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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth.

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.

When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale

> But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost.

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.

> 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'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.

> How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal)

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.

Universal healthcare sets a base standard which is fantastic but it in no way equalizes healthcare across the economic spectrum.

I'm frankly not concerned about the 0.1% that can afford to fly to another country for experimental treatments. The US is the primary place for this anyway, so if the US went universal healthcare route, that shrinks the pool even further.

I will recommend Thomas Sowell's writing on this topic, he has some very poignant (and somewhat depressing) points on AA and the wider black cultural landscape that surrounds it.

>How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare

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.

> Stop funding by zip code, that's the cause of it.

What is your basis for saying this?

Info I have come across suggests the opposite: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wis...

https://apnews.com/article/1d856cd98d4c491e8443576b3a817740

The real answer is you have to get anything you want ASAP before people stop caring or it becomes more difficult to achieve. This is why certain groups have received reparations and others haven't.

Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.

The social justice movement presumes to "make things right", but often it's hard or impossible to do so, and trying can have the opposite effect.

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?

Except those even able to immigrate out of such recently "impoverished" nations are a small self-selected subset of that population, that are likely considerably better off than those who stay behind and and certainly likely to be those with a strong determination to succeed. Perhaps you could argue the same of slave-descended native born Americans who then apply for college, but the former group are making the same decision, and at any rate, applying for college is rather easier than deciding to move your entire family half-way across the world. FWIW I'm generally skeptical of whether AA is actually a good thing for various reasons but I assume it's felt "something" has to be done to address underrepresentation of particular races in college admissions. Recent Asian immigrants if anything seem to be slightly overrepresented so for AA policies to have their desired effect, yes, they will by design discriminate against such a group.

The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community.

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.

And that would be my biggest concern about AA (certainly at hyper-elite institutions like Harvard) - it does little to address cultural issues among disadvantaged communities that work against social mobility, including the degree to which formal education is seen as worth pursuing. It may even further entrench such attitudes in some cases. At best, one might hope that if enough members of such communities did successfully navigate the ivy league system and prosper from it, it would prove something of an inspiration to others, but I suspect it's a fairly weak effect.

Also, embedded stereotypes are strengthened when the bottom of every class is full of AA admissions.

Is that actually what happens though? And does a phrase like "the bottom of the class" mean all that much when you're talking Harvard students? I can't imagine they're just taking in students to satisfy quotas despite them obviously not being capable of excelling in their chosen course.

Yes, I remember seeing an interview with a retired Ivy League professor (sadly don't remember who). He pointed out that many of the AA admitted students struggled with the intense demands of places like Harvard or MIT, but they would do really well at a slightly less elite university. Being consistently worse at everything than your fellow students surely doesn't help self esteem and confidence.

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?

Yes. Consider the case of Sandra A. Sellers, who was cancelled and fired after remarking that black students consistently end up at the bottom of her class: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/georgetown-university-...

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.

lets just say for arguments sake that is true, the question then becomes how did it get that way? was it like that in the 60s and 70s and 80s? did something change between now and then?

It goes back way further. For education specifically I'd recommend this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpzsJT1snd8 as well as Sowell's book on Affirmative ACtion.

The book Black Rednecks and White Liberals explores the cultural dimension pretty extensively.

A good friend of mine was a Vietnamese boat person. Her father drowned off some rickety-ass boat during the process. I dare you to explain to her that she is part of a small, self-selected, well-off group and that her people are "slightly over represented" in higher education.

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 promoters of "social justice" decided to penalize the Vietnamese the US harmed 1 generation ago to atone for the sins of 4 generations ago.

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.

> 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.

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.

I can't think of a "good faith" reason for why the grievances of some races are elevated to a top priority, while the grievances of other races, that are often more recent and relevant, are not just ignored - but these races are further penalized by these "social justice" policies.

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.

On the contrary, controversial wedge topics such as abortion and, namely, affirmative action show how divided people are. Good faith is valuable but often lacking; I daresay I could pull examples from this HN megathread. And HN is a small portion of the population that is engineered to be somewhat conducive to good faith discussions. I concur that many people here are genuinely trying to express their morals, but the discussion seems lacking in understanding. On these divisive issues, people fall into "us vs. them" naturally, and bridging the gap of understanding is not easily achieved. Everyone is an island in a sea of other viewpoints unless people make an effort to understand.

While that would very much be the the rational decision to make it goes against one of the core principles of much of the discourse in the US, which is that poor people are poor because of some character flaw or being financially irresponsible if you would have just tried hard enough you would not be poor, so why should the state help you.

Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.

> You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful.

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.

"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."

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.

> 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.

Slavery systematically destroyed the family unit of slaves because it was a risk to the power structure. If there was any indication of healthy family structures forming they would split for children and men from women.

But blacks had high marriage rates until relatively recently.

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...

That's not quite what that study says...

Slavery did that for sure.

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.

The cultural forces behind monogamous family units has weakened quite a bit. It's not super surprising that they can't pick themselves up by their boot straps in short order.

Afro-Caribbean immigrants actually raised the standard of living in the Bronx because they were richer than their white neighbors.

But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. And black folks who are doing fine, but not great, might be doing great right now if not for the color of their skin. Sure, affirmative action based on income will accidentally sweep up some of the right people, but we know how to exactly target these programs, even if we're no longer allowed to.

> But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors.

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.

Very few people in the US piss on the Irish today, but plenty of people and institutions continue to piss on African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. Sundown towns, and the same sick mentality that produces them hadn't gone away, even if some of them have mellowed out on the edges, or are too afraid to be brazen about it.

There's a large difference of degree between the problems faced by those groups.

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