceedings, for acts that are deemed illegal or in violation of their responsibilities. The nature of the wrongdoing and the applicable laws and regulations determine the process and consequences of holding them accountable.
Edit: Havard was ruled against as an organization. Of course organizations can be held responsible for what they do including the government.
I think the question here is who is entitled to have the 'revenge' or the reparation or the 'affirmative action'
People who were persecuted or opressed? or their offspring?
For example German government agreed to pay reparation to Jews in (some?) Eastern European countries and Russia, that were alive at the time of WWII and lived on the territories that the Germany attacked.
The reparation from what I know were 2,000 or 4,000 USD one time payment.
--
So in that model a) the person receiving the reparation had to be alive at the time of the crime. b) had to be on the territory where the crime was committed c) I do not think the person needed to prove that they were directly affected by the crime
from what I know the reparation was selective. It did not cover Gypsys, did not cover non-Jews
--
I do not know what the right model is.
Can a nation be responsible for the crimes their government has committed? For how long?
If the answer to the above is 'yes' (that the nation is responsible) -- wouldn't that justify terrorism? wouldn't that justify blood-revenge practice?
But that revenge can go for generations, and at some point will be reversed -- that means, in turn, endless wars.
--
May be the correct answer is to limit the action of 'righting the wrongs' to the people who were the victims and alive at the time of the crime ?
But that does not seem to be fair to the victims either
Still, I think my as-of-yet unstated point stands. That is, the government should do everything in its power (reasonably speaking) to serve justice to the criminal and support the victim, but that just isn't possible for massive historical grievances. Where there are current issues affecting Jews or whoever else, they should be addressed. Of course, some issues can be resolved with money, while others are more insidious.
This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the sheer size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.
I don't hold a grudge against the British for press-ganging my great^9 grandfather into involuntary navel service. He was taken because he was Irish and near the waterfront at the wrong time. How was his kidnapping, forced labor, and whipping with a cat'o nine materially any different from other forms of slavery? When he escaped by jumping ship and running as far inland as he could he was risking beating whipping and execution if he was ever caught. Is that any different than runaway slaves?
Should I get a pay off from the UK because they wronged my family taking my Great^9 grandfather away from his home family and job? They systematically oppressed the Irish for centuries too. His decedents have been mostly poor laborers only edging into middle class with my parents generation.
I don't think I deserve anything that would be ridiculous.
How about my sons they are 1/16 black on their mothers side even though they look to all appearances to be of blonde haired northern European stock. Do they get any special payments for their ancestors oppression? if not what percentage of your ancestors need to be of a single oppressed group to be owed restitution by the rest of taxpaying society.
oh but its was my government shitting on other racial groups. but I didn't vote for them. I usually vote third party and those candidates never win despite having better policy. Yet I am to be held responsible for crimes my ancestors didn't commit (mostly because they were to poor or not emigrated to America yet) and for government policy put in place either before my time or by representatives i voted against.
sure they suffered but why should i be penalized via taking more of my income I use to feed my family thus increasing their suffering for reparation to someone i haven't done anything to.
(I realize I'm focusing on the US; this can surely be applied to other countries too.)
Your last line is valid. Now (in the US, at least), where might massive and grossly unnecessary sums of wealth be found to be taxed? Oh yeah, billionaires. A progressive tax and elimination of loopholes such as charities are a start. If the US really is the land of opportunity, why not see if kids of rich people can work to the top themselves? They probably already have an advantage in schooling and whatnot, so inheritance should be capped heavily, or even cut entirely.
Those disadvantages include, as you point out, echoed effects from discrimination and disadvantage from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and further.
But they also include immediate effects going on today -- like discrimination based on skin color or hairstyle or choice of name or an imbalanced school system or you name it.
Affirmative action is a broad brush, as you say. But to demand that only people whose ancestors actually owned slaves be disadvantaged by affirmative action, and only those whose ancestors actually were slaves benefit from it, ignores the rest of the black experience in America, and is, frankly, offensive.
As a bonus, I'll mention that every time I learn something about black history in America, I find a new way to be disappointed in my (our?) ancestors. The most recent thing I learned is that as recently as the '50s and '60s, since hospitals were segregated, blacks often had much worse access to healthcare. As a result, when they needed immediate treatment and no black doctor was available, they would go to a veterinarian for help.
That's terrible, but the cherry on the shit sundae is that, if the veterinarian happened to be white, the care had to be rendered surreptitiously, because white people wouldn't take their pets to a vet who had served a black person.
Well, ok, you should.
Now, favoring person A due to their skin color, at the expense at person X, because person B was once harmed to favor person Y due to their skin color does not strike me as a productive way to do that.
You can start to make things right by banning that shit about children of alumni, all the bullshit police behavior there, doing some real wealth redistribution, etc. You can go looking at individuals that were harmed too, but modern legal systems have a really hard time dealing with that kind of situation, so be prepared to cover new ground, and be wary of not creating larger injustices than the ones you are trying to fix.
Anyway, I'm far from the US too. The entire thing isn't completely academic to me, but it's close to that.
We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learned by the period between world war 1 and world war 2 is that lasting peace is not about trying to fix every past injustice by never ending reparations. It is not feasible to create a world as if world war 2 did not occur, and at some point people has to accept the past and work as a single group, like say a European union rather than Europe vs Germans.
> In the meantime, Poland and Germany concluded several treaties and agreements to compensate Polish persons who were victims of German aggression. In 1972, West Germany paid compensation to Poles that had survived pseudo-medical experiments during their imprisonment in various Nazi camps during the Second World War.[35] In 1975, the Gierek-Schmidt agreement was signed in Warsaw. It stipulated that 1.3 billion DM was to be paid to Poles who, during Nazi occupation, had paid into the German social security system but received no pension.[36] In 1992, the Foundation for Polish-German Reconciliation was founded by the Polish and German governments, and as a result, Germany paid Polish sufferers approximately zl 4.7 billion (equivalent to zl 37.8 billion or US$7.97 billion in 2022[citation needed]). Between 1992 and 2006, Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish, non-Jewish victims of slave labour in Nazi Germany and also to Polish orphans and children who had been subject to forced labour.[37] The Swiss Fund for the Victims of the Holocaust (which had obtained settlement money from banks in Switzerland) used some of its funds to pay compensation between 1998 and 2002 to Polish Jews and Romani who were victims of Nazi Germany.[37]
Germany also ceded around 20% of its pre-1938 territory to Poland. The ethnic Germans who lived in those territories were subsequently denied citizenship and expelled. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierut_Decrees)
I'm not really sure that there's anything more to settle between the two countries in 2023.
The affirmative action discussed here are not about survivors of slavery. They are descendants and non-descendants. The Germany and Austria jointly paid compensation to surviving Polish. Not to every polish person who by being polish is today impacted by the historical events of world war 2.
To put the question in a different way, why is things settled between the polish people and the German people, while things are not settled between the white population in US and the black population?
> To put the question in a different way, why is things settled between the polish people and the German people, while things are not settled between the white population in US and the black population?
I personally believe both things are settled.
The key however is that such reparations are not being continued, nor are they repaying the full cost of the damages cause to every person on the planet that was impacted by the war. No amount of reparations can make right the wrong of world war 2.
If we just look at the dollar amount, according to the britannica, the money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000,000 (in 1945), which does not account for the human costs (the cost of slavery in Amercia is mostly about human cost). The reparations that Germany has paid is nowhere near those.
If we imagine them having a debt of $1,000,000,000,000, the inflation alone would be around the same as their GDP.
Germany was definitely punished through occupation, partition, forced resettlement of its people, forced ceding of territories to other countries, reparation payments, exportation of its industry, and forced labor by its POWs.
But in terms of feeling national guilt, that wasn't much of a thing immediately post war. The national reckoning for the Holocaust and dismantling of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and such didn't happen until decades later, the 68 movement was a major catalyst in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement.
High schools in Georgia have had segregated proms as recently as 2019 (and possibly since then too), either formally, up to 2012, or informally (one county had schools that had a prom that was open and then a "white prom" which didn't specify attendance requirements, but I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to who was welcome where.
I don't disagree with you, but I've always found it wrong that in a lot of cases of academic affirmative action, it's Asians who are absorbing the cost of making things right, when they are definitely not responsible for any of the wrongs done.
Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how?
> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.
How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight.
In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being.
If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.
It’s been 60. “Black People Were Enslaved in the US Until as Recently as 1963”:
https://www.livescience.com/61886-modern-slavery-united-stat...
I suspect that's strongly correlated to whether those alumni made contributions to the university or not.
I know several children of alumni that were rejected - and their parents hadn't made donations, either.
The only way forward is to correct current injustices and level the playing field on which people compete today (i.e. the rationale behind affirmative action). I do think the focus should be on class rather than race; the two are highly correlated but not the same. Nothing in the SCOTUS decision seems to prohibit affirmative action based on class, so I actually think this ruling could turn out less impactful than many seem to fear or hope.
If reparations were being paid, it could be paid to people who are alive right now.
And to put this in real terms, the number of racial justice who have 'killed themselves' via methods like 'hanging themselves from a tree outside their house with sheets their family haven't seen before' makes you think that this really isn't a whole thing that we've gotten past. It's not like lynchings were legal in the 1950s; the perpetrators simply structurally didn't face justice for their crimes.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...
As an absolute number, more white people are shot by police than black. [1]
As a percentage of population, the rate is higher in the black population, however that's a very complex analysis when you break it down by homicides by region and the populations (many urban areas are majority black, or Hispanic).
> You've got to try to make things right.
Discrimination based on race doesn't strike me as a very good strategy for making things right. It seems to me like it will just foster increased racial tensions, resentment and problems without solving anything.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Harvard also gets lots of Asians (well, Chinese) who are obviously not legacy admits, and there is/was active discrimination against them at Harvard (they don't want the student body to be too white and asian?). The decision specifically calls this out:
> The high court found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina discriminated against white and Asian American applicants by using race-conscious admissions policies.
Also see:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Using merit alone, it is totally possible that Harvard would be mostly Asian very quickly. However, it doesn't fit the narrative that the system is biased towards white legacy admits.
Before race based admission was used “as a positive” for minorities, it was being used to keep ivy leagues from being “too Jewish”.
It doesn’t take very long to see what this is, but the topic is always about removing the benefit, not preventing the abuse.
This is the hope but banning race-based Affirmative Action that favors ethnic minorities, blacks in particular, will not particularly benefit Asians in college admissions.
Harvard (as a proxy for elite colleges) admitted 1,942 students to the class of 2027, 15.3% of whom identify as African-American, or 297 students in total. [0] (Harvard fielded 56,937 applicants for the class of 2027)
Assuming every single entering African-American undergraduate at Harvard "displaced" a more qualified Asian due to Affirmative Action, 300 spots at what is arguably the most prestigious college in the United States is not likely to accommodate all the Asians who believe they may have been unfairly rejected because a "less qualified" African-American student matriculated to Harvard.
In other words, the number of matriculating African-Americans at US elite colleges and universities is dwarfed by the number of Asian applicants who will be rejected for reasons unrelated to Affirmative Action.
As a side note, the notion that college acceptance is a rigid formula determined by grades, test scores, and extracurriculars is misguided. Turning the elite college and university system in the United States into a reward for cram schoolers will not improve acceptance outcomes for the vast majority of all individuals, including Asians, who are rejected by elite academic institutions.
Affirmative Action is an issue that prevents people from seeing the larger problem which is: why do American elite universities fail to increase their enrollments for qualified individuals given the size of their endowments? (Harvard's endowment as of 2023 is 50.9 billion [1]) Were such well-endowed elite institutions to increase their enrollments in proportion to the meritorious student population, the controversy of Affirmative Action might become moot.
[0] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/college-makes...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
Harvard could increase in size 10 fold and still not come near satisfying demand. Why does Harvard have to expand at all? Why not just have more schools?
Let's explicitly look at how this affected race (instead of leaving it to readers imaginations), since that was the issue the court was asked to consider. The student body of the US Ivy League looked as follows, circa 2019 (international students excluded):
Ivy League US Ratio Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
Jewish 17.2% 2.4% 7.16
Asian 19.6% 5.3% 3.71 1216
White (incl. Jewish) 50.3% 61.5% 0.82 1148
Hispanic 11.4% 17.6% 0.65 1043
Black 7.8% 12.7% 0.61 966
White (non-Jewish) 33.1% 59.1% 0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate)
The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.
No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.
[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...
Edit: Clarified that the SAT scores are nationwide, and not just of the Ivy League students. Thank you to stanford_labrat for bringing it up.
This is a nice story, but actually not true.
If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed as blacks in the US, but they should thus get at least equivalent treatment as whites and hispanics, not worse.
This logic makes absolutely no sense. Why can't they have a legacy admits AND discriminate against Asians? Are you seriously trying to claim Ivy League schools don't have legacy admits?
> putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission
Rich and successful alumni means more donations, so it makes sense to take in the kids of rich and successful people.
They’re also in the literal business of prestige. They use mega-donors for mega-endowments which allows them to attract and fund mega-researchers. It’s also why it needs to be super exclusive (small class sizes).
And that's in a city adjacent to Los Angeles. We don't see many rebel flags in Southern California but the segregation is just staggering.
IME it's even worse in the East coast cities, especially with the way roads, highways, and mass transit are built. I'll admit I had no idea what true segregation looked like until I lived in Ft Lauderdale/Hollywood in Florida (in the mid-2010s).
[1] https://makinghousinghappen.net/2020/06/23/pasadenas-raciali...
However, it's clear to the outside observer that your single-digit hispanic or black prospective classmates at Caltech are generally more miserable than your prospective classmates at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etcetera. They are usually the only person like you in their dorm, or in their year, or in their major. So you don't go to Caltech.
At risk of starting a fun flame war, it’s more complicated than that.
Outside of a contingent of Polish mercenaries, whom were deemed something to the effect of honorary blacks, the new former slave regime effectively genocided the whites of the island. Men, women, children, the works. Not only that, but they threw in the mixed as well. Then went about taking all of everyone’s property.
I don’t know where the exact reasonable line is for revenge when you’ve been enslaved, but I’m certain they went well and unquestionably over it.
To that end, I don’t know where the reasonable counter-balance is for France to make claim against the former slave colony for its crimes against humanity but the idea that they have clean hands and or are owed something is an appalling revisionist history of the country.
And this is where most of the problems lie. It’s like a game of telephone, someone says one thing and its passes along until its an extremely toned down propagandist version of what it was before.
If so, pretty much every nation is guilty of genocide. The Spanish eliminated the natives in Hispaniola and Latin America. Saint Domingue was basically a meat grinder under the French. There were basically no international law, only allies. I don’t condemn genocide, but do you think if the rebellion failed, the French would have pardoned everyone? Dessalines was guilty of genocide, but most other nations have done worse (Napoleon and his wars).
N.B. Haiti is very small. And the white population was tiny at the time. People always going on about that because black slaves killed white slave owners 200 years ago.
The KKK has nothing to do with it fundamentally. Matters of racism and similar (it doesn't just have to be about race, this is a problem of collectivism, of which racism is a subset) will dominate the politics of any highly diverse nation (diverse not necessarily pertaining only to race of course), and without exception.
See: what has been going on in Sweden the past decade (it has gotten worse as Sweden has gotten more diverse). Or see: the forever riots in France by the poor minorities there that have never integrated into French culture.
It's probably important to understand that protesting is to France what baseball is to America - the national pastime.
I'd say most immigrants I know, including the largest groups from North Africa, follow an integration pattern similar to east Asians I met whilst living in the US.
Furthermore, I believe that actually political views dominate race when it comes to tribalism:
from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
> Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?
Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.
> Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.
Minor nitpick, Loving was 1967.
Had?
this is misinformation; State laws had complete jurisdiction over certain matters, by design. "The US" is calling Washington State the same as Alabama. So, no.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/discrimination-on-the-...
> Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people.
And you seem to be arguing that this is “misinformation”. The best I can make of your objection is that, prior to 1967, the US did not outlaw miscegenation and that it was merely 16 states that did so and that these laws were legal in the US. This is IMO unhelpful nitpicking — the OP’s point had nothing to do with which books the laws were written in and also did not depend on all states being affected.
(The connection between miscegenation and college admissions is rather more distant than, say, the discrimination outlawed not too much earlier by Brown v Board of Education, but even that is a bit of a nitpick.)
Last statement is, some religious people, of different groups, were absolutely and completely against slavery, preached against racism, wrote laws that were fair and impartial, from the very first days. The founding groups of the United States included deeply religious people who opposed slavery and did not practice it, and therefore got no monetary support from that system. And some of those deeply opposed to slavery, grew and built a great society. You or others cannot just ignore those founders and claim now that "everyone did it" , it is the fault of the USA, etc .. The USA was a place that broke away from the Old World systems, including a LOT of slaving, but the progress was uneven, and the slave system was profitable so their masters had a lot of money and things that go with that.
That seems pretty fair to me. Unless you want to focus on the color of the skin of students and not the content of their character.
450 is 18x times larger than 25. But lots of legacy whataboutism. It’s not as big of an impact as people like to think / eat the rich, etc.
A more recent group, Students for Fair Admission, largely cited the anti-Asian angle its effects were producing.
Affirmative Action was never part of formal U.S. law, and never designed to exist indefinitely.
I've heard there is a simpler way that does not consider race that would level the college admissions playing field, make it so there has to be equal admissions based on income level per zip code, but that would kills the grandfather clauses most colleges use to get relatives of graduates entry.
.... > America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead.
....
Joy and pain will always be there. In group and outgroup will always be there.
Society doesn't need to forget anything. Wisdom is drawn from both good and bad experiences. Those who forget are doomed to repeat the sins of the past.
Not to diminish the injustice of the slavery from which Haitians freed themselves, but I think there might have been a solution short of genocide. In particular, the systematic torture and execution of children was probably not necessary.
(Incidentally, the compensation in question was paid for lost property. The French government apparently considered that to be more important than the lives which were lost!)
The KKK embodies American white supremacy. In 1925 and 1926, 50k white hoods marched down Pennsylvania Ave. 4% (5 million) of Americans were Klan members. There were numerous mass lynchings and murder during the 1919 Red Summer. This was the surfacing of simmering racism because of an influx of Jewish and Catholic refugees from WW I and the increasing household wealth of black people. Somehow, black people, Jews, and Catholics were responsible for all of the ills, lack of wealth, and loss of privilege for the average American white Christian male. Henry Ford was Hitler's hero and wrote antisemitic editorials and books.
In 2023, it's still the case that some social clubs, private preschools, universities, apartment co-ops, and more require photographs with applications because it provides an easy way to discriminate without being openly honest about it. Blackballing (secret ballot cast by colored rocks) is also used to deny people arbitrarily.
And how do we make any sense of these racist laws when there’s more and more mixed race kids applying to college anyway? Our first “black” President is half white. Our first “black” Vice President is half-Asian. If this chicanery went on for a couple more generations, every kid’s gonna be like Liz Warren, looking for any trace of victim in their DNA…
Race is a social construct. These remnants of apartheid are completely illogical. The rules are made up and don’t matter. There is only one objective race: the human race. It’s about time we started deconstructing it if you ask me.
