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Comment by purpleblue | Hacker News Reader

Except it's not mostly poor, hardworking ADOS (African descendents of slavery) students that benefit. It's rich, Black students that are benefiting, especially those from outside the US and no lineage from slavery. The problem with affirmative action is that everyone is only looking literally at skin color, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.

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Anyone who's attended an Ivy League school can attest to the truth of this, and I've been vehemently disagreeing with every anti-AA comment in this thread, so that says something.

Pretty much every Black student I see at school is African (immigrant)-American, not ADOS.

Rich ADOS should still benefit, though. We should be looking at lineage instead of skin color, because thinking all black people are the same is a handicap of both

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:))

The rest of the developed world: why do you care so much about race? Just decide on household income

That would run the risk of helping the poor. We don't like doing that here in the USA.

> Just decide on household income

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.

Test scores and income are enough, as they are objective measurements. Grades, as mentioned in another comment, are not consistent across different high schools, and they favor people with more resources. Sports, as in play in the university team, which demands high performance, is also fair, and probably doesn't demand a lot of places, as you can't have a sports team with hundreds of people.

The issue is that also, generally speaking, anyone who was legally discriminated against probably lives in a jurisdiction performing poorly in test scores, since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax, and due to historic discrimination the formerly discriminated groups also live in areas with lower housing wealth. (A lot of people also moved out of districts with large minority populations when integration was mandated, taking their taxes and wealth with them.)

Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.

> areas with lower housing wealth.

So, in other words, lower income.

Not quite, because you can be house-poor due to luck with owning, and also owning a ‘bad’ house in, say, New York City would give you a high paper net worth when comparing to the entire country.

That’s why I mentioned income, not net worth.

There are also large differences in salaries and income across the country due to variance in cost of living. Poor in New York may be a decent wage in Gary or Biloxi.

> Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.

By that you mean that kids can not choose their school on the US?

No they can't. That's why Republicans are a big proponent of school vouchers so that parents can choose which school a child can go to, but Democrats say that is racist.

Correct. If you live in [poor high-percentage African-American town in Alabama] you cannot choose to go to high school in [wealthy mostly-white town in Massachusetts].

(Setting aside private schools...)

The commute distance would put a hamper on it even for 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.

Some jurisdictions jail parents who send their children to neighboring better districts. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/for-some-parents-s...

>since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax

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...

Are test score objective? If your school doesn't prepare you for the test doesn't that skew things just as much as schools inflating grades?

Good thing that you don't have to rely on school and start putting effort yourself

Skew the odds

If you don't put any independent effort, then the tests would match whatever the school taught. However, you do have the opportunity to apply yourself and put all the extra effort you need to get a higher grade, independent of your school. The things that would matter there are family support, not in economical sense, but in moral support that your extra effort is right.

I think ADOS stands for “American Descendants of Slavery” [0] as it is used in terms of US populations and, by definition, Americans aren’t African.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...

You're technically right, but you and parent (GP?) seem to ultimately be referring to the same group of people. Apologies if you picked up on that; I can't tell.

Yeah, the point should always have been explicitly to be reparations for slavery/Jim Crow and the Native American genocide. But that was never really explicit, and there was a lot of mission drift over the last fifty years.

and redlining, and other formal, informal, intentional and unintentional institutional (particularly governmental and financial) policies that limited people’s access to success based on their race.

Anything explicitly discriminatory that the government could have done something about and chose not to. We need to forget about "microaggressions" and deal with the macroaggressions. It's typical that white liberals have embarked on the project of detecting subtle clues to the slightest slights and condemning people for them, when they should just treat historical race-based abuse claims like any other compensation claim.

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.

Yes. I was sort of lumping redlining in with Jim Crow, although I guess it's technically a distinct thing.

Yes, and generations have passed, so that train has left the station, so to speak. Reparations are no longer an acceptable solution.

And yet the grandkids of those slave owners sure as hell still profit from their ill gotten gains

> And yet the grandkids of those slave owners sure as hell still profit from their ill gotten gains.

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...

Not to mention so very few families owned slaves back in the day. The way people talk, you'd think everyone had slaves - no, that was a very small minority of ultra-wealthy people.

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.

It's probably a reliable collective action problem. For example, the point of the 1965 Civil Rights Act was to help black men so their families could stay intact, but Howard Smith poison-pilled the whole thing by diverting it to women.

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?

But people who never owned slaves are now discriminated against so people who never were slaves get priviliges and get accepted to college.

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