[HN Gopher] Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in col...
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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
Author : rbrown
Score : 663 points
Date : 2023-06-29 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| tekla wrote:
| "Racism in US college admission has been banned"
|
| I'm a huge fan of this.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion begins on page 49. He pulls
| no punches, and its worth a read.
|
| 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.
| Osiris wrote:
| I think public college admission should just be a random lottery.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| A good development but I think this won't stop the practice.
| Harvard lawyers are now hard at work finding new way to achieve
| the same effect.
| isykt wrote:
| [dead]
| Spivak wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| 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.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions
|
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| That's not how this works. The supreme court interpreted the
| equal protection clause to mean A in the original case and
| decided that limited discrimination didn't violate the
| constitution. Disagree with it all you want, I'll join you,
| but that was the ruling. Today the supreme court interpreted
| the equal protection clause to mean B and struck down their
| previous decision.
|
| Also lol our constitution isn't anything blind and both
| acknowledges and establishes different classes of person in
| order to make rules about them.
| parineum wrote:
| After being presented with new information, they came to a
| different conclusion. As a result of their previous
| decisions, the data showed that the limited discrimination
| allowed has had a larger effect than anticipated and led to
| an outcome of less than limited discrimination.
| Spivak wrote:
| I actually agree, but what you're describing is
| effectively legislation. The courts were asked to make a
| decision and interpret the law as it's written and they
| did. Honestly, I care more that the court makes a
| decision than they make the right one. They took a
| dispute over ambiguous law and disambiguated it. After
| that the ball is in the other branches' courts.
| Legislation that outright banned affirmative action would
| have been constitutional and we let the status quo stand
| for 45 years without feeling the need to intervene. I can
| only speak for myself but a ruling that people just
| accept and don't feel the need to pass new legislation to
| correct is to me the gold standard.
| parineum wrote:
| I don't think that's the case.
|
| The effects of a law can end up being unconstitutional,
| that's something that may only reveal itself over time.
| falcolas wrote:
| > I hate this supreme court for overruling their own decisions
|
| 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.
| jwond wrote:
| The Supreme Court has a long history of overruling prior
| Supreme Court decisions, and has done so over 200 times.
|
| https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/decisions-
| overru...
| Timon3 wrote:
| The problem goes further - a number of justices previously
| declared they'd honor the previous decisions. They should
| have lost the publics trust over that alone.
| falcolas wrote:
| > They should have lost the publics trust over that alone.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > they're appointed by the government for life.
|
| "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).
| Timon3 wrote:
| Public opinion and public trust absolutely do matter to
| the justices. They derive their mandate from the people.
| If the people really want to relieve a justice of their
| duty, they will find a way - "the government" can't exist
| without any public support.
|
| The Supreme Court is only the Supreme Court if enough
| people say it is.
| emmelaich wrote:
| I guess you can consider an individual's hardships (whatever
| they may be) but not a blanket consideration based on race or
| religion or ...
| bitcurious wrote:
| Do you feel the same about the courts rulings on segregation?
| Initially decided on 1896, revisited in 1954.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
| Spivak wrote:
| I do, I think this should have been done with amendments to
| the constitution like we did for the 15th and 19th amendment.
|
| 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.
| mucle6 wrote:
| The court changing their mind feels like a feature not a bug.
| The court represents people, and those people change their mind
| from generation to generation.
|
| 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?
| Spivak wrote:
| Our government is structured so that nothing is really set in
| stone. The people who are supposed to check bad decisions by
| the court are the legislature.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kllrnohj wrote:
| There's a process for overturning "bad decisions" it's called
| passing legislation. There's a reason Stare Decisis is
| supposed to be a thing, after all.
|
| 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?
| parineum wrote:
| No two cases are the same. Often, a unique situation can
| highlight why a previous decision was erroneous.
| [deleted]
| cpascal wrote:
| I think universities can probably come up with a different set of
| non-protected criteria to lift underrepresented communities out
| of social/financial oppression. This might even provide greater
| access to some equally needing students that are looked over by
| racially-based criteria. In a perfect world, everyone would have
| equal opportunity and support throughout their primary education,
| and college admission could be much more merit-based.
| Unfortunately, that is not the country we live in and there is
| little appetite to invest in ensuring all Americans have access
| to high-quality primary education.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > lift underrepresented communities out
|
| There already is, though - study hard!
| mehlmao wrote:
| *study harder than the rich legacy admissions
| peterfirefly wrote:
| And choose your parents well!