Sinophobia is getting extremely out of hand at the moment. We need to condemn systemic racism against Asian people and reject the model minority myth, before we repeat some of the ugliest chapters of US history… both parties are way too eager for war in Greater China.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...
Is Latonya associated with lower class the way Cletus is? I honestly don't know, and I'd be surprised if most of the people hiring did. What are some "black" names not associated with lower class? My sneaking suspicion (without evidence) is that "black" names in general are more likely to be associated with lower class and to escape those connotations one would have to avoid the more ethnic names, but I'm open to being educated on this point.
The names in the NBER study were drawn from actual birth certificate data correlated with race. It was not a subjective choice from researchers. Latonya was used because Latonya was the first name given to 4.7% of the black female babies born during the study period. Just like Allison was 4.7% of white female babies in the same data.
If you perceive common African American names as lower class than equally common white names, I believe that's part of what the study is trying to demonstrate and not a flaw of its design.
You seem to be ignoring the earlier statistical complaint by the other poster. They are implying a null hypothesis where names signal socioeconomic status and discrimination may be on that status rather than race.
To test for this, you cannot start with unequally characterized populations (black and white) and compare equally popular names from each population. You need to first stratify by socioeconomic status and then draw popular names from equivalent sub-populations. E.g. equally popular black and white names among babies born to households with lowest quintile income and high school as the parents' terminal degrees; equally popular black and white names among babies born to households of middle quintile income and 4-year college degrees; etc.
But more to the point, racial discrimination has been replicated by many studies constructed in different ways. A famous 1978 study found discrimination when sending equivalent resumes that had a headshot of either a white or black person attached. Other studies have looked at including extracurricular activities that imply a certain race.
Explicitly filtering by race is bad. However, if it leads to the same outcome as filtering by qualifications, then forcing people to switch hiring practices doesn’t actually improve anything.
The blame shouldn’t be on the hiring process, but instead (at least in the US) by the politicians that have set up our cities and schools to be systematically racist.
(I still think this is a bad SCOTUS ruling, to be clear.)
The ruling is about college, not job applications. It's actually the other way around in universities when it comes to black applicants. As another non-American foreigner it's bizarre to me how many "anti-racists" are shocked by a constitutional court affirming that discriminating based on race is unconstitutional.
More or less, but not precisely. How do you define a "minority race"? Universities in America discriminate against Asian Americans despite them being a minority of the American population generally, ostensibly because they're over-represented in universities.
Mostly it was a justice thing. The US spent decades disadvantaging people based on race and this was a step to try and reverse some of that.
I agree that changing it from race to economic class is probably the right move at this point.
That being said, I don't like that the SC is legislating from the bench. They are striking this down for purely political reasons.
On its face affirmative action is pretty blatantly a violation of the 14th amendment:
Which to a trivial reading would come out as 'All persons [black, white, rainbow] shall have equal rights to attend [state funded school], and as such a right to a fair and impartial admissions process'.
Affirmative action adds the clause: "except those whose skin color we do not like today, those shall have to score higher on tests. Those whose skin color we do like today, those shall not have to score as high. Those whose skin color we do not care about can score the same as before."
> No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Admittance to a school is not a deprivation of life, liberty, or property. Nor is this "equal protection of the laws".
Where in the 14th does it say anything about school attendance? When did school attendance become a right? Which amendment does that come from?
Seems like a pretty liberal reading of the 14th to come to the conclusion that prestigious school attendance is somehow a right for white people.
Oh, and this ruling also said that "private schools are allow to discriminate on race if they so choose, this only strikes down the federal law tailored to roll back institutional racism."
But hey, if you want to make the argument that higher education should be a right funded by the public I probably could get behind that. I just don't think there's constitutional or historical backing for that conclusion.
Brown v. Board of Ed, to start, seems to pretty clearly dictate that public schools may not discriminate on the basis of race because it is a violation of the 14th amendment. What is affirmative action if not a discrimination based on the color of one's skin?
> When did school attendance become a right?
I don't really feel like in 2023 I should have to be arguing that the right to attend a public school shouldn't be conditioned on a pupil's race or ethnicity.
Harvard is NOT a public school! It is a private institution which receives public funds. Huge difference but I guess that's not something you want to consider.
Nobody has the right to attend Harvard. They must discriminate based on something. (see: their legacy admission system which accounts for half of all their admissions. Which is fundamentally racist because, guess what color of skin harvard legacy admissions predominantly have?)
> I don't really feel like in 2023 I should have to be arguing that the right to attend a public school shouldn't be conditioned on a pupil's race or ethnicity.
Again, Harvard is NOT a public school. Affirmative action was conditions for receiving public funds. But if you are really mad at harvard for not letting in more deserving students maybe redirect that hate towards the legacy admissions which almost certainly pushed out well deserving students.
That’s okay, because CJ Roberts did consider it.
> Title VI provides that "[n]o person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." 12 U.S. C.§2000d. "We have explained that discrimination that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment committed by an institution that accepts federal funds also constitutes a violation of Title VI." Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 244, 276, n. 23 (2003). Although JUSTICE GORSUCH questions that proposition, no party asks us to reconsider it. We accordingly evaluate Harvard's admissions program under the standards of the Equal Protection Clause itself.
It would be terrible for them economically, as one would hope they would lose customers due to the policy, but that's what it should be.
The supreme court is picking and choosing how they want to follow their textualism/originalism (as are the defenders of this opinion). There's no originalist argument for striking down AA. That makes them political activists (my original claim).
But if you want my personal opinion on AA, it's that it's a net good even though it's not perfect. We do need to deal with the fact that PoC have been discriminated against and that discrimination shows itself in generational poverty.
There is a mountain [1] of evidence that poverty has detrimental effects on education. We've spent decades forcing black people into poverty through red lining, racist loans, and even firebombing them when they became too prosperous [2]. So, of course, the offspring of these actions are going to have a much harder time succeeding.
Black americans have had higher rights of poverty for as long as we've tracked that statistic [3].
So should we "discriminate" against white people by making it easier for PoC to get admitted? Absolutely. The racism of the past has ripple effects that still haven't been fully addressed.
Now, to be frank, I'd rather that discrimination be based on income. Which would STILL result in black people getting a leg up (see poverty stats). But, you can't just say "well let's just be color blind now" and think everything is hunky dory.
I also support government reparations. Which could also be argued to be "discriminatory" since they'd primarily go to black people. Well, guess what, we discriminated based on race. The only way to heal that is helping the race that was discriminated against.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=pov...
[2] https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre
[3] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/poverty-rates...
okay, what constitutional basis does the civil rights act have to protect you from discrimination by a restaurant that should not apply to a university?
Did you know that private schools can discriminate based on race today (In fact, this SC opinion reaffirms that)? The civil rights act explicitly only applied to public schools, not private ones.
What prevents the civil rights act from applying to a (private) university? The text of the bill. Could it? Yeah, if we amended it. Should it? Yup, we should push for that.
What gives the civil rights act its power? 9th amendment, 14th amendment, and article 1 of the constitution.
I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People need to focus on race otherwise they would start to pay attention to the enormous social/financial disparity between the top and the bottom of the pyramid. And we really do not want that.
It really does feel like people weren't at each others throats as much 10 years ago as they seem to be now. It's almost like it's being used as a wedge to divide and distract from more important issues.
Don't get me wrong, politicians and elites are absolutely using identity to play the populace against each other. But this is less part of a grand conspiracy and more the oldest trick in the book of politics, there's evidence of it going back all the way to classic antiquity.
The poor black urbanite and poor white trumpist are arch enemies but should be close allies.
The world is governed by international capitalist classism. It gives no shit about race or gender. It just cares about having lots of disposables that have few options. There being more disposables in a particular race is a historical artifact, not a goal in itself.
Likewise, you could diversify the captains of industry but the system remains exactly the same. Because it isn't governed by race.
Depends on the country. As usual, Romania isn't really a EU country. We have reserved places for Gypsies in universities as a means of integration... not that it's ever worked.
Is that true? I have heard that white males benefit most from admission rules to colleges (perhaps primarily in California?). But maybe that's "quota rules" and not affirmative action.
Regardless, it appears as though the while male is probably going to take a hit if all admissions become strictly academically based.
Why would White students choose to claim non-White ancestry at these levels if it's going to disadvantage them?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-benefits-from-af...
The central argument, and what Zimmerman backs with data, is that affirmative action benefited white men because it disadvantaged Asians and women, both of whom, statistically, will be more-likely to have higher academic scores.
Can you link to a study showing this? How did this study define what an "order of magnitude less qualification" means?
Here's a PDF. White people with a criminal record are received more positively than noncriminal black-sounding people.
"Employment discrimination against people with criminal records, especially in entry-level positions, is rampant, as demonstrated by a 2005 report produced by the Commission called “Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market” written by Drs. Devah Pager and Bruce Western. [1] The report relied on results from matched pairs of testers of young white, Latino, and African-American men who applied for 1470 entry-level jobs throughout New York City. Not only were whites more likely to get a callback or job offer than Latinos or African-Americans, African-Americans were nearly half as likely to be considered as whites.[2] When white testers presented with a recent felony record, they were as likely as Latinos and much more likely than African-Americans to receive a callback or job offer.[3] Overall, people with criminal records are only half as likely to get a call back than those without; for African-American applicants, the likelihood is reduced to one-third.[4]"
from https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/testimony-in-support-of-tes...
"Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...
"Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers" https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/4/1963/660593
That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education. They’re “ivy leagues” for preserving class inequality having been marketed as schools.
To the extent that race is a distraction from class, the fact that counteracting racial bias in admissions has failed to uplift the poor just puts too fine a point on this arrangement.
Race in the US is horribly complicated and tied into so many parts of life here in the US. Full Stop.
HN comment sections aren't really the place to go into the very fine details, especially just one comment like mine. and the fine details do matter. Ok, all that out of the way, now to the questions here.
Let's take a small micro-example and explore a bit:
You are an African-American woman experiencing preeclampsia at 30 weeks gestation. Preeclampsia is a very serious medical condition and can cause death to you and your baby. You go into the hospital not knowing what is wrong with you, but you know something is wrong.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that African-Americans don't feel pain like other people do.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that women over-react to pain [0].
Like it or not, many medical professionals do not believe the above if they are African-American women.
So, as a worried mother-to-be, you get a doctor assigned to you, likely at random. If your MD is not of the same race or sex as you are, then your experience is likely to be less positive than if they were. From what I have heard from African-American women whom I am able to talk with about medical care, the experience is highly likely to be a negative one unless they get someone of their own race or are lucky.
So, having more people that are of diverse backgrounds in the medical field leads to more positive outcomes for patients of every race and sex.
Meaning that you have to get more diversity into the med schools to begin with. Which means that you have to get more diversity into colleges. Which means you have to get more diversity into Secondary education, and in primary education. Which means you have to get more diversity in pedagogical training. And round we go.
Yes, we could solve this by untying med school from college. Yes, we could open up the med schools to more than just the select few we already have. Yes, we could have more nurses and RNs that accompany MDs. Yes we could make medical care a single payer system and try to solve this from there. Yes, there are a million other ways to fix this.
Hopefully you begin to see what a complex mess racial issues are in the US and how at each and every level, race is a contributing factor that affects everyone. I haven't even come close to any of the real issues here, and there are so many spider webs that tie into each sub-issue. Look at this Supreme Court Decision itself, the first black supreme court justice, a Harvard Grad, voted to end it. Thing get really really squirrely.
[0] I have personally experienced this with my SO during labor, BTW. The attending OB-GYN, a man, remarked to me 'How can you stand the screaming all the time'. I threw him out of the room. No joke, this really did happen.
However, examples like OBGYN diversity might outline a slightly different aspect of race and racial issues in the USA.
OBGYN is one of the most diverse specialties and, even with more diversity, it's still going to be unlikely for an African-American woman to end up with an African-American female doctor (assuming emergency intake and ignoring sorting done at the time of physician selection).
In the 2022 NRMP Match data[0], OBGYN residency applicants were 86% female and 11% Black/African American(B/AA). Quick and possibly unreliable skimming of recent paper abstracts returned ~62% female and 11% B/AA for the current overall OBGYN pool.
11% of OBGYN is lower than the overall population demographics in the USA but the B/AA population is still only 13%.
The answer might be better education and training for all doctors, or it might involve matching patient and doctor demographics for the best patient experience, but we're never going to have enough minority group doctors to make a minority group patient likely to receive care from a minority group doctor in a randomized setting.
[0] https://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Demographic-...
I don't know about this. Like about 1000 undergraduate students are admitted to Harvard each year, Harvard being named in this suit. Affirmative action at Harvard being necessary to help anyone seems like a stretch. Is Harvard really the only way to help people? It's an elite school so I think the stakes are different than helping people because the applicant pool is very elite already.
I think in reality the US is embroiled in ethnic conflict and people are fighting over spots at elite schools for their children and a lot of this is political. There are other countries where affirmative action is used and a similar thing happens. Like in India for example, the child of a billionaire from the OBC designation has a much higher chance of getting into IIT than the child of poor Brahmins. The OBC designation has expanded over time for political reasons to form coalitions, as I understand it.
> Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?
Ironically the SFFA case argued that specifically white kids were being backdoored into Harvard at the expense of Asian students[1]. So yes, the goal would not be met. Although I need to read this case closely because the official decision mentions more about Black and Latino affirmative action.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.
Universities would do this instead of affirmative action if it would lead to the same result. But it wouldn't. It would help poor Asian students. And it would hurt the URMs who are not poor. They currently benefit from strong affirmative action programs but would fare much worse under a program like you describe.
Or we could just dissolve the country every 4 years and start over from scratch if you prefer. I don't see how that could go wrong. :-)
I want to leave a fair world to my children, not one filled with hate and systemic racial discrimination.
Agreed. At some point you do have to shrug and say we tried our best and move on with a moral bankruptcy. But we're not really close to that point yet. Bankruptcy comes after you've exhausted extraordinary measures. I would say realistically you need maybe 100 or 150 years of positive effort before you shrug and give up, and we're barely even at 50 yet.
Anyway, so the goal of affirmative action was to try to break that cycle, by essentially awarding the best and brightest from those segregated communities opportunities they could never achieve otherwise.
There was also maybe a sense of society thinking (at least in the case of blacks and maybe indigenous americans) "We owe them because we put them in this situation by kidnapping/enslaving or massacring their ancestors." Whereas with just generic poor people, to say that we owe them anything (as in "we owe them because our economy requires a pool of desparate labor") would be an indictment of capitalism, which is not an acceptable thought pattern in the USA.
It has been transformed into that through the twin attacks of "diversity" and "class, not race," but what it was meant to do was aid the problem that the US ran into after it released millions of slaves into the street with nothing, and they didn't manage to magically create something from nothing.
It transformed from that into an efficiency argument to stay "constitutional" in a country that largely doesn't feel any guilt over slavery. Instead of staying an excuse not to pay reparations to their discarded farm equipment, the justification was A) that everybody should get a fair shake, and some people couldn't because of who their parents were ("class, not race", "equality of opportunity"), and B) that "diversity" of background gave an creative and decisionmaking advantage to businesses.
The problem with these stupid justifications for affirmative action is that they don't support it at all. A) actually argues against race-based affirmative action, and B) paints it as a problem that should be naturally solved by the market with no intervention.
The problem that the US has is that it had brutal discrimination by laws at times so harsh that in 18th century Maryland (iirc) there was a law that would sentence a white person to death for teaching a black person how to read. The problem is that black people collectively have barely more per capita wealth than they had when they were freed (which was $0.)
That being said, black people have increased their proportion of national wealth since freedom, and white people's proportion of national wealth has been reduced, so that's sure libertarian evidence that black people are intrinsically superior to white people, though who can say if that's due to genetics or culture. If reparations were paid that brought the black share of national wealth to parity with the black proportion of the population, racism against black people would cease to be an issue that the government should be concerned with.
The disagreement is essentially about the best way to achieve equality, which though a nebulous term is accepted as a goal without debate, even though the definition of the term can be widely different, as in this case. The conversatives argue that we can only achieve equality by being colorblind. The progressives argue that we can only achieve equality by consciously addressing inequality.
I see some merit on both sides. I tend to lean toward the conservative view, but I recognize moments in our history where active intervention was both noble and necessary (desegregating schools, for example). The question is whether those actions were special cases or are examples for us to follow going forward.
Equality based: Fund the schools, and use evidence based educational reforms, with the result that California schools were top ten in the US.
Equity based: Not everyone can do math and stem, so defund science and art programs (already done) and try to discontinue funding for calculus (almost happened this year). Schools are now 43rd in country, but rich districts can have parents fund the missing programs via donations, and are some of the best in the country. Further fuck with things by forcing UC admissions to be based on standing within each school’s graduating class, so illiterate minority kids end up being admitted to the top schools, and need to be weeded out.
But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese.
A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences.
Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.
Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance?
My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation.
For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.
- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1]
- Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2]
- Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [1]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [2]https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-lea... [3]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach...
A lot these debates really come down to just how impressed one is by arguments like this. It so happens that an Interstate was built through the neighborhood my entire family occupied in St. Louis in the 1950s. Some of them were "displaced." I can't for the life of me figure out how this is supposed to be relevant to my life today. I'd wager that I'm the only one of my cousins to even know about it, since I'm interested in local history and bugged my grandparents about this stuff before they died.
It just doesn't amount to anything. My family members had a trillion decisions to make -- big and small -- both before and after that singular event and the sum of those decisions had a much bigger impact on familial wealth -- note: there was none -- than that one time in the 1950s they were forced to move.
Modern people are spread out all over the regions they occupy.
It really seems like on this one topic people accept arguments on behalf of other people that they know with perfect clarity make zero sense when they try to apply them to their own lives.
The generational wealth kicks in when your heirs can assume your mortgage free lifestyle, generate monthly income from it, borrow against it, or sell an asset that has likely appreciated in value (sometimes greatly) since it was purchased ages ago.
Plainly, this is not generating "generational wealth" that's giving people an enormous head start.
These tropes are repeated uncritically because people want them to represent large effects.
As an example, I went to a good public school that had a policy where the top 5% of high school students were automatically given admission to the university. While this was technically race blind, it was de facto affirmative action, because a more poor high school is not as competitive as a rich high school.
At first, I too, thought that affirmative action was bad because racism of any kind is bad. However, it dawned on me one day that if this policy wasn't in place, there just wouldn't be many minorities at our university, and in a way I would be deprived off a well-rounded, diverse college experience.
Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities.
I don't think it's really any different in how the American justice system doesn't exist solely to provide justice for victim or the accused. The most important beneficiary of our justice system, is what happens when you have justice for society. Sure, individual cases don't always have what is perceived as the "right" outcome, but that's considered acceptable in our system if the result is justice for society.
I know few friends from Lake Travis who disagree though but I think that has to do with not making the top 8% (back then I think it was lower?).
On the other hand, if your admissions policies make a point of drawing from many income brackets or many countries, suddenly you have a whole world of people who you likely would never have associated with and who are actually different than you in meaningful ways.
