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Comment by MordinSolus | Hacker News Reader

> AA doesn't correct for immediate need, it corrects for the fact that people growing up in unpriviledged environments lack advantages.

So poor white folks never grow up in unpriviledged environments?

You're providing no justification for why AA is race based instead of socio-economic based.

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The first sentence is just bad statistics. Obviously all that's required is that "more" poor black kids grow up in unpriviledged environemnts (something that I assume you agree with) to have a problem worth correcting. You can't disprove a correlation with a single counterexample.

And why must I "justify" that it be "race based"? There's a problem. It's a solution. It works, if imperfectly. I'd like to see a better option too. (Not least because one of it's biggest problems is that it pisses off entitled white kids like you and starts pointless internet flames like this.)

So I repeat what I said earlier: if you have another solution that works better, then propose it and advocate for it. Right now all you're doing is whining.

(edit to avoid prolonging thread: both replies have ignored the issue mentioned upthread, namely that AA corrects for disadvantage in the past, not currently. You can't give executive jobs to unqualified poor people, you need to start farther upstream. So if that's your suggestion, come up with a new one -- you're essentially saying "eliminate poverty", which is dumb.)

If a policy benefits poor people in general and more black people are poor it would stand to reason that it would help more black people. I think that the problem with AA is that it attempts to treat the entire country. A better solution would be to concentrate efforts on the poorest communities with the largest percentage of black population. Once those cities start to succeed it would help turn around institutional bias. I don't thank that AA has helped reduce bias, it seems like it has served more as a cosmetic measure. I could be wrong.

You must justify it because you are advocating for race based discrimination.

We have already proposed an alternative: economics based discrimination. It is better because it captures the group of people that deserve help more accurately.

We are not whining, we are having a discussion.

> (Not least because one of it's biggest problems is that it pisses off entitled white kids like you and starts pointless internet flames like this.)

> Right now all you're doing is whining.

Stop the nonsense.

I'm going to specifically look at college admissions since it's a pretty interesting area. Specifically, I want to point out a passage from here (the article itself is worth reading): http://www.tnr.com/book/review/disadvantages

> Moreover, some universities have been successful in maintaining racial diversity despite a ban on using race in admissions. At UT Austin, which was forbidden by a lower court from considering race between 1997 and 2003, a class-based affirmative action plan, combined with a plan to automatically admit students in the top 10 percent of their high school class, resulted in a net increase in racial diversity. In 1996, prior to the ban on race, African Americans and Latinos made up 18.8 percent of the freshman class. In 2004, under the socioeconomic and top 10 percent plan, the combined representation had risen to 21.4 percent.

Not only is such policy less racist, but it is more effective!

It came about when the disparity was more substantial. That it's less obvious now is a sign that it's working. Institutional underrepresentation of poor white people is already dealt with separately by the lack of historical institutional discrimination against them.

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