Country of origin and socioeconomic status are a much bigger deal when it comes to diversity than race, because race isn't real. It's a proxy for things that are real, and continuing to use it as a proxy perpetuates a subtle form of racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...
I think in general the population is mostly against affirmative action because it seems racist, and they just substitute their own ideas of how those policies are implemented. It's the same thing where if you asked people if murderers should be let go over some kind of procedural technicality, then they'd probably say no because murder is bad. However, in practice those technicalities are stuff like how evidence is collected, which can lead to potentially innocent people being convicted, etc...
Why does the student body need to replace part of its Whites and Asians with minorities to be "rich and diverse"? Can't it be rich and diverse by having different people which are each his own individual not defined by his race?
Also, aren't you worried about how getting denied admission to a college because of your race will have a very negative effect for "society"?
Hey, so there are two parts to your question, the "rich" part and the "diverse" part. I'll start with diverse because it's the most obvious.
In order to have a "diverse" student body, it should be represent a plurality of points of view. If everyone was White/Asian then the student body wouldn't be diverse, because, by definition, there would just be people from those backgrounds. Obviously there's more to diversity than just race, and I'm not not trying to argue there isn't. I am trying to keep this response short though, so forgive me from enumerating on other things when you asked specifically about race.
Ok so now the "rich" part of the question. College is an important time in one's life where many people get the opportunity to experience freedom for the first time, while they pursue a challenging, serious education. However homework and lecture is not the only place where our education happens. Being exposed to a lot of ideas, people, and experiences is also critical to the college education. By this line of reasoning being around people of all sorts of different backgrounds is part of that aspect of education.
I grew up in a suburb of Texas. There were not a lot African Americans. I actually can't remember there being any. My family wasn't wealthy though, and my parents are immigrants (just to give you some context and to keep my story honest). I truly think that if my university hadn't had its affirmative action program, there's a good chance I would have made it to adulthood without having ever been around non-white people in a meaningful sense. When would I have? I didn't choose what family, city, state, or country I was born in. All of those things happened outside of my control, and, frankly, from the perspective of someone who was from a city like New York or London I would have seemed pretty ignorant.
It's sort of like traveling, you know? Having the opportunity to travel gives you a baseline level of experience in the world that there really is no substitute for. I think having an ethnically diverse student body is similar, and that is why I said society is the primary beneficiary of affirmative action. That's my best way to answer the question without there being an actual person in front of me and being able to have a face to face discussion, so I hope you take my answer as one given sincerely, even if you don't agree with it.
> Also, aren't you worried about how getting denied admission to a college because of your race will have a very negative effect for "society"?
I am Italian. My "race" invented pizza, so no.
Edit: Also, kidding aside, give me a break. I don't even know how to answer that. You're acting like you're the victim of some kind of race war, and it's cringe. I hate to say it, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's true. You sound like one of my parents when they pretend like "you can't joke about anything anymore" or that everything is "so complicated with all the political correctness". Madonna.
It seems like a well-intentioned but badly thought through process designed to ensure disadvantaged groups gain access they might not have gotten to their system.
The general idea seems to be - if you are of a particular race, you are automatically disadvantaged over ever other race. There is probably some truth to this. However, perhaps they now need to look at how people of a certain race are disadvantaged (other than because of their race itself) and use this as their selection criteria. This might actually also raise all groups - there are plenty of people in other racial groupings who also are disadvantaged for reasons other than their race.
FWIW, I am not American and I realise this is a sensitive area, so if I am out of line for whatever reason I can just say this is an observation which may not be accurate.
After that, these two groups were substantially discriminated against in law, and other races were added to the mix to be given less rights than others.
Today, there are huge disparities between outcomes for different races in large part due to this historical discrimination. There's also an ingrained culture of stereotyping and discrimination that's hard to lift. It doesn't matter if you're the first generation of Americans descended from African immigrants who came in the 1980s... you still are impacted by this legacy.
The concept of affirmative action was to specifically counteract the effects of these negative, historical circumstances and provide a countervailing effect.
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people. (I suspect it's similar elsewhere, but we are also a pretty racially diverse country, so the effect is larger)
Do you have any sources for that?
I mean, there's a large body of evidence (I personally like the economics methodology of this study, which has been repeated many times: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0203hrn...).
But just like many will never be convinced that vaccines are safe and the earth is round, many will never be convinced that racism in the US is real, I suppose.
Then why are the white people equally poor? And does it matter where they live? For example in a major city compared to a dying small town where industry has left? That's a really broad claim to make. Would it hold true in Appalachia, for example?
I am going to answer your specific questions,
>Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Racial justice issues are separate from economic justice issues.
Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program?
Racism is a complex issue and in listening to Black/Asian/Brown Americans I have come to the realization that such programs have to be specific to each and every race because they experience racism in different ways.
A very small number of private, public and military colleges attract so many applicants they have to select students for admission.
Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender?
Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.
Similarly with the race thing. The US fought a big civil war about whether people with dark skin were livestock or people and the losing side didn't actually change their mind just because they lost. So they needed laws to address that.
What makes you think that affirmative action for women was successful?
I don't see a lot of women garbage collectors. There certainly aren't a lot of women working on oil fields. 5% of Firefighters are women. Whenever I hear about AA it sounds like the plan isn't "equality" but "construct an ideal racial society". Sounds a lot like the bad ideas leading up to WWII, which eventually led to the most horrific crimes against humanity in the history of the world.
I live in a small, now-EU, once a socialist country, and we calculate points based on grades and starndardized tests, and top X get accepted to college, without colleges even knowing who they are at all.
It became clear that immersing predominantly white, privileged students in a predominantly white, privileged campus during 4 years of college was poorly preparing them as leaders for a future world in which they will encounter a greater diversity of backgrounds than their parents did. (Because of both changing U.S. demographics AND growing global trade.)
And it became clear that sourcing students primarily from white, privileged backgrounds was poorly positioning the institutions themselves in an increasingly diversifying society.
As legal barriers to the financial and political participation of women and minorities fell, there were more opportunities for people of those backgrounds to succeed. And elite higher education institutions want to remain the schools of choice for the most successful members of society (regardless of background). They can’t do that if everyone thinks they only care about rich white people.
Adjusting admissions to increase the diversity of backgrounds of new students was a way to short-cut solutions to these challenges.
In short, a thumb on the scale to bring the student body more in line with global diversity was also done with an eye toward remaining competitive as a top choice among options for higher education.
So inasmuch as any group is disadvantaged, they'll get more help due to there being more of them that are poor and this strategy will work to self-correct the imbalance.
In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. In his opinion, he argued that affirmative action which is a race based policy is logically incompatible with the Equal Protection clause.
Affirmative Action was always about race. The US historically and systematically discriminated, disenfranchised, and disadvantaged slaves and children of slaves. The problem with race based policies like Affirmative Action is (a) like Roberts argues it is illogical to fix historical racial discrimination with modern racial affirmation (b) you have unintended consequences like discrimination against Asians (c) how do you even define race in today's hyper connected world? e.g., Is Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, an African-American? Are recent immigrants from West Africa also African-American? Race conscious policies are generally distasteful because you then dwell into how many generations of your ancestors were from X continent and what percentage you are of Y race.
That is so ahistorical, it makes me wince. A war to end slavery, yes (though you could argue even that). To end racial discrimination? That is a ludicrous thing for a supposedly educated person to say.
Abraham Lincoln didn't think the freed slaves should get the vote.
The controversy animated Roberts, himself a graduate of Harvard College and Law School.
“Take two African American applicants,” he said to lawyer Seth Waxman, representing Harvard. “They both can get a tip, right, based on their race? And yet they may have entirely different views. Some of their views may contribute to diversity from the perspective of Asians or Whites. Some of them may not. And yet it’s true that they’re eligible for the same increase in the opportunities for admission based solely on their skin color?” Waxman acknowledged that being an African American or being a Hispanic could give the applicant a boost and may even be determinative of who gets a coveted place in the freshman class.
“Race, for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip,” Waxman said, offering an example that Roberts immediately skewered.
“We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players,” he rejoined. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of considerable concern.”
The US Civil War wasn't even fought to end slavery. That's a jingoistic talking point that "patriots" like to tell themselves that has absolutely no basis in reality. But "discrimination?" That's pure, unadulterated idiocy.
The war was fought to put down a rebellion by Southern states who refused to modernize because they used slavery to maintain their representational numbers in Congress. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't even enacted until year three of the US Civil War, but the Southern states saw the writing on the wall and decided to act while they believed they still had time to do so.
The rebellion was the important thing to the North.
How does it even work? I can proof I'm poor with for example tax returns, but how does someone proof they are of a certain "race"?
Same reason everyone doesn’t just walk out of restaurants without paying.
But there have been high profile cases where it has come to light later and people have endured some social shame.
How does someone know what they should fill in?
Is it fine to fill in African American if one of your grandparents was black? Or only if your skin is dark enough?
You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.
Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.
If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.
While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial.
This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.
It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.
The amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world is not the reason non-white racial groups disproportionately lack access to opportunity and wealth and you know it.
> You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.
> Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.
I read this as saying that any difference in outcomes is due to racism. My understanding of your argument is that if it were not for racism then all outcome curves would be identical across all racial categories, because there are no real differences between racial groups.
If that was misunderstanding, I apologize!
I understand that there are differences between cultures. But saying that a culture difference is the reason that a culture disproportionately lacks access to the things deemed of value in the society is blaming the disadvantaged for their disadvantage. That is literally racism. “You do not have the same access to education that white people do because your black culture prevents you from having it.” That is obviously preposterous. What prevents none-white races from having proportional access to education (or anything of value in the society) is the racist system. People do not inflict racism onto themselves. It is inflicted onto them by the race in power.
Unless you think the 'characteristics' have a strong genetic component, and so we are back to racism.
I resent the implication that any claim of genetic differences amounts to racism. We need to be able to have a reasonable discussion about genetics that doesn't come with all the value judgments that people assign to different genotypes. It's a bald fact that there are genetic differences, and that shouldn't be controversial. The inferences we draw from that fact can be racist, but the fact itself is just a fact.
The only conclusion that I'm arguing for is that people are born and raised differently, and we should expect to see different outcomes as a result. It's pretty obvious that we have not yet reached the point where the differences in outcomes are due exclusively to different choices, but we should expect to eventually reach such a point! People prioritize different things in their lives, and sometimes people prioritize things that the majority doesn't believe are important. That doesn't make them flawed people.
Obviously there are a huge number of poor white people in America. Mostly in the vast countryside with its small towns. And you're right that they're forgotten about a bit in this debate; certainly no one expects them ever to send their children to Harvard.
I think the reason they are forgotten about in this debate is that the white educated classes feel very guilty about the terrible race-wealth correlation.
In theory, but in practice it often includes “unless you are Asian.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-fight-school-dis...
I promise if you spend even an iota of time digging into this you will find some meaningful substance that resonates wi the buoy without asking other (indirectly or unintentionally) to do your mental labour for you and to your satisfaction to be convinced otherwise.
This itself is an example of the type of variables and equations that exist that seem second nature because of how they are conditioned into most people from a young age without awareness.
That's why.
Latinos are just the foreign "du jour".Tomorrow it's going to be someone else. And it is deliberate.
I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like <1%) portion of all people going into universities in the way it was intended. What would be much more useful is exactly what you say, taking much more of the student's overall socioeconomic status into account rather than race.
We would probably find that this does a better job of helping those who actually need help. And that would likely mean that minorities are still prioritized.
Finally, what we should really be doing if we care about helping those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is make all community college free. It's already very cheap as-is , we just need to take the leap to make it totally free. This would also help the student loan crisis since those who are going for bachelor degrees would only need a couple more years of education vs. 4
One the key takeaways for me was the question of “what is it trying to achieve?” and “is it working?” To which the answers are nobody can agree but it’s not achieving any of the possible goals.
The effects of affirmative action having been banned from California public universities since 1996, including Berkeley and UCLA, was also quite telling. This happened nearly 30 years ago, so the effects are very clear to see.
Diversity was rocky for a few years, but they eventually figured out other ways to have it without using affirmative action.
The part about community colleges being a huge lever at getting more students into higher education was interesting. It’s not talked about much but has proved to be very successful.
Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certainly not with public funding.
EDIT: What I mean by that is partially to say, dealing with motivation and behavior occurs at lower grade levels and schools are fighting an uphill battle. Affirmative action politics at the collegiate level feels like putting the cart before the horse.
Because the hot topic this past decade or 2 has been about the college bubble. And we conflate college with university. I think Community college is cheap enough that no one is worried about paying off debts for 20 years in CC, but there is certainly that problem with university. With almost zero alternatives.
And to be frank, it (university costs) is an easier problem to solve. there are (apparently) 1600 accredited universities. I'm not sure about free, but if we can price control tuition (and all those other "extra fees". I know your loopholes) for even 100 of those universities, that would create opportunity where none may exist now. elementary/secondary education... we're talking 10's of thousands of schools to take into account. And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.
The alternative is mostly that a lot of people shouldn't be going to college. We shouldn't be guaranteeing loans and the government shouldn't be in the business of handing out student loans. That is a large contributor to the massive inflation in student fees. When you improve elementary education, the negative effects of less people attending college are offset by the general working knowledge of the populace being higher, of better quality, and with a mindset that allows people to really think and learn.
Without that, all we're doing is basically setting people up for failure and a whole lot of school debt. There is a large percentage of Americans who have absolutely nothing to show for their time and money spent on college because they never completed their degree.
> And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.
The entire public school system is one that favors the privileged. They are funded largely by property taxes and so obviously the wealthier your area is, the more funding and thus better education children have access to.
So yes, there is extreme deficiencies in equity when it comes to educational opportunities in the United States. Providing subsidized college doesn't fix that issue and it doesn't target the right people, either.
I wouldn't necessarily oppose actual public (completely government funded) universities that compete with the private schools, but that's serving such a small population of people for it to really see much benefit.
Well you need some sort of post secondary education these days if you don't want to be stuck in entry level jobs. It's not like I'm opposed to trade schools nor the peace corp nor apprenticeships. But trade schools are also feeling a similar strain these days and apprenticeships are non-existent for high school graduates.
Saying people shouldn't go to college is like saying people shouldn't have good jobs. And i don't think that's a better alternative.
This is entirely because people created this notion that everyone should go to college. The vast majority of jobs don't need specialized education that college is supposed to offer. If you start deemphasizing college as a basic requirement, while simultaneously improving the education system from the bottom up, you will create better outcomes and a more educated population.
Most people don't have college degrees in the US and yet it isn't the case that half of the population is unemployed.
I'm simply talking about the path of least resistance. We're well past the times where you walk into a mom and pop shop and grab a job in a few days time. At least in Metropolitan areas.
I just don't get this. Yes we need to improve primary and secondary education, but we can't just pretend like tertiary education doesn't matter to people. College isn't just about learning material in classrooms. College provides a way for young people to transition in a structured way into adulthood. It provides job opportunities and social interaction that you just can't get as easily or consistently if you immediately go into the workforce as a high school grad.
I'll leave you with this, a list of 39 other countries that provide free or very cheap college for their citizens - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Given that the majority of people in the United States do not have even an associate's degree and still transition into adulthood, even if your assumption that it gives people a structured way into adulthood was correct, it's serving less than half the population. The majority of people do complete high school, or an equivalent, though. It's pretty plainly clear that preparing children to transition into adulthood needs to start earlier. That goes hand in hand with the failure of the elementary and secondary education systems in the United States.
Also, just philosophically, I am morally opposed to the idea that people who don't or start complete college for one reason or another should be subsidizing those who can and do. College degree holders earn dramatically more money in their lifetime over non college graduates.
I understand that the goal is to expand the number of people that can attend college. I think that you would expand that number more by improving the K-12 system and you'd leave everyone better off by doing so. If you want to increase the number of disadvantaged people in university (i.e. the people that would go to college if it were free but can't afford it so they don't) you should look at expanding the Pell grant, not subsidize college for everyone.
Poor people are always told to "pull themselves by the bootstraps (sic!)"
The beneficiaries of AA are:
1. Kids of rich black people (like children of OBAMA)
2. Rich international students from African continent (Nigeria, Ghana etc)
3. Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender)
Very few colleges prefer women. Of those that do, it's pretty much just the engineering focused ones and thus would pick up nearly as many Asian women as white women.
Generally, (weak) male preferences are more common given the general male underrepresentation in higher ed.
Legacy female +black with subpar SAT scores (despite having enough money for SAT prep) is a perfect candidate in Harvard’s eyes
AA is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a social justice program.
Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. For example, despite owning homes in the same neighbourhood, the appraisal of homes of black people ends up lower than white folks[1], there are more traffic stops and searches for black folks than white[2]..etc., you get the drift.
So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. Now there aren't many ways to suddenly make this go away. So, AA is an attempt at making this go away by saying, put more of the people from the underrepresented community in places where they are underrepresented, starting with the high echelons of education. By that the society hopes to the laws we create, systems we build as a result will have the perspective of people from those community. It's not a silver bullet, not a magical solution, but one amongst many things to try.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-ho... [2] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
That sounds backwards on both points. Poverty impacts how people perceive and interact with the world from building relationships to the use and conservation of assets. For example people in poverty are less likely to save for the future because institutions necessary to safely preserve assets into the future are distant therefore resulting in behaviors motivated towards immediate consumption. That is not something fixed by just throwing money at it.
At the same time social systemic unfair treatment can be fixed with money as it allows an otherwise well positioned person to alter their relationship with the constraints imposing such unfair conditions.
> So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family.
That imposes a bunch of unstated assumptions that may or may not apply. Most all my neighbors are black families of different economic statuses who moved into a predominately white neighborhood and did just fine regarding social capital.
That's actually where you have missed the point. This isn't about disadvantaged people. This is only about race. In the US, racial discrimination is evil and is generally disallowed. But you are 100% allowed to discriminate against poor people. That is capitalism. If someone said Disneyland was discriminating against poor people because they charged an entrance fee, the vast majority of Americans would laugh at the concept of even calling that discrimination. Everyone who sells something for a price, including schools that sell access to education, are allowed to discriminate against those who cannot afford to pay. So "disadvantaged" isn't enough. To get protection or some sort of leg-up your disadvantage must arise from race/sex/religion ... basically anything other than lack of money.
Is there a legal way to discriminate based on race? I thought that was pretty much illegal in most countries, despite efforts in sections of both left and right to keep racism alive...
- totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors
- reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable
- what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they want this to be the predominant intuition even for people with more context
- logically reasonable if you assume advantage barriers generally follow a similar pattern and even then if you assume good faith
- untenable on inspection for the same reason any social democratic institution needs to exist: a thing that’s supposed to be structurally fair intrinsically isn’t, and demands correction to address that
The problem is that an economic axis isn’t the only one involved. Sometimes it isn’t even involved at all. Racism is deeply embedded in American culture and history and outcomes, even when other factors are otherwise favorable. And at least in the US, this is a huge source of conflict among otherwise like minds even on the left.
It would be much better if those with an open mind to “can’t we just level the field” had a more open mind to the various axes of relative and historically intentionally stratified advantage. That applies to race, to sex, to sexuality and gender identity, to disability. And in each, structural inequality is much more particular and involved than access to money/resources.
Likewise a better approach to social democracy is to look at disadvantages today. It is a common mistake to create false problems. This would not be the first time. And participation in society sadly has a lot to do with economic factors and I am sure that is something social democracy would like to address. Of course there are exceptions, but you have to be careful about the metrics you choose.
For example, in New Zealand, a couple of weeks ago there was a bit of a kerfuffle due to reporting on those of certain ethnicities being prioritised on surgical wait lists.
Those against it were arguing (validly) that prioritisation should only be based on clinical need.
However, the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation.
So how do you resolve this? In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution.
Instead you get a "hack" like this to increase the weight of the minorities to even things out overall, hopefully to be removed later while you resolve the trickier issues.
Sometimes just targeting things to those in most need doesn't always fairly target across ethnic groups.
You can read a bit more detail about the NZ situation here: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ethnicity-a-factor-in-surgery-wai...
If they managed to identify that “the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation”, it means they have done 95% of the required work already. So either the report is bogus, or the solution isn’t as complex as you make it to be.
All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get a good-paying job, and more likely to get one that abuses you). Race is just one more, and it's particularly effective at leveling the field because it has extremely strong correlations with (and very clearly a cause in) tons of them.
Look at any school in a lower income area and it’s plagued with issues of attendance, resources of things like access to technology, commitment of parents to help their kids outside of the classroom with homework, and general safety that fails to provide a quality learning space for children to become qualified when they leave school.
Since you can’t put massive school reform with budgets and funding to provide this to schools in a political cycle of 2-4 years, we just keep kicking the can down the road and accept instead of helping build better youth who all can compete for jobs and colleges, let’s just lower the bar and make it seem like we are doing something.
Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4].
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black...
[1] https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/two-american-experiences-ra...
[2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/10/pobre-preto-t... (article in Portuguese)
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/world/americas/brazil-ena...
Affirmative action makes sense because it's a policy that's simple, cheap and fast to implement to counterbalance this. And let's not forget that, in the past, the State legally discriminated against those people and no historical reparation has ever been given to them.
"Poor people" aren't a unified political coalition in the US.
For various reasons, you can't do political favors for poor people and expect them to reliably vote for you.
Black people are a unified political coalition in the US.
I recommend reading about Bueno de Mesquita's model of selectorate theory for understanding how stable political patronage networks operate; the model is very insightful for cases like this.
Anyhow, from the total number of seats per year, a larger number is allocated to Hungarians and a smaller one to Germans. The caveat being you don't have to be ethically German, only to speak it. In the wake of the new woke movement I can see a radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one ;) ;) ;)
So with Hungarian they fill those places with what I estimate to be 100% ethnic Hungarians. With Germans however, they're like 99% Romanians and Hungarians who take the hit of having to learn / speak German for the advantage of having fewer competition. Like mainstream (Romanian, Hungarian) computer science can have 10 candidates per seat, the German line has 1.5 or so: much easier to get in. I know a guy who couldn't code a FOP loop (with the typo of P instead of R) out of a paper bag but completed the German computer science line.
Look up Rachel Dolezal.
Capitalist societies literally cannot subsist without a class of people living in poverty. At best, that poverty is exported to other countries but it must be somewhere.
To demonstrate this fact you will overwhelmingly see black individuals from very white and non-poverty backgrounds graduating from unis. Most don't make it their first year, the costs are insane and the culture drinks its own Kool aid.
If blues legitimately cared about people the streets would back them - they do not. It's us vs gov.
I think it's much saner to completely throw away the framework and look at the issue: what you're trying to fix here is economic inequality, so do that. The side effect is you can avoid resentment from people unjustly disadvantaged by race based policies and avoid further radicalization of a discourse that has no basis in anything measurable.
To be clear: race is made up BS, and how americans view race is absolutely idiotic for anyone that hasn't been raised here. Whenever I need to check a box I have to choose between being white, or latino, or black etc...
Right there you see the problem: that list has two skin colors of uncertain definition, and a category that's cultural and not based on skin color or other physical attributes.
I was born in a mediterranean country (Italy) and according to current categorization I'm white but I went to school with other Italians that are darker skinned than people I know that call themselves "of color" in the US. So which box do they check? Can I check "latino" since well, we're the original ones? Or do I have to ask to add a "cisalpine gaul" since I'm partially from the north of the country and have a red beard?
It's complete nonsense. You're not missing anything, it's just an entrenched cultural view that people raised in this country can't seem to be able to escape.
To be clear, being better at something than somebody else who is even worse than you is not a valid excuse for being bad either way. I just hate that this kind of rhetoric 1) discredits the points being made, and 2) spreads misinformation.
But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try.
The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us.
If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked.
The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.
But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my background on standardized tests and always checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity (which is how all the tests asked it in those days, not sure if it's still the case), without thinking much about it.
I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs and I feel like I was a strong candidate, but then everyone who gets into MIT is strong. And since I did successfully graduate then I guess it was fine that I was accepted, but I was constantly blown away and overwhelmed by the accomplishments of my peers there, and always wondered a bit if I belonged.
I've always had an identity crisis about what I am. I know in the current zeitgeist there's a big push for racial justice, of which being Hispanic and "brown" is a part. But it also feels totally irrelevant to me, personally, because of my upper class upbringing and elite education, and I feel like I've never really been discriminated against. Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So I don't know how I feel about this change. It's certainly a big one, but in the long run, maybe it's good? I know I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs, but the flip side is that other people must wonder the same...
The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have friends in my home country who are mixed and dark skinned but culturally fit with a suburban white American more.
He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.
But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
1. Latinos are extremely colorist in their own countries and have serious racism from the "European" heritaged ones vs the "indigenous" ones. This dynamic is a big deal in latin america
2. Latinos in the USA voted more heavily from Trump in 2020 than in 2016, and iirc trump got like 39% of the latino vote in 2020. Latinos are extremely conservative and are straight up abandoning catholocism and embracing evangelical protestantism due to the "liberalisation" of the catholic church.
It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.
And if we are talking high end schools I've also read it's not simply a matter of getting admitted and that the rates of affirmative action candidates drops outs at much higher rates, which hurts/delays their chance to succeed in the future because they would have been better off dominating at a lower percentile school.
Sounds like OP certainly deserved it to me. Instead we have these perverse incentives to go to "elite" schools purely because of the school's name (not because you're really getting that much of a better education than you would in a different top 100 university). These schools end up with thousands of applicants who definitely deserve to get in, but they need to cull the group of perfect candidates somehow because of practical considerations like faculty to student ratio. Whether they discriminate using race, or implement a lottery system, there's plenty of candidates that deserve the entry but don't get in because of practical limitations.
I certainly didn't get perfect scores on the SAT and I certainly wasn't valedictorian.
This mentality is very gross, and treats life like it's a fair game with clear winners and losers. Life is messy, and you can still do every single thing right and end up worse off. Likewise, you can, and many people do, fail "up" into extraordinary positions of power due to no merit of your own.
Around the healthcare debate specifically, there were a lot of people who talked about the restrictive policies that artificially limit the supply of doctors as well as the policies that prevent the creation of more hospitals.
When my dad was growing up, his father was a mechanic and he really just wanted to go be a mechanic to work with his dad...who told him that it wouldn't support 2 families. So instead...my dad became a dentist. Don't get me wrong, he's very smart (particularly with math) but how many people could be doctors? How many people could handle the curriculum at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, etc?
My guess is that it's a whole lot more than are actually admitted. Further, is the curriculum at these schools that much better than everywhere else or is it more a factor of surrounding yourself with highly motivated peers that makes it better?
While AA is an issue, OP most benefited from the Physician cartel/AMA who lobbies/bribes their way to wealth for their members at the expense of the 99% of the population.
I've watched the full set of lectures for a few classes at top universities (Yale, MIT, that kind of thing) for a topic area in which I took a lot of classes at a very-cheap low-tier ex-normal-school state university that's completely unknown outside a ~150 mile radius, and only somewhat recognized within it.
From what I could tell, the content, pace, and amount & sort of assigned work were all pretty similar.
What differed? Two main things:
1) The guest lecturers—cheap state school, none, or unremarkable ones; the fancy schools, both more common to have them, and universally very impressive credentials, possibly someone you've heard of even if you don't really follow the topic, basically, their guests were "celebrities", at least within a field.
2) How engaged the students seemed to be—not at all, at the cheap state school; very, at the fancy schools.
This is for undergrad. The ways they differ may not be the same in grad school.
Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.
https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-graduate...
Otherwise I agree with you. It’s in the past. We all have advantages and disadvantages, whether genetic or societal. There’s no reason to feel bad about something in the past you had no control over.
vs...
250k-1M/yr
The difference is being middle class to being upper class/upper-middle class.
The school district differences are stark. So yes, these kind of things make a big difference.
We really just need to remove power from the AMA/AGCME in this specific case. It hurts everyone except the Physician cartel members.
Affirmative Action is talked about as positive discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-less.
Every decision is discrimination. Basis and purpose is what matters.
That is true, which is why it is illegal in my country to discriminate based on things that you are. In my country, we value equality and believe that everyone should be treated fairly and without discrimination. Laws are in place to protect individuals from discrimination based on factors such as race, gender, religion, age, disability, and other protected characteristics.
Discrimination based on who you are, such as your inherent traits or characteristics, is considered unjust and contrary to the principles of equality. The focus should be on a person's abilities, qualifications, and merits rather than factors that they have no control over.
I don't think Anatole France really had thought things through when he wrote that quote...
Snooping at your comment history, you're talking about Finland?
In general, there are massively fewer people sleeping under bridges in places that get seriously cold. How much of this is just climate?
(Ex: in the US, Boston and San Francisco have very different numbers of people sleeping rough, while both being very liberal places for the US)
Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity.
To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be racism free, the degree to which it is focused on just proves that the US isn't free of racism. Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
It's not even reversed racism, it's just plain old racism. The only difference is the targets of the racism are European descended and Asian descended people instead of African and Latin American descended people.
In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.
In an already racist system, doing something like economic class based support (example: 20% of college admissions need to come from poor households) would just mostly go to the privileged race and perpetuate the systemic racism.
Your post is also an illustration of what white privilege can look like. I know you said you’re not American, but the tone matches to a T. White people don’t realize the negative effects of racism on others and others family history and can’t even conceive of it. From having cab drivers not willing to pick you up, to not getting a job or being passed over for promotions, let alone going to schools that are under funded. And as a side effect of that racism towards non-whites, white people benefit by getting the can, the job, the promotion, the good schools that the non-whites, but equally qualified did not.
And as the head paragraph states, that gets embedded into society in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family.
According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
The per capita income for "whites" in the US is $36,962
The per capita income for the following groups is higher than that: Indian, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean.
Similar results for median household incomes.
I couldn't easily find the data but I've seen previous reports of sub-groups of "blacks" that also have higher median incomes than whites (as a group). Ahh, here is an article talking about the success of Nigerian immigrants, as an example. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...
Please explain how to reconcile this data with your statement.
I don't know what's right or wrong really but I can say that the rapidness of the shift was definitely shocking to me. There's a lot of disagreement between Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z on the topic because of it.
Believe me, this has been considered and tried in various contexts. The problem is that in the end schools and companies find out that they don't achieve the "right" mix of ethnicities and genders and so it's back to square one.
Minorities, like the Uyghurs, were exempt from the 1-child policy and they got extra points on the national college exam.
It is, but it is an attempt to right a wrong, which isn't an easy thing to do or measure. It's a moralistic endeavor and moralistic endeavors can become monsters in their own right.
>To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race.
It's become a political football, because of this, I think it's perpetuating it more than it would be naturally. Morgan Freeman articulated this well many years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnpIhqSLto
>Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.
It's funny, this is done to ensure that historically oppressed races are measured for success / failure. It seems to support to your reverse racism comment.
>Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.
I agree, that's why AA was struck down. It's a clear violation of the 14th amendment. This was known at the time and known in the early 2000's (2003?) when this came up before. It's always been considered an emergency measure that would need to end because it was a clear violation of equal protection under the law clause of the 14th.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”
Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country
But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.
I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.
And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.
So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.
So nothing happens
If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system
This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they want to meet their 13% black quota, but there are too few American descendants of slaves who will not be utterly out of place, so they make up the shortage with Africans.
Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.
For example, if Harvard only wants to admit people 2 sigma above median, by 68-95-99.7 rule it will be 2.5% of white applicants, but 0.15% of black applicants. That’s 16-to-1 even before you adjust for the fact that non-Hispanic whites are 60% and blacks are 13% of population, after which you get something like 75 qualified whites for each whites. Add to that Hispanics whites, who, while overall having lower academic achievement, are not nearly as low as blacks, and Asians, who have even higher achievement than whites, you’ll easily get something like 100 to 150 qualified non blacks for every black applicant.
Even more concretely: there are something like 2 million freshmen every year. 2 sigma cutoff means only 2.5% of them qualify, which is only 50,000 people. 1 in 100 means only 500 blacks qualify at above 2 population sigma. Then you have all Ivies and other top schools compete for these. So yes, you can find 300 blacks at 2 sigma cutoff, but Harvard won’t get all of those. Thus, Africans.
If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/DoingPsychScien...
What was this highly predictive test? It was, quite simply, taking SAT at 11-12 years of age. SAT is really good test, and is highly predictive of academic success, its biggest flaw is that it is too easy for those at the top of distribution, but that can be ameliorated by administering it earlier than typical.
> If you truly think that the top 2.5% of black students would be "out of place" at Harvard then you have a completely invented mysticism of what it means to go to Harvard.
If 2.5% of all black students were of Harvard quality, then something like 16% of white students would be, which is something like 3 kids in every high school class. Harvard can afford to be much more selective than that, and in fact it must be so to keep its brand.
Regardless of how selective they are with admissions it also doesn't mean that a large chunk of the people they rejected wouldn't have also done fine there.
Arguably it's much easier to get good grades at Harvard due to grade inflation if you are a good student (which you are by definition if you are at the top of your class) than at state schools.
Honestly, I think this is 100% the responsibility of parents. They are the ones that need to break the generational cycle of whatever they're facing. Beyond that - as you say - needs based approaches to this.
I don't understand why we as a society can't simply have "Oh you got more than 95% on your standardized test scores? 100% full scholarship to any college and any degree you wish without paying it back." That is how you fix a society if you ask me, by rewarding hard work and merit.
Just take from some and give to others
But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in life?
My guess is not, in which case it would be justified under the principles behind it.
Having successful minorities that continue to produce success multi-generationally is a good thing. It brings people out of poverty, creates positive examples for people that look like someone who is struggling, creates more wealth in the targeted communities which can be spread around, etc.
As The Boss said, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"...
But not the same “cream” - that’s what the current cream is trying to preserve
> I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs
I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishments.
AA had a purpose and place at some moment in time. I think that moment has passed.
Given how women and people with disabilities are still largely absent from these discussions and who still face massive challenges in breaking into some industries - let alone leadership roles in those industries - I think AA still had a place.
I think it's a mistake to say that absent AA we have a pure meritocracy. Instead the discrimination is simply based on criteria that we (US voters) no longer have a say in.
Throwing out a philosophical question, is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and residential are to have a completely equal proportion of every group label that can be created?
Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.
But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.
Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.
However, if an 85 year old with arthritis and glaucoma wants or needs to join the workforce, they should have the opportunity and the tools available to them. Many from the Baby Boomer generation are finding themselves in the "needs" category, for example.
The counterfactual to that claim is nursing. Nursing is a very good job that has a relatively low barrier of entry yet the field is 88% female. The reason for that might be cultural but the reason is certainly self-selection, not discrimination. However, the difference may, in fact, be genetic (hormonal, more likely).
Nursing is the mirror image of programming. If the gender compositions were reversed, the campaigns for STEM would, instead, be for healthcare.
It may not be useful to look at outcomes to determine if opportunities are equal. It may be harder, but looking at opportunities to determine if opportunities are equal is really the only option.
Until that's addressed, we can't even begin to assert that Nursing is inherently a field dominated by a single gender. Ditto teaching, writing, and so forth.
"discrimination of men in nursing" returns some great resources for looking into this further.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:tex....
It's a natural-sounding conclusion that has no evidentiary basis in reality. Different cultural and ethnic groups value and specialize in different things, which over generations make for significant differences in the average member of those groups.
This is one of the biggest fallacies when it comes to policies that incorporate preferences based on racial, gender, or whatever other demographic basis you can think of: that absent biases (or "structures of oppression" or what have you), each and every subsection of society will reflect the composition of the whole more or less perfectly.
Asians are 6.3% of the US population yet comprise only 0.1% of the NFL (literally a handful of players among 1500+ in the active roster). Is it because football racially discriminates against Asians? No, it's because Asians as a whole are not very interested in being professional football players. There's nothing that stops the odd individual of Asian descent from making it to the NFL.
Women are roughly half of the population yet comprise only 13% of taxicab drivers. Is there a taxicab union that's preventing women from joining? No, on the whole women aren't very interested in being taxicab drivers. There's nothing that stops the odd woman from being one, though.
So on and so forth for literally every slice of life you can think of; you will never find anything that reflects the demographics of the underlying society. Hell, even the demographics of the 50 states don't reflect the demographics of the country as a whole. Vermont is only 1.5% black, whereas Alabama is nearly 30% black. By that metric, Vermont would be 20x as discriminatory against black people, wouldn't it?
Aside from discrimination built into the slices of life, sure.
To use your NFL example, a pull quote from a 2022 Yahoo article: "Those who did come faced virulent racism and discrimination". There's a number of articles on Google under the search "nfl discrimination against asians" which show the same thing.
This can be repeated with similar results for all of the other examples you've brought up as well.
And when there's discrimination happening in the workforce, it can't be used to say "this is the natural balance of [attribute] in the workforce".
But why divide things along skin color? There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
Because that is the basis on which people are being discriminated against? If people suddenly started beating up people with red hair, why wouldn't we try to help the group "people with red hair"?
> There are so many ways to group people, income of parents, whether they are from single parent homes, history of severe illness in family line, … etc. No one seems to care about equal outcomes when it comes to such groupings though.
The same people who care about race-based discrimination are also trying to create equal outcomes for those groupings. Why do you think they don't?
"There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity." The word "inherently" is doing all the work here by making acknowledgement of endogeneity look bigoted. But whether any of the thousands of factors that produce an outcome are "inherent," whatever that means, is irrelevant. You should always expect endogenous interactions if you haven't used a methodology that prevents it, like randomized blind experiments, difference in difference, instrumental variables, etc.
With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.
Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.
There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.
I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.
But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.
This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tennis%...
Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.
Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].
I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.
It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.
Also, given that the split of working-age humans is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.
For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.
If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.
> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.
Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.
Equal opportunity to participate, yes.
It starts with a basic belief—do you agree that US Society is disadvantageous for certain racial demographics?
And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.
In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.
One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.
But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district.
Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Because if someone can't go to MIT, they're doomed to a life of abject poverty? Really?
A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.
OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.
Into that medical school. There are others.
Curious how often you wonder if the white people you work with had an advantage by not being historically discriminated against? Probably never. And rightfully so. If people do wonder then that’s on them. There’s a lot of dumb stuff people can wonder about.
It’s one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative action undermines the accomplishments of its potential beneficiaries.
I get what you’re saying, but racial discrimination has worked against Latinos and Blacks for so long and in so many facets of life — you don’t find it odd that this singular event of college admissions trumps everything else?
If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.
So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house, that's system advantage built from advantages that most blacks couldn't benefit from.
Additionally, where you live and proximity to better schools. Blacks in many cases weren't allowed to move into certain neighborhoods. Busing attemnpted (horribly) to compensate, but even that now is largely no longer done. Blacks simply tend to go to worse schools by almost every metric (including total funding).
Health care is another example, where most research has been done for white ethnicities. And there is still discrimination in how health care is administered. And health insurance coverage is still more difficult for Blacks to get, and they often pay more for it.
These are a few examples of "systemic" discrimination that benefits white people. There are literally books written about this if you do want to research it yourself.
I'm not sure which time period you're talking about, but if it's the Boston Fed 1992 research on mortgage loans, then it has had legitimate academic challenges to its methodology.
> So as a white male, when you inherit your parent's house
The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
> where most research has been done for white ethnicities
The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
I was referring to redlining. See https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
> The same advantage goes to a black male who inherits his parent's house, and the same disadvantage to anyone of any color who did not inherit a house.
Of course, and any difference in equity associated with the house. Around 75% of whites own a home versus 45% of blacks. And as you know -- homeownership is the single largest source of wealth for most people in the US.
> The US was nearly 90% white as recently as 1960, and was 75% white as of the 2000 census, so of course most research that has been done in the past was done with white research subjects.
Of course. I'm talking about proportional representation. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4670264/
> Ultimately, nobody serious rejects the fact that there was past de jure racial discrimination against blacks in this country. What many people challenge is the notion that present de jure discrimination is the only way to remedy past de jure discrimination.
The person I was responding to seemed to be making that assertion. And I never said that discrimination was the only way to remedy past discrimination.
The part that's disheartening is that so many people are so up in arms about affirmative action -- and how its discriminatory. But consider everything else we discussed (and there's a lot more) as having no real impact. I mean, why are we even talking about it...
It's a hard problem.
I've never really had an identity crisis about it though. I'm white, but I'm also Mexican. The majority of my extended family is Mexican (I basically have no extended family on any maternal branches). But I wasn't raised to speak Spanish and in general had a pretty generic white American upper-middle-class upbringing. Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or uplifting.
[1] Except while I got into MIT, I did not go (went to my very good in-state school - whole other topic + I am very happy with the outcome.)
This is a good point. I've always thought that my esteem of anybody should not change based on immutable characteristics of that person, or other factors that they had no material choice in being.
> Though I possibly have been discriminated "for", and benefited tremendously from it.
So have a lot of people. You're probably surrounded by people whose familial background benefited them in numerous ways. You just happen to have some empathy about yours.
Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other.
The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.
Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We all knew those few incredible superstars who could run laps around us, but that doesn't mean you're not a star too.
Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out:
1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities manufacture scarcity.
2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The level of noise in admissions is huge.
3) It's not a meritocracy otherwise. There isn't a single axis of "quality," and if there were, it's not what admissions selects for. A lot of this became public with the Harvard lawsuit, where it turned out close to half of white students at Harvard got in through back doors (alumni, legacy, children of faculty, athletics, etc.). MIT is different, but no better.
4) Where you go matters a lot less than we make it out to. So much of MIT (and other elite schools) is about building out alumni as brand ambassadors. It's like the magic of Disney -- manufactured by PR departments to fool people. MIT builds itself on being hyper-elite, but there's no difference in quality of individuals at MIT, Georgia Tech, or many other good schools.
5) The elite school advantage is mostly in having a brand stamp and a power network when you graduate, not educational. That helps a lot of you're trying to be a CEO, faculty member, or similar, but not so much for the jobs 90% of my MIT-graduating peers are in. The educational outcomes are the same.
Unfortunately, the "best-and-brightest" brand-building leads to things like impostor syndrome. It may help if you know you were manipulated, but it probably won't. It's pretty deeply embedded in most graduates, and even if you know everything in this post internally, most people take decades to internalize it.
Breaking conditioning is hard.
This is how I've always felt when I'm involved in hiring (especially when I was at Google). I don't relate to the whole "nobody can do fizzbuzz" thing at all. There are so many ridiculously smart and talented people out there, and so many bottlenecks letting fewer of them through than would actually be capable of succeeding. I think it ends up being almost entirely luck who gets through these bottlenecks and who doesn't, because of this. I have found it very dispiriting to see candidates who I felt were definitely better than me be rejected by hiring processes that I made it through, and realizing that I was just lucky and they were just unlucky.
the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.
thanks for a clear headed view on it all.
- You want to hire someone with a competency of 100 units
- A bad hire is expensive, and you definitely don't want one slipping in.
- There is a noise floor in the interview process of 50 units
- This means you need to set the hiring bar at 150 units to be sure no one below 100 units slips in
This means the vast majority of qualified people won't be hired (which is okay; the cost of a lost hire is low), but you're very unlikely to get the person who can't pass fizzbuzz.
The flip side is that the job applications are saturated with idiots. Consider this model:
- You have 100 people in a work force.
- 95 are qualified, and quickly find jobs after 1-6 interviews. They stay in those jobs until they get bored, typically 3-10 years.
- Five can barely tie their shoelaces. They send out hundreds of resumes until they get hired, and then stay in jobs until they're found to be incompetent and fired, typically 3-6 months.
Although there are O(20x) as many qualified people as unqualified, they'll send out at most 100 resumes per year, and so job applications are dominated by the unqualified ones. This means hiring needs a very high noise floor, indeed, and a few idiots will still sneak in.
This is oversimplified in a millions ways, but it's why you probably won't get a Google offer no matter how good you are. Interviews have a huge noise floor, and to be hired, you need to be qualified AND have a good day. How good a day depends on how qualified you are, but that's why you see twitter posts from world-famous developers about not qualifying for this job or the other.
Maybe you’re just being too kind.
So the person that got into Stanford by writing #BlackLivesMastter 100 times was just a coincidence?
Of course there are more people who deserve to be there than there is room. But keeping it small allows it to achieve something special that being bigger wouldn’t allow. Those that do make it in are by and large absolutely top talent.
So it’s not just education and network that matters. I’d argue culture is one of the most important under-appreciated aspects. And MIT culture is top notch.
I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.
A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.
At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.
I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were outnumbered.
the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools
if you succeeded then you deserved to get in.
I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."
"better" is subjective and imo anyone who goes on to succeed at the school is as good as the next person; there are lots of other equally arbitrary decisions that go into college admissions
After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
What I find amusing is that black college students tend to have a MASSIVE chip on their shoulder about people assuming that affirmative action helped them get in or get a job, but suggest that affirmative action should be eliminated and here comes the rhetoric about how black people will be banned from ever attending college or getting a good job. Affirmative action helps everyone else, but not me! No sir, I was 100% merit-based!
Where I'm going with this is: this remedy (affirmative action) is a terrible one; because once it is in place, it is impossible to get rid of (notwithstanding today's USSC decision, which was caused by a unique confluence of factors which resulted in a court dominated by conservatives). No political party will want to touch it in the future, and if at all, politicians will fall over each other trying to add more and more reservation for their voting blocks.
IMHO, the solution to historical discrimination is not to lower the standards of admission, but to raise the standards of applicants. Inner city schools are terribly lacking in quality teachers, resources, facilities, etc. and that's where the fix should start. Make inner city schools so good that white families will lie about their residential status to get their kids into those schools. This, of course, requires hard work on the part of politicians, so instead, they choose the easy way out: let's just lower the standards.
Left to its own devices it's a cycle of poverty: Better jobs go to the better educated, better educations go to the people with parents who had better jobs. When you had a legal system actively applying a cap to the success of people in these groups less than 3 generations ago, it should come as no surprise that it takes active measures to unfuck the mess.
But we've known this for a long time, and still refuse to deal with it. With some resources you can deal with this issue.
For me the most hurtful revelation from the Harvard case was their use of "personality scores" which were systematically lower for Asian applicants[1]. I don't mind that students from other backgrounds might be given a leg up in admissions. What I do mind is the implication it is because who I am is somehow less than - less interesting, less personable, less "deserving" - rather than merely a mechanism to create diversity. The latter is an attempt to rectify historical injustices, while the former an attempt to fuck up someone's sense of self worth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.
Yeah, maybe you didn't need the extra help, but I'm pretty sure there are still a LOT of people with your background that did/do.
I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.
I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the program and 100% of us got an A. It was definitely unfair.
Half of the minority engineers just left the program. They were clearly capable of passing engineering school and the minority program was culty and a bit weird. The kids who stayed were dragged through the system with copious free tutoring and paid staff helping them stay on top of their course work. These kids dropped out at Juniors when they would have probably otherwise dropped out as Freshman.
only a portion of like 1 and a half generations of slave descendants identify as African American because there are too many other kinds of “black people in America” for “African American” to have made sense for very long or be a useful term
Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever.
As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upbringing who went to a state college, I often found it unfair that many of my desperately poor white peers worked their asses off their whole lives, despite minimal support from their parents, to get into college on merit alone. Meanwhile for me, my admissions counselor handwaved away all the entrance requirements (my GPA was low, I didn't have the pre reqs done, etc.) and admitted me on the spot. Years later I'd find out that I was part of their zip code based recruiting program designed to get non whites into the school for the benefit of their diversity quotas. In California they already weren't allowed to use affirmative action due to Prop 209, so they just used a geographical proxy for race (finding zip codes with high non white ratios to recruit from).
I didn't deserve that spot at all. I never worked for it, I never suffered for it, my parents didn't much either. I just happened to benefit from policies meant to protect Black and Hispanic people, at their expense, while simultaneously throwing white people under the bus. It was pretty unfair all around.
I get that as a society we want to help give people a chance to escape the circumstances of their birth. But skin color alone is an awfully broad brush that paints only a vague picture of who that person is and what kind of adversity they may or may not have overcome. I wish we looked at it with more nuance is all I'm saying.
All we’ve done is create new grievances among poor whites to justify the guilt of upper class whites about things their grandparents did. Those people are rightly upset that the government has been openly racist to them their entire lives.
How did that help? — I mean, besides soothing the feelings of elites that they’re not bigots, even though they made 1950s style racist policies about “too many” Jews and Asians in their universities. (Which is what triggered this lawsuit…)
Some of the most down to earth, hardworking people I knew were poor white men with a dream: teachers, farmers, builders, activists, lawyers. They weren't interested in going into tech or finance or getting rich and retiring early or whatever, just to pursue their dreams and some semblance of happiness. Reminds me of old homesteaders.
Same with the Black and Hispanic folks I knew at the same time, many of whom got support or scholarships of one kind or the other. On the ground, we were all just peers and friends and supported each other however we could. But officially the poor whites had no formal support network at all, while diversity programs had special buildings, funding, time, and labor devoted to the rest of us. My white peers never held that against me, as far as I know, but they did comment about how unfair it was to them to be punished for the sins of their (great grand) fathers. And I can't say they're wrong...
Not because his supporters are racists, but because they’re done with an establishment openly bigoted towards them — and pathologically unwilling to address their needs.
Talking one on one with people though, it's easier to find common ground. And sometimes make a new friend. But it's hard for sure when the elites are so insistent on a divide and conquer strategy.
In Western Europe, somewhere around the early 90s most social democratic parties abandoned their blue collar base. They used to fight for them. For reasonable hours, minimum wage, social benefits.
I guess they were not cool or interesting anymore, as they shifted focus almost exclusively to minorities as well as various forms of elitist salon socialism.
On top of being abandoned politically, blue collar got destroyed economically by manufacturing moving overseas. And if that wasn't enough still, they were next culturally destroyed and labeled bigots or privileged, on the basis of their skin or what is between their legs.
This class, which is very large and makes sure shit works in society, is why you have Trump but also various other right-wing rises in Europe.
Look no further than the divide between "black lives matter" and "all lives matter" - the group you describe couldn't accept the first statement, they had to replace it with the second.
Probably we need to support all of them, at the expense of people who could afford it (the upper middle class and up), not make them fight for scraps against each other.
I think the likely outcome of such a system (my hypothesis only, untested in reality) is that we'll find that yes, believe it or not, life is harder for Black people in general, especially in some areas, but that there are also rich Latinos, poor whites, cis men who've been abused, Asians who grew up in the hood, whatever.
Our society is too heterogeneous to neatly segregate us by any one line alone, whether that line is race or class or sex oe whatever. Our backgrounds are a complex mix of variables that each have an impact and shouldn't be ignored.
The point is that points for being $race and $class exists. As a society, do we want to fine tune everything to ensure that our individual mix of variables are accounted for or do we want individual to adjust to societal mold?
It is a real question. For school, that clearly values obedience to the mold and passivity ( for better or worse ), I would assume the latter.
(Sorry, it's a bit hard to keep track of which post/point is a parent or GP or such. Not sure if I understood your point correctly.)
I think this is more about opportunities than conforming, like whether we could have a system that provides supplemental resources (whether it's tuition or teaching aid or job opportunities or whatever) to people who have the same drive and merit as anyone else, but for whatever reason was given a significant handicap early on.
That just lets them get into an organization to begin with. What they do with their participation, whether it's to conform or rebel or something else, is a separate (but still fascinating) question, I think?
There is this idea that diversity will automatically lead to change. Sometimes it does, but yeah, sometimes people just choose to assimilate and stay quiet instead.
To me it seems pretty messy and a recipe for democratic disaster and polarizations, but I think that line of thought is considered old fashioned and possibly wrongthink at this point. I've just never heard of multiculturalism successfully working over the long term (vs assimilation), but that's all the rage these days. I guess I'll see how it pans out...
I don’t disagree with any of the considerations you’ve laid out here, but again, I worry about how well we could really rate people like this in a large scale and fair way.
It wasn't until I met face to face with a counselor that they let me in. My guess -- it's only a guess, I can't prove this -- is that the counselor had some leeway to determine whether to admit me, and that there was an unwritten mandate to prioritize candidates of color. I don't know if whites from those same zip codes would've gotten the same treatment. It seemed to me like the face time was a possible way for the university to hide race quotas behind judgment calls. I don't have the numbers for this though, just a hunch.
And to their credit, we did have poor white applicants who did get in, obviously, or I wouldn't have gotten to know them. It wasn't an especially selective school to begin with. But it did seem like zip code recruiting was a proxy for race based recruiting. If they wanted income based recruiting they could've done that from anywhere without geography as a constraint.
Also the weight you assign each attribute is a subjective judgement. Who do you trust to make such a judgement? For example, what bestows more "privilege", having a pretty face, or being from the middle class? And by how much? I don't know.
One, how do you quantify "oppression" or "deservedness". My honest answer to that is I don't know. I wonder if a statistical model of demographics vs lifetime earnings can help, at a first estimation, by it wouldn't be simple at all and would probably be even more controversial than gerrymandering.
But the other side of the question: the "why" should we do this at all, I think there is a clearer answer for that. Because if we don't, power and wealth quickly entrenches and polarizes society. Those with existing privileges share them with their offspring, and in so doing create dynasties of power that are counterproductive to the dream of an equitable democracy (which isn't a dream everyone shares). Those dynasties can arise from race, but also class, family name, legacy admissions, etc. People aren't just blank slate individuals but also very much the product of their environments. I think the goal isn't to wash away individual performance but to give people the chance to actually discover, express, and utilize their individual ability despite handicaps of circumstance -- at its core, the basic idea is that there are people who are richly deserving of aid and recognition because they could be great, "if only" something. It's the "if only what" that isn't easy to agree on.
We don't want to exclude someone just because they had poor parents. Or because they're neurodivergent. Or white. In an ideal society there would just be ample opportunities for everyone. We don't live in such a society, so as long as there are limited resources and opportunities, we have to either fight over them or try to share them. I prefer the sharing model, but not everyone does.
Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors.
There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a male always more privileged than a non male? How do you weight one point of privilege vs another? It all started to feel very subjective. I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.
I think of it less like a tournament and more like food stamps: below a certain income, food becomes difficult to afford, and aid is helpful (I was on food stamps for a short bit and really appreciated it). It doesn't really matter WHY their income is low, just that society can help them with food.
College aid is similar, except that admission seats aren't as easily fungible as tuition dollars. Same for job spots, I suppose.
Let's say you have 100 openings of something. A candidate would be scored across the board, mixing demographics with performance. 10 points for an essay. -3 for bad GPA. +5 for a bad zip code. +3 for being a woman. -6 for wealthy parents. Whatever. In that way all those factors could be considered.
But yes, the exact numbers would be difficult to arrive at. Maybe we could try to statistically model those based on their impact to lifetime earnings, updated every census or whatever. It wouldn't be easy. At all.
Is it legal? I don't know. But the law can change. More to your point, I'm not even sure if this is a GOOD or ethical idea. Just a thought for discussion.
Such a matrix would only become a goal for those wanting to get their kids into schools. I have no doubt at all, you'd get a cottage industry of counselors that would plan out how to best maximize your kids' privileged scores to get in.
Sell your house to a relative at X months before admissions, find an ancestor of Y race on our special website at Z months before submission, claim a disability of ABC and take a SAT/ACT/FGH test under that disability, etc. You'll have a score of III with Stanford, a score of JJJ with Harvard, and a score of LLL with your safety school. Yadda yadda yadda, and here's the percent chances for each school.
Hell, with AI and all this jazz, this won't even cost all that much and be the purview of the upper-middle class. You could likely just buy that service for under $100 by 2040.
They also "move" to a worse zip code for the same reason.
Probably not, but I heard from an acquaintance college admissions official that systems like this exist, and they are highly secretive. This is just one anecdote, so make of that what you will.
It was never really clear (imho) how affirmative action (as actually practiced) could be implemented; discrimination based on race has been explicitly illegal since 1964 but somehow the courts ruled that some discrimination was legal (in Bakke v. California) but the courts can't actually provide a workable solution, they can just shoot down what people try.
And they do it because reverse racism is just racism.
The way you truly eliminate racism from society is by eliminating all its forms. And that includes “well intentioned” racism.
If there’s any metric outside of academic competence that will be a deciding factor in an admittance process, the only acceptable choices are wealth and income. Though even those have their contrarian arguments.
Be careful what you wish for. Like most well-intentioned ideas, this would become terribly exploited/gamified.
no, thanks
Why make it so hard ? Why not just let everyone in and end discrimination
Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities are trying to limit (Asian Americans).
[1] https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
High school grades on the other hand are getting inflated now, because of parental pressure, now that colleges are abandoning standardized tests, and relying more on GPAs. High schools don’t even have a standardized curriculum. Comparing GPAs across high schools make no sense. Within the same school it may make sense though.
SAT + grades is a stronger predictor of college performance than grades alone. AFAIK this is a pretty uncontroversial finding. For a review article, see Frey (2019), "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement."
I think the guy that got a 2.9 in a school that was seriously focused on education is going to be better prepared for the 4.1 from a peace and love participation trophy school.
Are you missing “standardized” portion?
At least poor people have a chance when it comes to standardised testing.
And being rich benefits GPA, extracurriculars, and college essays far more than it helps SATs where prep costs a couple hundred dollars and a month of weekends.
SAT prep materials are FREE at your local library (or high school library), anyone who is smart and has willingness to study - can study and nail this exam.
and SAT is very very easy exam nowadays, nothing compared to Indian/Chinese/Singapore exams
I wrote up a survey of people and distributed to classmates who had either taken the SAT more than once or had taken the PSAT and then the SAT. I asked them if they took a prep class and what kind.
The results strongly supported the meme.
There was a big gap between people who did and did not take prep classes. There was a small but statistically significant difference between the Princeton Review and Stanley Kaplan (I don't remember which one won) and there was a large gap between people who took group classes and those who had private tutors.
I didn't collect any demographic information but it was at a fairly expensive private school in Manhattan. Mostly white kids. The minority kids were mostly from prep-for-prep.
To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative you need the other half of the comparison.
If you have an Asian Medical Doctor, they are AAA. If you have a multiple minority Medical Doctor, they are not necessarily AAA, they could be As.
Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?
Without Affirmative action, you'd trust a multiple minority doctor equally to an Asian doctor.
I wonder what the cost is on the healthcare system/US citizens when we have worse performers in critical positions.
> Which one do you want to do brain surgery on you?
I have no strong opinion on affirmative action but this is a dishonest way to frame this topic.
Affirmative action doesn't mean an institution can produce unqualified doctors. Both doctors should've gone through same examinations at medical schools, studied same textbooks and have similar training.
Also if the school is willing to bend their standards on admissions, who’s to say they won’t bend their standards on grading? It’s also almost impossible to get fired from a residency program once you get in, graduation rates are near 95%…
I already don’t trust MD’s compared to DO’s because MD schools nearly all got rid of grading and all classes are pass/fail which encourages doing just well enough to pass. DO schools meanwhile continue to grade students which encourages excellence.
Schools that do this will lose their accreditation.
The Physician->AMA->ACGME->Physician pipe benefits everyone involved.
What's the worst thing that could happen? Malpractice lawsuits have doctors win 50% of the time when there is strong evidence, and 90% of the time when there is weak evidence.
The rich created a cartel and the feedback loop is already here.
Given that affirmative action was banned at UC schools in 1996, I suspect that you're mistaken about at least the school in question.
Which, it should be noted, means that we've accrued ~25 years of data about the results of such a ban. And the answer is that it's bad: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-31/californ...
A black applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 56% acceptance rate.
As a medical school dropout, scoring 33S... I had a hard time accepting this.
I say, eliminate obvious cases of students who aren't trying, take the handful of obviously excellent students, and for every applicant in between, have a lottery.
I would not want a doctor who did poorly on tests, but a doctor who is great at tests vs one who is top in the country probably does not matter.
This will increase discrimination against minority doctors. It most hurts the ones who could have gotten in through the front door but will be assumed not to have.
1: https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/26/some-underrepresented-stu...
Although a difficult process I believe most people genuinely believed in the concept.
Fast forward to today and we have a much different framework. Equity.
There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere. This premise is much more controversial and not universally supported.
Should women have the exact same percentage acceptance into computer scientist or welding programs? Or should it be a 50/50 split and anything short of that screams discrimination.
It boils down to equal opportunity vs equalized outcomes. They are not same … one has almost universal support the other seems to be taken directly out of a dystopian novel.
Of course we need to be more specific than just "percent of population". For example, the average age of whites is older than for minorities. So we shouldn't expect the total population percentage for whites college students to line up with their percent enrollment in college, not in the total adult population.
But considering age is just one factor. Of course we need to consider others in order to be equitable. If Harvard admits students with 1500+ SATs, then shouldn't we be looking at that population? It turns out that population is 43% Asian and 45% white. [1]
Interestingly this lines up with Caltech's percentages almost exactly. UC Berkeley, where affirmative action is banned, has roughly the same percentage of Asian students, but many fewer white students.
1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...
If you accept Equity, then you accept whatever group you are in, the outcome should be the same. Then this defeats the diversity.
The people who believe either of these ideas aren't a monolith. Some people subscribe to affirmative action for the original reasons you describe without wanting or subscribing to this "equity" concept.
Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.
If it only takes 5 out of 9 people to make laws for 600 million, it only takes one seat change to revert them.
(Edit: sorry, 300 - pre-caffeine posting)
Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw? Sounds like the whole thing is legislating from the bench! Maybe we should bring back Lochner-style scrutiny of minimum wage laws under a newly-discovered "right to earn a living"?
People inevitably making this argument was actually the primary argument against adopting a Bill of Rights at all, and the Ninth Amendment was the compromise solution to have some enumerated rights while hoping to negate this exact argument.
That's internally consistent. Roe V. Wade was the bench legislation in this case.
The citizenship rights in the constitution were not written or otherwise intended to provide a right to abortions.
Even the concept of privacy the decision was based on is inferred only from the statement "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
While this case is held up as being the legislating from the bench case, it's really not. We don't generally pass laws that make something legal, except as exceptions to other laws. Saying that government access to a person's medical records is protected by the constitution is exactly the function of SCOTUS.
> Casual observers of the Supreme Court who came to the Law School to hear Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speak about Roe v. Wade likely expected a simple message from the longtime defender of reproductive and women’s rights: Roe was a good decision.
> Those more acquainted with Ginsburg and her thoughtful, nuanced approach to difficult legal questions were not surprised, however, to hear her say just the opposite, that Roe was a faulty decision. For Ginsburg, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman’s right to an abortion was too far-reaching and too sweeping, and it gave anti-abortion rights activists a very tangible target to rally against in the four decades since.
> “My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change,” Ginsburg said. She would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on Roe was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...
The right to abortion is guaranteed by the right to be free from "unreasonable search and seizure." That is literally the best ever example of squinting REALLY hard at the constitution and trying to make something fit. Roe was 100% making a legal argument for abortion to be regulated at the federal level using the most twisted pretzel logic imaginable.
No, its just a typo, Roe rested on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, not any provision of the 4th. “A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” (It in passing mentions other previous cases relating to privacy rights which found aspects of them other places in the Constitution, including, among many others, the combination of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments in Terry v. Ohio, but no part of the rule articulated in Roe purported to be interpreting the Fourth Amendment, only the 14th.)
It makes sense therefore that there was no non-enumerated right to abortion, and states did have the right to ban it.
The 1973 decision was most definitively legislating from behind the bench.
It will probably only be banned after both the right and the left get burned by this type of legislating enough times.
Most sources I can find suggest none.
Eg:
Abortion has existed in North America since the European colonization of the Americas, was a fairly common practice, and was not always illegal or controversial.
Until the 19th century, abortion was legal under common law, and only after quickening it was not allowed.
Though it is considered taboo in Christian traditions, until the mid-19th century, “the Catholic Church implicitly accepted early abortions prior to ensoulment,” she explained. “Not until 1869, at about the same time that abortion became politicized in this country, did the church condemn abortion; in 1895, it condemned therapeutic abortion,” meaning procedures to save a woman’s life.
Legal scholar Sheldon Gelman has argued that the U.S. Constitution (1789) imported the tenets of the English Magna Carta (1215), which includes the basis of the right to bodily integrity including abortion.
Connecticut was the first state to regulate abortion in 1821; it outlawed abortion after quickening and forbade the use of poisons to induce one post-quickening.
There are opposing legal philosophies on how to interpret amendments 9 and 10, which say that people have rights and the government has powers. The question is always how to resolve when the two are in conflict.
Current SCOTUS majority holds an extremist view that when government exercises an unenumerated power, it essentially cancels the existence of an unenumerated right. That's why they look for historical laws that support their desired outcomes. Until recently, this was a fringe idea because it means the state governments get dibs on your unenumerated rights.
You're entitled to your opinion on this approach, but don't expect everyone to take that reasoning seriously.
Federal courts enjoy the sole power to interpret the law, determine the constitutionality of the law, and apply it to individual cases. The courts, like Congress, can compel the production of evidence and testimony through the use of a subpoena.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/our-governm...
The problem when you do this - especially on questionable legal arguments - is you're essentially setting up the future to have to fight for that right all over again, as we've seen with Roe v. Wade.
You can't take a section of the constitution that's about citizenship, infer a right to privacy and then extend that to abortion and not expect that flimsy foundation to be challenged later when the right 5 people happen to be present.
If the Citizens United decision didn't teach us that, nothing will.
This is a really lazy trope whatever you think of the specific decision's result (or the reasoning).
The "political spending" in the case of Citizens United was the production and dissemination of a propaganda film. If the release of a film can be restricted, why not a press release as well?
From wikipedia: "Broadcasting the film would have been a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited any corporation, non-profit organization, or labor union from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time."
If the law bans "electioneering communication", could not an electioneering press release be considered such a banned communication as well?
1. SCOTUS considers corporations 'natural persons' in their decisions
2. SCOTUS considers 'corporate personhood' to encompass too many rights, you believe should be exclusive for 'natural persons'
3. Possible misunderstanding around the term 'corporate personhood'
Could you clarify a bit? I've seen a lot of (3.) on discussions around this, while claiming essentially (1.) happens or (2.) is what peopel try to complain about.
But saying that corporate personhood shouldn't include political donations as part of their free speech rights, while a perfectly reasonable position and I might even agree, doesn't make as good a soundbite.
You mean 330 million?
I’d like term limits on Supreme Court justices. But I think the arguments on both sides of this debate are well thought out.
Again I don’t love the decision, but Im OK with it. That said I’d love to see universities stop giving weight to legacies. But the money is just too strong.
Some states are getting legislation done. Minnesota, for example, but same too with states that rapidly passed abortion curbs.
I think this is naive. Roberts is not "calling balls and strikes" despite what he would have you believe. The conservative wing of the court has been willing to adopt a range of interpretations to accommodate their outcome.
It's not just setting aside precedent but their increased use of emergency motions (shadow docket) to issue orders without explanation.
Perhaps, if there is no 75% majority of opinions at the supreme court, then the case is just put on hold indefinitely until new clarifying laws are passed?
Even Congress with 535 representatives isn't many. One representative for each 600,000 citizens? When was the last time a thousand Americans agreed on anything, much less half a million?
We have one of the worst ratios in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_number...
Edit: And the SC isn't representative anyway. They're appointed by the elites for the benefit of the ruling party, and there's a lot of politicking for those seats. Way too much power and corruption -- for life. The institution itself is a problem.
Democracy isn’t perfect, and they’re a check against some of the failings of the system.
Frankly, I’m shocked at how upset some of you are over racial discrimination being banned.
I don't really care about affirmative action much one way or the other. I care about the lack of representation in my so called democracy, and the Supremes are a huge part of that problem.
Avoiding the tyranny of the majority is a major reason we intentionally don’t have direct democracy.
If they were 9 randomly selected citizens, then the majority vote of the 9 matches the result of a majority vote of the 300 million nearly always, particularly for decisive issues.
For example, if 90% of the population think something, then there is a 0.089% chance that a majority of the 9 citizens disagree.
Obviously judge selection isn't random, and thats probably your main concern.
Now, they may not have interpreted it the way you or I would, and they may not have interpreted it correctly. But that is what they do.
We afford deference to the Court because we believe it follows a constrained legal procedure that makes the word "interpret" meaningful: this involves taking into account precedent and past case law. This approach tends to prevent justices from "interpreting" the law in ways that effectively re-write the law according to their instantaneous political preferences. This court is receiving criticism (and serious loss of public approval [1]) because it has abandoned those constraints, and keeps overturning longstanding precedent in ways that happen to correspond to the stated political preferences of the justices (and the politicians that appointed them.)
We saw this with Roe last year.
What changed is the make-up of the court; otherwise, apparently affirmative action's unconstitutionality was just realized like a revelation from God and every previous court (federal and Supreme) was wrong.
Racial rancor, and racism in general -- anti black racism in particular -- has probably increased since 2003; at least in the public sphere - hopefully this ruling is not a part of that milieu.
If they only selectively struck them down in favor of one group or another, then that would be a different matter.
This is in juxtaposition to civil law systems that are based on codified legislation, for example in France or Germany.
That's been in place for a LONG time, it dates all the way back to the separation of church and state decision being based on a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote.
Hell Roe v. Wade itself is an example.
https://gspp.berkeley.edu/research-and-impact/publications/w...
> In her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concluded that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not in perpetuity: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”
There are lots of criticisms of the SC, but I don't see why everything they rule should be absolute ground truth forever. They can (and do) revisit cases for good reason.
That's modern liberal opinion news talking. It's about law. AA is a direct contradiction to the 14th amendment and it dilutes it. I'm sure just about everyone, including previously and currently oppressed minorities would prefer the protections of 14th amendment over the protections of AA.
Can you give an example of a government program that takes race into consideration other than Affirmative Action programs?
I don't like many recent rulings from SCOTUS, but intellectual honesty forces me to admit that when the pendulum was on the other side, the same thing happened with different allegiances.
Almost as if the Robert's court concluded there is no point in being powerful if you can't rule, even though ruling is beyond the scope of all courts.
As for Roe V. Wade being codified, this was a moot point at the time because you had a Constitutional right to an abortion -- your right to an abortion was codified in the Constitution, a law would have been redundant.
I think when the status quo requires on someone's stretched interpretation of a series of things, and this status quo is very important to people, it's on lawmakers to make the rules unambiguous.
A lot of the logic of Roe v Wade was based on viability outside of a womb based on medical science of the time.
Right in the decision of affirmative action there is admission that it will need to be revisited.
Not really, 12 weeks are pretty common, and most european countries fit in 10-14 weeks, with just few exceptions like UK and Netherlands.
these policies of racial discrimination aren't helping anyone. they don't help the people who didn't deserve the spots in the first place, and they don't help the people that are being robbed of the spots they deserve.
Congress cannot override this with a law. It would require an amendment to the Constitution, which is more involved. Considering that not even CA could pass a law to allow affirmative action in higher education, it would be impossible for such an amendment to be passed and ratified by the states.
The main opinion was actually following a line of cases using 14th Amendment jurisprudence to guide the interpetation of similar text in Title VI of the the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so, yes, Congress can override it by changing the text of the statute, which is in principal what is actually being applied.
The portion of the 14th Amendment whose interprtation was imported doesn’t bind either private actors or the federal government, so isn’t directly applicable on its own.
> Held: Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The concurrence by Gorsuch also makes clear that the majority opinion was based on the Constitution, not Title VI.
> Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either.
What are you seeing that indicates that the majority opinion was based on Title VI?
The original usage of the phrase is reasonable enough[0], but that's not what this lawsuit was about.
[0] > On March 6, 1961, shortly after taking office, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, which required all federal contractors to take “affirmative action”—the first use of the phrase in this context—to ensure all job applicants and employees were treated equally, regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
You're implying that the judicial branch legislated in this case.
They did no such thing.
They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
Indeed, legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea, and so it's a good thing that they do not and are not able to.
In the dissent at least, the court is very much interpreting court precedent and almost entirely ignoring the law itself
Thomas is a textualist when the text is favorable. If it's not, suddenly historical context and the founder's intent becomes crucial.
> Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the genera- tions. Every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles—the “self-evident” truth that all of us are created equal.
Apparently anything that doesn’t further a final state of equality of outcome is inherently racist and it’s the governments job to make that happen.
It is a defacto Politburo - a long lived legislative body of ultimate authority that has a rolling composition not determined by direct electoral results.
We can point to the legal fiction that the judiciary is not the legislature all we want but it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.
You're under the mistaken impression that justifications are a prerequisite. Any court can find justification for any ruling in whatever way they see fit. Yes, lower judges have been remove for questionable decisions. SCOTUS is above that, as a lifetime appointment. Sometimes rulings come with no justification at all. SCOTUS has been trying to explain itself via these public "opinions", but is not required to do so.
It has been a problem for decades now that Congress will pass laws that aren't well thought out, then leave it to the judiciary to iron out the specifics. It's only recently that members of the judiciary began pushing back and ruling on the text of the law and saying the legislators should "fix" the obvious problems with the law.
The term for this is colloquially, "legislating from the bench."
> They interpreted existing laws for a particular case, gave their judgement, and applied the existing law.
This is not how it works in common law jurisdictions. Common law judges can and do make law. This is called case law (or common law), in contrast to statute law that is enacted by the legislature. That goes beyond just interpreting statute law but also making new laws where they do not exist. Common law offences, for example, are crimes declared as such by judges even when there is no statute criminalising that conduct. Most of the existing contract law has been made by judges rather than by legislators.
New York has a right to shelter law because of the judicial branch of government. Basically, a pro bono lawsuit and a judge forced NY to have enough shelter space for all people sleeping in the street.
Compare and contrast that to San Francisco (and more broadly California) - where everything can be decided on at the ballot box (like kidney dialysis staffing levels) - which has more people sleeping on the street than all of the UK, and has a wait list of each night of 1000+ for a shelter spot.
Everything has advantages and drawbacks.
Indeed, just today, SCOTUS also released a unanimous opinion protecting a person's religious rights against his employer [1]. Sotomayor and Jackson left an addendum pointing out that this man had asked them to overrule a 50-year precedent in interpreting a law, and they explicitly chose not to do so (though they ruled in his favor in a different, narrower way) precisely for the reason I mentioned about Congress having the opportunity to correct the matter if they so choose.
The "liberal" justices usually get the most flack for "legislating from the bench" (although arguments can be made that the "conservative" ones do it too). But here we have the most liberal justice on the Court saying "The Court's respect for Congress's decision not to intervene promotes the separation of powers by requiring interested parties to resort to the legislative rather than the judicial process to achieve their policy goals."
If I could air a very broad-brush opinion, complaints people have about SCOTUS being a partisan institution these days are best levied against Congress (and litigants) for how they treat the Court, not against the Court for its own behavior. When people express low confidence in the Court, I'm always eager to see them aim their low confidence at Congress instead of (not in addition to) the Court.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/22-174_k536.pdf
The school is already about 25% white in a country that is ~60% white. Is that sufficiently diverse? What is the optimal amount of diversity and why? There are a lot of questions I could ask. But I think it's interesting that schools have announced so strong a commitment to diversity without really explaining what diversity is or how having certain racial demographics results in the best possible outcome. How would you prove that?
I don't think this ruling will have any effect. The schools are pretty clearly committed to diversity, whatever that means and for whatever their reasons may be.
College populations are a window into the staggering inequality of our society. Shallow as we Americans are, many of us will be content if we can just apply a little window dressing and create some stories to make ourselves feel better. (Be warned, this strategy has now entered many workplaces.)
People with jobs like university president and CEO are stuck in a bind - most can’t stick their neck out. Unfortunately there’s no reasoning with a person whose job depends on not conceding their argument.
—- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-spee...
> Because Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions programs lack suffi- ciently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereo- typing, and lack meaningful end points, those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from consid- ering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the uni- versity. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
This conflates whether racial discrimination is legal, with how much people base their identity on race. Because on the latter question, the universities have concluded correctly - 74% of Blacks, 59% of Hispanics, and 56% of Asians (but only 15% of Whites) say their race is extremely or very important to their identity:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in...
What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that they discriminated against whites and asians
Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next? Could this trigger a wave of litigation?
I'm no fan of regulation and government intervention in private business, but its gotten out of control in tech and the corporate world. I've flat out heard hiring managers say they'll only hire a woman, lgbtq, or [certain minority] for certain roles. I've sat in hiring committees where candidates preform horribly, esp compared to others being reviewed at the same time, and get pushed through to offer stage just because of their inalienable characteristics. If these meetings were recorded and leaked to the press, there'd be outrage. These managers talk of human beings like people collect coins or action figures. And HR/Recruiting/C-suite is super complicit in all this, if not actively encouraging it.
What about title VII banning discrimination on the basis of race (among other factors)? That's outright illegal
There's likely enough ammunition on social media rn for plenty of litigation wrt this
So I meant "moral right" rather than "legal right". The substance of morals and laws coincide much less frequently than the language used by both pursuits.
As someone who is white, and got 100% job offers from every interview, I wonder if I got it out of discrimination, or I'm so elite and they picked me despite being white.
> “many of the thought processes and the basic legal principles” are the same, says Daniel Pyne III, an employment specialist at law firm Hopkins & Carley. If the court strikes down race-conscious admissions in education, “that is a strong hint that the same decision might be made” in employment cases
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-06-22/suprem...
To get around this, companies do a couple things to increase the likelihood of hiring an underrepresented person into a role:
1) They will quietly try to fill up their candidate pipelines with people who match the criteria they are looking for to increase the likelihood they wind up hiring a candidate who matches.
2) They will apply the "Rooney Rule" which says at least one person from an underrepresented minority group must be interviewed for a position before a hiring decision can be made.
They already do.
Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with.
In any case I doubt this will change the makeup of schools at all:
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
I’m curious how this case would play out if some males applying to CalTech did this against female applicants. That said I’m not sure how much gender based affirmitive action there is in science/engineering today.
http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-miscell...
Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: https://www.reddit.com/r/UIUC/comments/12kwc4a/uiuc_cs_admis...
Note that admissions rates for female applicants are higher across all categories—international, out-of-state, and in-state. Obviously you can't fully tell what's going on here without more of an understanding of the strengths of the different pools, but a 10–30% spread (for in-state) suggests that gender is being directly considered.
IANAL, but I'm also concerned about the degree to which this decision affects the use of other factors during college admissions. Fundamentally admissions is a complex balance between prior performance and future potential, and only admitting based on prior performance means that we're stuck perpetuating existing societal inequities.
From the data you present I suspect that there is weight still given to gender. I wonder how much energy there would be to investigating this? I wonder how many guys who get rejected from MIT CS will now do Tik Toks about how a girl took his spot, since he can no longer say it was a black kid?
This article [1] indicates that state schools cannot discriminate, but private schools can. It's a decade old, but I can't think of any intervening laws/cases that would have changed this analysis (IAAL).
1: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/affirmative-actio...
It could be very well true that some or many institutions are violating the law, but I don't think that negates the point that I made about what the law is.
That's occurred to me too. Or put more bluntly, the admissions boards who strongly disagree with this ruling will find a way around it by simply putting their own personal bias into essay anecdotes about race.
Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination.
This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed
>Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “strict scrutiny,” first whether the racial classification is used to “further compelling governmental interests,” and second whether the government’s use of race is “narrowly tailored,” i.e., “necessary,” to achieve that interest. Acceptance of race-based state action is rare for a reason.
There are still tons of exemptions and hypocrisy, but in general you typical public university can not discriminate admissions based on sex, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, ect.
If a public university instituted a no-gays or no-immigrants admission policy it would be quickly struck down under the status quo, so there is no need to discuss that.
Im not sure how single gender schools fit into the whole scheme. is there a specific case about Wellesley I should look up? I didnt see anything about title 9 challenges on Wikipedia.
Now, In 2022, almost 70% of all seats reserved for the "lower" castes with a small population. The rest population competes for 30% of seats.
If someone tries to reduce the amount of quota: Riots happens, ministers are dethroned, shot etc. Nobody even touches this issue anymore.
The result is that the top brass of the skilled population have built up a deep resentment. The moment they start earning well, they leave the country and surrender their citizenship without hesitation.
This leads to a feedback loop where the general population is taxed more and more to cover the revenue gap of HNI (High Networth Individuals) leaving. And then more population with the ability to leave , leaves.
1. https://www.shiksha.com/engineering/articles/jee-main-reserv...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India
3. https://www.forbesindia.com/media/images/2023/Jun/img_210405...
The Indian Census of 2011 shows that SC/ST category accounts for roughly 25% of the population. [1]
I agree with people making the point that these designations have now been used as a political tool, and that sometimes cases arise where people fake credentials. But to claim that they are a lower population is absurd, given that SC/ST/OBC would account for more than 50% of the population.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Backward_Class
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheduled_Castes_and_Schedul...
I just do not know how to politely say any form of affirmative action is bizarre.
If your schools suck at teaching worthwhile things to minorities or poor people, the problem is that your school system sucks. Not that some people don’t get into a few highly prestigious universities.
You could argue it’s a kind of bandaid, but at the cost of introducing discrimination yet again and hiding the true problem. Which is that your system sucks at creating opportunity for everyone.
Link to demographics on legacy admissions: https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-ins...
> In addition, 70 percent of Harvard’s legacy applicants are white.
From US Census:
> Race and Hispanic Origin
> White alone, percent
> 75.5%
> Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected absent their ALDC status.
So, three-quarters of those individuals didn't earn their place academically.
> Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students away from whites.
So, the mechanisms in place for academics currently favor white people.
Yes, 70% vs 75% is about the same, but it was helped that way in part because of legacies, and would be much lower otherwise.
Which supports the original comment:
> [legacy admissions] overwhelmingly favor rich and white students.
Maybe the paper itself has more details. I'm only going by the abstract. But unless the abstract is lying, I think it makes sense.
not really. Legacy students have higher SAT scores than non-legacy. https://features.thecrimson.com/2021/freshman-survey/academi...
Whites are also the only ethnic group on Harvard's campus that are underrepresented relative to their percentage of the population. I think to argue that Harvard (I am using them as the example since they are part of the SC case and relevant here) is white supremacist is absurd. It's really quite the opposite.
In fact, I think the SFFA case will reduce the number of white students because Harvard may have been using affirmative action to help poor white students who are the least likely to take test prep[1] and likely didn't attend a high powered high school.
There is absolutely 0 appetite from Harvard to favor white people in any way.
[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/03/th...
> At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. See, e.g., 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1725–1726, 1741; Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20–1199, at 10. But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.” Cummings v. Missouri, 4 Wall. 277, 325 (1867). A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.
So what does the elite institution actually do? It largely feeds the smartest to lower business ranks to allow elites to better their portfolios. You are smart when you get out to Harvard and you’ll still be smart when you leave. A great school would change low performers into high performers, but that’s not what Harvard does, it looks for those who will already do well after Harvard. Note that with the business focus on DEI, elites need DEI in their portfolio, but nepotism comes first. DEI is a worthy cause to address structural inequities, but it’s now also a business scorecard.
A meritocracy would eliminate the legacy admissions and make admissions not only need-blind but also PII blind. Some elite universities have done need-blind, but this is only sustained by their endowment which is predicated on admitting the less qualified legacies. A meritocracy like this is only possible if the endowment is self sustaining or the college is a public institution. But is meritocracy what we want? Should we focus the most energy on advantaging the already gifted?
It’s notable that in other areas of the world, public institutions provide the best education. Here society is less stratified and college is for learning more than networking. What is needed for the same in the US is a change in perception about our elite schools.
Theoretically a world which doesn't distinguish, seems most equitable (and sane, at least to me). I'm genuinely trying to understand the impetus toward a different status quo. Is it because the reality of growing up a certain race is so far removed from that ideal that justice requires accommodations be made?
Grateful for insight and experiences. I grew up in a diverse city in Canada so my reality may be a bit skewed from readers in other parts of the world.
A system which fails to converge because of purposeful injustice with lagging feedback is worse than a system that converges toward an equal outcome — no matter the initial conditions.
That’s the problem with racial programs: you’re institutionalizing racism with no end, which causes the system to “ring” between modes of racism rather than converge on an equal outcome. So-called “systems thinking” consistently fails to account for control lag, convergence, and stability of the system — revealing that it’s a shallow pretense.
But you’re not the first bigot to pretend science justifies their racism.
For example, someone may bring a lot of your cultural assumptions into how the country should be run, but a different group of people may see things completely differently. So when the majority group of people imposes their culture and influence on the less powerful groups, how is this fair and just to say everyone is equal & we don’t need to see distinctions?
To give you a silly example something like bathroom design is heavily influenced by culture. In places where water was important and cleanliness, they had bidets. But in places like the US and Canada, there really isn’t this present in many places, as a result we lose many benefits of bidets from imposing the current cultural standard for bathrooms.
People talk about tests, well standardized tests are also rooted in gate keeping undesirable groups of people, and by setting requirements that are “equal” they actually discriminate against people who were actively hurt by unjust social policies and circumstances. For example if one group is more illiterate because of historical injustice against them, if you make a test requiring literacy and then nothing is done to address the injustice, you are just perpetuating an excuse to continue discrimination under the guise of being equal.
Does that make more sense?
I can recommend Thomas Sowell book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_...
They sit at the end of 12 years of schooling for applicants, where the quality of that schooling and the level of funding for extra curricular activities will have been vastly different based on where that student lived and which school they attended.
Trying to fix this problem at the college admissions level creates the unintended effect and consequence that Asians and whites who are objectively better academic candidates get rejected in favor of non white/Asian candidates with lower academic scores. That is wrong and it's discrimination on the sole basis of the color of your skin.
The real fight needs to be about fixing our education system so every kid of every race and everywhere gets the same high quality education. It means giving parents school choice to take their kids to private school instead of the poorly run public schools that may be near them. It means raising the standards for training teachers so they can have real workable educational tools to make sure their students succeed.
You can't fix this broken system with more racism, and it was wrong to try to do so.
This is basically what the University of Texas does; the top x% of applicants from each Texas high school is admitted, with other applicants competing against each other. I think it's a good way for a state school with the duty to educate its citizens to do so without using race as the determinant.
There already is, though - study hard!
they will just make it so you can't really tell if they are using affirmative action or not instead of having it be explicit.
A plaintiff doesn't have to be able to prove its case in its initial filing: if the initial complaint isn't thrown out (which a good lawyer could likely avoid), then the plaintiff gets to go through 'discovery', where it can compel the defendant to produce relevant documents and data. In the case of affirmative action, this would include potentially damning evidence like notes from admissions meetings (if the school is foolish enough to put illegal considerations in writing), as well as detailed statistical information regarding the makeup of the applicants and admitted students.
1: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/what-are-the-elements-...
I found it particularly offensive the pettiness embedded within the footnotes, to an obviously-divided court [and on such a simple topic, too].
From majority ruling:
"ELIMINATING RACIAL DISCRIMINATION MEANS ELIMINATING ALL OF IT."
People with all different kinds of motivations and agendas have various explanations for why that is, but ignoring all that the fact of the matter is that a strict "meritocracy" of that sort ends up with certain groups overrepresented and others underrepresented.
Cards on the table: I think Justice Thomas has a genuinely nutty jurisprudence. Like way out there nutty. And I disagree with him about virtually everything. But he’s much more complex than the standard caricatures allow for (even when they come from fellow-travelers, like the people who thought Thomas was just Scalia’s lapdog; wrong; Scalia was nakedly unprincipled when compared to Thomas).
How many other judges routinely cite their own opinion when it was in the minority? I gotta say though I respect the massive the balls to constantly be doing that.
https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/ says it's 25-35% of students who're legacies at Harvard.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26316/w263... is analyzing the admissions data that got released from an earlier lawsuit against Harvard about Asian American admissions bias, and says that although being a legacy isn't as good as being a recruited athlete, it still gets you admitted at about 5x the rate of non-legacies.
They're vastly different in terms of magnitude.
That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
And sure, race can serve as a proxy, the black population in the United States is impoverished compared to the mean, but in the same way that it's not acceptable to take race as proxy when it comes to crime, it's not acceptable to do it when it comes to livelihood, in my opinion.
As a group asian Americans have had no trouble being over represented in colleges based on purely merit.
Basically as far as I know AA was intended to give places to people like me.
But I would not have accepted if I had any idea I was not admitted on achievement alone.
Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist and the proponents "enemies of excellence" in precisely the same way that they did for the eventually implemented system. A similar response would happen if applied to universities.
I think that merit lotteries are excellent and work much more effectively than the ordinary things people to do increase diversity (which often focuses on aesthetics rather than actually changing things). But we are kidding ourselves if we think that they won't face precisely the same resistance.
Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist
So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.
You can read about in the ruling here:
https://pacificlegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Coalitio...
I suggest you read pages 11 and 12 for context, but I'd like to specifically draw your attention to the first full sentence on page 14:
"Here, no dispute of material fact exists regarding any of the Arlington Heights factors, nor as to the ultimate question that the Board acted with discriminatory intent."
For specific evidence of that discriminatory intent, start at page 17.
For more evidence, see pages 53-56 in the appeal dissent: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23821588/tjca4opn0523...
People will oppose merit lotteries, like I said.
And the system that is part of the suit isn't the merit lottery, btw.
I responded by explaining why the 'Conservative advocates' were correct.
Do you deny that the changes were racially motivated?
I'm saying that conservatives aren't going to get on board with merit lotteries any more than other proposals.
It wouldn't create as much randomness as you think. For example, nearly 90% of student who score 1500+ on the SATs are Asian or white. [1] It's nearly the same for 1400+. If an Ivy set its lottery cutoff to be at a level that kept its average and interquartile range the same as it currently is, their admitted class would follow this pattern.
1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...
You're being punished for performing well compared to other demographic groups despite being a minority and experiencing discrimination.
Because now you have "Race A" paying the same tax rates for public university as "Race B", yet their children could be biologically limited (on average) in comparison.
Regardless, it's probably a "close enough" call and culture might be a larger factor. Which one can also only selectively talk about.
For example, everybody knows why Asians outperform whites: performance culture and work ethic.
Elites schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford want to keep their exclusiveness. Only one way to achieve that is to recruit the kids of the elite class (uber wealthy, powerful politicians, dictators, Cervant class of the elite); also have elite companies recruit people from such schools.
> In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.
I don't understand why people are freaking out about this?
1. It lumps all ethnic groups into one without any regard for culture or sub-ethnicity, which matters. I think Nigerian immigrants tend to do really really well compared to say their black American counterparts. There's also different measured outcome for different groups of Asians (say Vietnamese vs Chinese).
2. I understand the desire to correct the past wrong... but going about that via reverse-racism seems also wrong. I think Gandhi said it best when he said "eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
3. It feels more egalitarian and less discriminatory to fix the past wrong by providing programs/support for disadvantaged Americans, regardless of race.
The "elite" colleges can take care of themselves. They will figure out how to curate their student body to maintain whatever image they want to project. And they're swimming in money, so let them spend it.
Instead, let's focus our attention and support on the public universities, community colleges, and tech schools. I'd never say that low income students "belong" there, but it's where they have the best chance of success. And every dollar spent at those schools educates more people.
My kids both attended public colleges, and I know plenty of people who have sent their kids to community colleges and trade schools. Those institutions are the true jewels in the crown of higher education.
Both my parents were drug addicts, lived separately, beat me, and didn’t pay for my college. Dad was in jail.
I am Hispanic and was lucky enough to go to the University of Chicago. I did do very well in school, nearly perfect scores with tons of extracurriculars, but I never knew if I belonged.
By the end of my college experience, I did just as well as anyone else in my university, and I have a good job and met lovely and supportive people.
I don’t know if I got in because of affirmative action, but if I did, it has forever changed my life
These types of policies have been in place for decades. We have data on inequality between different demographics over time. So can we detect a measurable improvement attributable to the policy?
Further, it left open the question of the goal: is it to assimilate cultures? To ensure equal resources? participation? representation? respect? understanding? freedom to be different?
Which means different affirmative-action programs had different cost/benefit and no one really knows the path.
In logic, not-not-A is A, but it's anything but in reality.
And whatever debate could be held seems to be absent in the opinion, which is why I asked.
p 129 of https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
Taking into account only equal protection, it would still be acceptable for a private institution to say "We want to limit our association with $RACE". Such a policy does not rise to the level of being law (notwithstanding that private institution being considered a de facto arm of the government, which is an argument I'm open to but doesn't seem to have been explored here).
If the reasoning of this decision hinged upon interpretation of the Civil Rights Act as banning "positive discrimination", that would make sense independently (I think a concurring opinion might be based on this?). If Harvard College maintained that it didn't want to be discriminating based on race but was being forced to by Title VI, I would see the link to Equal Protection. But as presented the majority opinion seems like a mismatch trying to somehow tie the issue directly to constitutionality.
edit: I think they're getting there by this chain: Title VI has provisions mandating equality. Due to the Equal Protection clause, Title VI's provisions that prohibit discrimination must also be construed to prohibit "positive" discrimination. Therefore Harvard is bound by this new interpretation of Title VI which prohibits it from engaging in "positive" discrimination. (contrast with simply ruling parts of Title VI unconstitutional and therefore null and void)
Ultimately this feels in line with the continued erosion of separation of powers as every activity gradually comes under the purview of the federal government.
"The universities' main response to these criticisms is 'trust us' ... Universities may define their missions as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours."
That’s not the typical legacy.
That’s more “z-list” or equivalent.
Since 2012, with the Law of Social Quotas, that reality has changed, since 50% of the new admission spots are destined for students coming from public high schools, with further subdivisions for racial minorities based on the demographic makeup of each Brazilian state. Those racial minorities quotas are as high as 30% at some universities.
I could personally see that change, since I did undergrad in engineering 10 years ago, and my colleagues were mainly white. I'm doing another undergrad and my new colleagues come from truly different backgrounds, some are black, poor, from indigenous origin... and that matters because if we don't share the same spaces as universities students, we probably won't share latter on, when occupying spaces of power
In fact, a blue eyes, blonde hair white European from Argentina would be given preference over an Indian or Thai individual.
2. The vast majority of students attend colleges that accept almost everyone.
A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants.
>The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, lega- cies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.
Of course there remains issues of opportunity for students of color, who are more likely than white students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However economic status, or rural/urban based admissions would capture many of these inequalities.
Of course this all comes from a conversation that supposes college should be as scarce as it is, and that the earnings benefit from college should be as large as it is.
> This, [Justice Jackson] claims, locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood. [...] What it cannot do is use the applicant’s skin color as a heuristic, assuming that because the applicant checks the box for “black” he therefore conforms to the university’s monolithic and reductionist view of an abstract, average black person.
> Accordingly, JUSTICE JACKSON’s race-infused world view falls flat at each step. Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives. A contrary, myopic world view based on individuals’ skin color to the total exclusion of their personal choices is nothing short of racial determinism.
> JUSTICE JACKSON then builds from her faulty premise to call for action, arguing that courts should defer to “experts” and allow institutions to discriminate on the basis of race. Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless. It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will “tell us [what] is required to level the playing field” among castes and classifications that they alone can divine. Post, at 26; see also post, at 5–7 (GORSUCH , J., concurring) (explaining the arbitrariness of these classifications). Then, after siloing us all into racial castes and pitting those castes against each other, the dissent somehow believes that we will be able—at some undefined point—to “march forward together” into some utopian vision. Post, at 26 (opinion of JACKSON, J.). Social movements that invoke these sorts of rallying cries, historically, have ended disastrously.
> Unsurprisingly, this tried-and-failed system defies both law and reason. Start with the obvious: If social reorganization in the name of equality may be justified by the mere fact of statistical disparities among racial groups, then that reorganization must continue until these disparities are fully eliminated, regardless of the reasons for the disparities and the cost of their elimination. [...] If those measures were to result in blacks failing at yet higher rates, the only solution would be to double down. In fact, there would seem to be no logical limit to what the government may do to level the racial playing field—outright wealth transfers, quota systems, and racial preferences would all seem permissible. In such a system, it would not matter how many innocents suffer race-based injuries; all that would matter is reaching the race-based goal.
[...]
> The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.
> The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).
> While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
His concluding 3 paragraphs:
> The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.
> The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).
> While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
You need a mental gymnastics of the highest order to justify racist policies like the ones employed by Harvard. Sometimes people get so deep into ideology that they can't think straight anymore. Ask someone detaches from American political discourse to read the Constitution and then ask them how adding points for race plays with that.
Coming from a former communist country where "social class points" where the thing we were so happy to get over I can't see how affirmative action isn't just a worse, more blatant and unjust version of that.
Though now that you mention it, I looked at the article a bit more closely. It says that conservatives "...argued that the Constitution and the civil rights law prohibited discrimination based on race...". The civil rights law part makes more sense than the constitution part. But, the article says that the SCOTUS based this on the 14th amendment.
It's probably more complicated than this article makes it out to be.
I think the answer must be that Harvard has government contracts or something (as others responded to me).
But this is affirmative action. What did they strike down?
Also god damn I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions. Even the ones I would personally benefit from. This is going to ruin the court in the long run for partisan bullshit. If going to the court twice for the same issue can get you different decisions then the ruling of the court means absolutely fucking nothing. You might as well just continue your affirmative action program because the next time the court makeup might be different and they'll change their mind again.
This was already decided forty years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_University_of_C...
Which Supreme Court decision did they overrule here? They upheld the Equal Protection Clause. Should they have overruled that?
"Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens"
They upheld that. Should they have overruled it?
They had to overrule something. People are mad because they didn't overrule the Equal Protection Clause.
Also lol our constitution isn't anything blind and both acknowledges and establishes different classes of person in order to make rules about them.
The effects of a law can end up being unconstitutional, that's something that may only reveal itself over time.
Yeah. Based off the various deep dives I heard about a year ago, the court is supposed to strongly favor leaving prior court rulings in place, but the current justices decided that they were fine changing prior rulings since it's a convention, not a rule.
The current SC really dislikes all the prior rulings that were based off the 14th amendment, so I fully expect this same behavior to continue.
Public opinion - let alone public trust - does not matter to a Supreme Court justice; they're appointed by the government for life. There's literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Only the opinions of the house/senate members even remotely matters to them, and so long as congress can't get enough votes to impeach them (a majority in the House, and 2/3 of the Senate), they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It's been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
The Supreme Court is only the Supreme Court if enough people say it is.
“In good behavior”, actually.
> There’s literally nothing the public can do (short of revolution) that impacts their jobs.
Political pressure on Congress to impeach a particular justice, or exercise its power to adjust the scope of the appellate jurisdiction of the Court, as well as taking direct extralegal action against specific judges are all acts “short of revolution”.
> Historically, no Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate. It’s been around 200 years (1805) since the last attempt was even made.
No, 1805 was the only successful impeachment of a Supreme Court justice, though no conviction occurred in the Senate. The last attempt (counting only those where there is some official action in the House directed explicitly directed at impeachment) was far more recent, 2019 against Justice Kavanaugh (H.Res. 560).
https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-overru...
I don't want to live in a world where we can't overturn bad decisions. Would America be better off if we legalized slavery 300 years ago, and could never undo it?
This game we're playing is we now have one legislative body that writes laws and another that writes effectively constitutional amendments. This makes no sense at all and we've created an in-practice unchecked branch of government.
So I don't disagree that the court has done good things with their power but once in a generation swings is much easier to put up with than what we have going now. The world hasn't meaningfully changed since they originally upheld universities' limited ability to discriminate and as much as I don't like that choice I still think take-backsies is a worse one.
My (red) state has a bill going through right now to outlaw university diversity quotas and it likely won't pass so this isn't cultural attitudes changing.
But if the Supreme Court doesn't have to listen to itself, then does any court? Should every minor court just decide SC precedent was bad & overturn it?
The decision continues with:
"But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.) "[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows," and the prohibition against racial discrimination is "levelled at the thing, not the name.""
They are warning the universities to not play games with them.
Taken to its logical extreme if the US had a single dictator but they did good things would you argue against needing a democratic process? The court lives in a weird place where they have close to unchecked power and make their own rules. It is what it is, there's always a root account somewhere. But the convention/culture of the courts has been the primary thing keeping this in check and if that goes we're in trouble.
> This was already decided forty years ago
If the US Supreme Court never overturned its decisions, these decisions would still be in force:
- laws criminalising private consensual same-sex activity are constitutional (Bowers v Hardwick, 1986–overturned by Lawrence v Texas in 2003)
- miscegenation laws do not violate the 14th Amendment (Pace v Alambama, 1883–overturned in part by McLaughlin v Florida in 1964 and fully by Loving v Virginia in 1967)
- legally enforced racial segregation does not violate the 14th Amendment (Plessy v Ferguson, 1896–effectively overturned by Brown v Board of Education in 1954)
- racial segregation in public schools is constitutional (Cumming v Richmond County Board of Education, 1899–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- states have the constitutional right to ban racially integrated private educational institutions (Berea College v Kentucky, 1908–also overturned by Brown v Board of Education)
- it is constitutional to execute juvenile offenders who were 16 or 17 at the time of their crime (Stanford v Kentucky, 1989–overturned by Roper v Simmons, 2005)
- it is constitutional to execute the intellectually disabled (Penry v Lynaugh, 1989–overturned by Atkins v Virginia in 2002)
- it is constitutional for public schools to force students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, even if they have a religious objection to doing so (Minersville School District v Gobitis, 1940–overturned a mere three years later by West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, 1943)
- labor laws which impose limits on working hours are unconstitutional (Lochner v New York, 1905–never explicitly overturned, although a series of 1930s decisions effectively did so)
- minimum wage laws are unconstitutional (Adkins v Children's Hospital, 1923–overturned by West Coast Hotel Co. v Parrish, 1937)
- child labor laws violate children's constitutional right to work (Hammer v Dagenhart, 1918, and Bailey v Drexel Furniture Co, 1922–overturned by United States v Darby Lumber Co, 1941)
If the principle "the Supreme Court should never overturn its past decisions" was accepted–the US would be a very different country today. Even if you only want to apply that principle to "established precedent" – Pace v Alabama was law for over 80 years, so if that principle was seriously followed, interracial marriage bans might well still exist in the US today.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/167442708751463629...
I can't come up with a clear path from increased diversity to increased profitability.
I must be missing something because for profit entities don't do things out of the kindness of their heart.
"I Have A Dream" Today https://synystron.substack.com/p/i-have-a-dream-today
That requires addressing inequality earlier, and more thoroughly, and across more axes, than an approach that is, in the final analysis, about setting quotas based on ethnicity.
Affirmative action can do everything it was designed to do while having essentially zero impact on inequality in society at large - it's always seemed like a cop out to me.
The majority wanted to make clear that they are not opining on the analysis that would apply to the military academies.
EDIT: here's a discussion of such special considerations, from a prior affirmative action case: https://volokh.com/2012/10/11/the-military-rationale-for-aff...
Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder."
Elsewhere: "Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people."
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slav...
This is only politicians, doesn't include former and present business leaders. Wealth may have disappeared at certain points, but the social networks remained and wealth was rebuilt. It's a fascinating read - Barack Obama's ancestors were part of that club!
I understand that many think this was a good decision because logic, but let's hope the same enthusiasm goes into figuring out a way to deal with the disparities that were born back then, at both ends of the spectrum.
1) say that these disparities are inevitable
2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own
3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative
Why is race important at all when discussing academia?
The merits are what matter, not your race.
Does this impact internal corporate DEI programs?
This decision confirms a nearly-unanimous legal consensus that existed before this ruling about the legality of disparate treatment vs disparate impact.
Disparate treatment is enshrined as illegal in other legislation like the fair credit and lending act. It basically states that the use of protected class data for most use cases is illegal. I know the most about how this is interpreted in the context of private companies, but my understanding is that the embargo on the data use is much broader.
Disparate impact, by contrast, is a legal theory without much case law to support it, but it asserts that what is illegal is not the use of the protected class data, but unequal outcomes.
This is super thorny territory. On the surface, disparate treatment (which again, is what the court upheld here) appears to only reinforce the racist, sexist, unequal status quo. And personally, I agree, but it at least prevents overt discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other important human characteristics. The law right now makes it illegal to outright say that you are treating someone else differently on the basis of those traits. It doesn’t prevent all the other ways to still be racist and sexist and awful, though.
So you might say, let’s go with disparate outcome, then! And this is indeed what I first thought. But there are huge problems here, too. First, the only way to ensure that outcomes are equal is … to measure and report on the very traits we think are sensitive. This wouldn’t just be invasive, it would entrench the collection and measurement of this information. I can think of a lot of ways that bad actors could misuse petabytes of accurate racial demographic information in ways that would make current ML-based inferences and regression correlations laughably indirect.
Then there’s the issue of whether or important things in our society should be equal at all. Take the example of sex and employment. There are professions that are heavily male or female dominated. How would you feel if a colleague of the opposite sex with no training in your discipline was offered 2x as much compensation as you to perform the same task because society insisted that your profession have exactly equal representation? I think of myself a bit of a bleeding heart liberal, but I don’t think that’s a desirable outcome.
And then there are the second and third order effects to consider. Is the fact that most commercial truck drivers are men a reflection of different preferences, social norms, or something altogether different? I have no idea and I’m not about to go all Charles Murray and act like I do.
My goal in writing such a long post isn’t to make an apologist defense for what seem to me a clearly socially regressive finding from the Supreme Court, just that finding a better alternative is really, really hard.
So let’s not get discouraged by this setback. Let’s find a better alternative and get that written into law.
And that would be the same thing. If someone can prove it, it's illegal.
Could courts force colleges to keep using the SAT?
(They were going to stop anyway, but this ruling sped things up.)
> “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” Roberts wrote.
Sure seems like proxies for race are if anything explicitly called out as being OK by SCOTUS rather than illegal.
The court recognizes the effects of race and recognizes them as valuable when considering a candidate, just not their race per se. If you allow me to be a bit cheeky, it values the content of their character over the color of their skin.
That’s probably what your theoretical proxy will look like, if you’re correct.
"Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...
Probably a modest reverse version of that at the lower tier universities.
Love the policy change or hate it, that’s what’s likely to happen.
Given the actual numbers, its more likely that the largest number of applicants negatively affected by this will be white, in absolute terms.
https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-racial-engineering/
Stanford might be an outlier, but I don't see white applicants being negatively affected by this decision. Quite the opposite.
Asians aren’t White.
I will gladly bet the under on double digits for Ivies, MIT, and Stanford.
5% max, possibly as little as 2% — that is, 26% might increase to 31%, but more likely 28%-29%.
Whatever the number is, the increase for whites will probably be greater in both percentage and absolute number.
That said, I agree that the demographics that will lose these spots are non-white, non-Asian groups.
Eventually some university will get sued for that, and we’ll see how the Supreme Court rules. I imagine it’ll depend on how egregious it is, and if there are any internal emails where admissions are openly talking about it.
In relative numbers it probably impacts less than .1% of all students one way or another.
1990s and 2000s: Asians do well on exams (and in workplace), take ever greater % of sets from establishment, competitively
2010s: Establishment realize that "BLM" and aim to give Asian seats to PoC, while also conveniently setting proportionately lower quotas for Asians so establishment retains seats they were losing
2020s: New ways found to prevent Asians from competitively winning seats (e.g., roadblocks on registration, etc)
If people are really interested in doing something - whether that's discriminating against Black people or discriminating in favor of Black people - they're probably going to find a way to do it. Laws will make a difference on the margins but if there are motivated people then they are going to start trying to work around this ruling today.
The biggest effect of this ruling is that it's a marker to let people know that opposition to affirmative action is serious. That will have more of an impact then the ruling itself.
What this really means is that some students who had better grades and test scores will get into their more preferred university, and some students who had worse grades and scores will have to settle for a more fitting less-preferred university.
However, my fear is that the universities are working hard to figure out ways to continue this practice against Asian Americans by skirting around the rules.
'These classifications rest on incoherent stereotypes. Take the “Asian” category. It sweeps into one pile East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese) and South Asians (e.g., Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi), even though together they constitute about 60% of the world’s population. Bernstein Amicus Brief 2, 5. This agglomeration of so many peoples paves over countless differences in “language,” “culture,” and historical experience. Id., at 5–6. It does so even though few would suggest that all such persons share “similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences.” Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin, 579 U. S. 365, 414 (2016) (ALITO, J., dissenting). Consider, as well, the development of a separate category for “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” It seems federal officials disaggregated these groups from the “Asian” category only in the 1990s and only “in response to political lobbying.” Bernstein Amicus Brief 9–10. And even that category contains its curiosities. It appears, for example, that Filipino Americans remain classified as “Asian” rather than “Other Pacific Islander.” See 4 App. in No. 21–707, at 1732. The remaining classifications depend just as much on irrational stereotypes. The “Hispanic” category covers those whose ancestral language is Spanish, Basque, or Catalan— but it also covers individuals of Mayan, Mixtec, or Zapotec descent who do not speak any of those languages and whose ancestry does not trace to the Iberian Peninsula but bears deep ties to the Americas. See Bernstein Amicus Brief 10–
The “White” category sweeps in anyone from “Europe, Asia west of India, and North Africa.” Id., at 14. That includes those of Welsh, Norwegian, Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Lebanese, Turkish, or Iranian descent. It embraces an Iraqi or Ukrainian refugee as much as a member of the British royal family. Meanwhile, “Black or African American” covers everyone from a descendant of enslaved persons who grew up poor in the rural South, to a first-generation child of wealthy Nigerian immigrants, to a Black-identifying applicant with multiracial ancestry whose family lives in a typical American suburb. See id., at 15–16. If anything, attempts to divide us all up into a handful of groups have become only more incoherent with time. American families have become increasingly multicultural, a fact that has led to unseemly disputes about whether someone is really a member of a certain racial or ethnic group. There are decisions denying Hispanic status to someone of ItalianArgentine descent, Marinelli Constr. Corp. v. New York, 200 App. Div. 2d 294, 296–297, 613 N. Y. S. 2d 1000, 1002 (1994), as well as someone with one Mexican grandparent, Major Concrete Constr., Inc. v. Erie County, 134 App. Div. 2d 872, 873, 521 N. Y. S. 2d 959, 960 (1987). Yet there are also decisions granting Hispanic status to a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors fled Spain centuries ago, In re RothschildLynn Legal & Fin. Servs., SBA No. 499, 1995 WL 542398, 2–4 (Apr. 12, 1995), and bestowing a “sort of Hispanic” status on a person with one Cuban grandparent, Bernstein, 94 S. Cal. L. Rev., at 232 (discussing In re Kist Corp., 99 F. C. C. 2d 173, 193 (1984)).'
Not everyone can go to an Ivy League College. Employers should only be focusing on GPA or other performance metrics. If its really about meritocracy.
Yep.
It is not my intention to sound confrontational, but it is merely logical reasoning. The moment the decision is made based on race, the policy is racist. Just because it may benefit some groups over others based on race makes it racist. In other words, using logic of the parent, you cannot solve racism with more racism.
<< To the extent racism is solvable, that's done on the cultural level.
I am willing to agree. Personally, I did not think racism really existed until I came to US. I was aware of ethnic prejudices though.
<< My own view is that continuing to focus on race instead of moving past racial categories keeps it going.
Zero disagreement.
<< Ethnicities are real, but racial categories are social constructs (of varying ethnicities or ancestries over time) that only have cultural currency because we continue to allow them to.
Eh. Good luck having that conversation on most public fora or even with an average person. Merely suggesting along something the lines puts into question years of programming and to many it is a very uncomfortable conversation. And this does not even touch recent attempts to rewrite language to further confuse the matters ( 'race is a social construct', 'race isn't real, but racism is' ).
And just to confuse the matters further, allow me to throw another wrench into the mix. Ethnicity is real, but ethnicity itself is a spectrum. At best, it is a common range of genetic variables and there well may be uncommon ones.
Still, my original point is that it is all rather unnecessary distraction. Most people want effectively the same things. If you spend more than a 15 minutes reflecting on this, actual racism is a silly proposition.
Problem is: everything is racism these days. It makes things complicated as it is merely a social construct.
And that's after you, as an adversarial nation, had already spent tons of resources on growing and educating those kids to the quality level high enough to be accepted into those top US colleges, as well as (presumably) paid for the tuition (which for international students can easily become x4 of in-state tuition and x2 of out-of-state).
Heavily investing into a highly efficient brain-drain program might not be as smart of an idea as you believe it is, if you are funding the side of it that drains those brains away from you.
Predictable, too.
I'm a huge fan of this.
Around 25% of admissions in Ivy League schools are legacies. Unsurprisingly, this does not seem to outrage certain parts of society that much.
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...
* https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/21/20897021/meritocra...
* https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is...
* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/01/the-myth-of-m...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Criticism
The word's modern popularity originated in a pejorative meaning which was then lost:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Once people 'are in', they get more resources, and that allows for (e.g.) their children to have more opportunities, and so they then in turn win. If you have a person who does not 'get in' and 'win', then they have fewer resources / opportunities to show or develop what skills they may have: a doom-loop can become possible.
As an example of what resources can get you:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/rick-singer-mastermin...
You... can't. Even if you want to only consider the individual experience, race is deeply tied up with the individual experience. If you only considered race, that would be even more crazy. But you cannot just ignore race, as much as you want to.
All of you writing that if a Black kid gets admitted then some white or Asian kid gets bumped off are scrapping for the little bits the rich have left to you, while misunderstanding the fundamental mathematics at work. You're pawns. This is the genius of racism -- sow manufactured division among the "little people" so that those on top (of whatever color) can continue comfortably while no one else can rise.