| cpascal wrote:
| This isn't always possible, though. You could grow up with
| parents and teachers who do not push you to study. Perhaps
| you are malnourished or abused. Having the environment and
| support to study hard is something not all students have. You
| cannot hand wave studying as the solution to the disparity in
| educational outcomes.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Why does it need to be more complicated than investing more
| into underperforming areas? Money talks
| [deleted]
| rtkwe wrote:
| My read and view has been for a long while that to reverse the
| centuries of race based discrimination you have to do something
| to specifically funnel opportunities and resources to those
| affected groups. PoC were kept out of many of the big wealth
| building booms in the US like the post WW2 golden era for
| example so unless we're willing to wait for one of those to
| come around again or a couple centuries of diffusion to even
| the starting point discrepancies the pre Civil Rights Era built
| deep into our cities and economies, the race based issues of
| the past kind of demand addressing with race based solutions.
| Lendal wrote:
| Yeah, and I think it will be pretty simple to do. Just switch
| over to looking at what district the applicants graduated (or
| what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try to equally
| represent all school districts over time. For instance, if you
| have a poor high school that's never had anyone admitted to
| your university, then try to choose the next outstanding
| applicant coming out of that high school. That promotes
| diversity without involving race. Poor families can't easily
| change school districts just because they find themselves with
| a gifted child on their hands. I know because I've been there.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Just switch over to looking at what district the applicants
| graduated (or what neighborhood they grew up in) from and try
| to equally represent all school districts over time.
|
| 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.
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| For people who are against affirmative action, what is your
| preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that
| exist in academia? I see three options:
|
| 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
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 4) which race you are doesn't matter, it's your skills that
| matter and what should be judged on
| caditinpiscinam wrote:
| How do you measure skill? And if your measure of skill
| over/under-represents races, does that mean that your metrics
| are flawed, or that skill is distributed unevenly across
| races?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| From a non US perspective, your questions don't make sense
| and are flawed, and the whole race discussion is racist
| (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racist
| definition a).
|
| Why is race important at all when discussing academia?
|
| The merits are what matter, not your race.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| 3) e.g. See how Texas uses "Top 7% Rule" as a color-blind
| method of increasing diversity through meritocracy. When I was
| applying, it was a "Top 10% Rule."
| dreday wrote:
| Ok. Did they propose a different way to combat systemic racism?
| mythrwy wrote:
| They did issue this ruling, which in my estimation does exactly
| that.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Can someone explain why the military academies were explicitly
| exempt from this ruling when their policies are similar to those
| of UNC and Harvard?
| losvedir wrote:
| As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me.
| Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a
| construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped
| out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a
| doctor.
|
| 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...
| azinman2 wrote:
| If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a
| doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story
| that motivates the action. I don't know percent of the time a
| similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds
| like you should embrace the path that your family's life has
| taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair
| knowing what could and then did become.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Do we need race based affirmative action though? Couldn't we
| have needs based discrimination? What makes a poor hispanic
| immigrant more deserving of a hand up than a poor ukranian
| immigrant?
| zo1 wrote:
| Because the issue goes way further back than college, yet
| they sit here at the college-level with little-dictators
| breathing down their necks about why is their college "so
| white". So how far back does one need to go, and how
| patient are we to see generational results?
|
| 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.
| nyolfen wrote:
| people vote in racial/ethnic blocs, so spoils are doled out
| on those terms
| azinman2 wrote:
| I would say both are in need, personally, but affirmative
| action is looking at the reality that society will
| discriminate more against the Hispanic immigrant... so
| everything on the way to education and afterwords will
| reduce the chances of upward mobility and the self-
| confidence to withstand such discrimination compared to
| someone who is the dominant perceived race.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Well, there's someone out there who is white or Asian that
| didn't get to become a doctor. Are their kids as successful?
|
| 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.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| They don't get into medical school, they have a pre-
| med/biology degree. Make $40-60k/yr. Maybe 100k-200k if
| they are exceptionally talented
|
| 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.
| jlawson wrote:
| It's worth bearing in mind that if affirmative action helped
| his father become a doctor, it also prevented someone else's
| father from becoming a doctor. I wonder what that person
| could have achieved.
| hondo77 wrote:
| No, it means it prevented someone else's father from
| attending _that_ school. There are others. That 's why you
| apply to more than one.
| Maxion wrote:
| In the end, higher education is a scarce resource. Making
| it harder for group X to get in is absolutely
| discrimination, and does reduce the amount of people from
| group X who can attain higher education.
|
| Affirmative Action is talked about as positive
| discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-
| less.
| fwungy wrote:
| What if Group X has their own country where they will get
| that preference but Group Y is native born and gets a
| taint? The top class of Group Y will be fine. It's the
| lower ranks of Group Y who lose out to Group X and the
| higher ranks of Group Y who cement their own status by
| cutting off their native competition.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Maxion wrote:
| > 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.
| cadlin wrote:
| There's a saying in my country. "The law, in its majestic
| equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
| bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their
| bread."
| peterfirefly wrote:
| I doubt the poor likes having their bread stolen.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The poor are overwhelmingly the victims of petty crime.
| The rich can live in gated communities and afford
| security systems.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Or even a small private army for their protection. The
| poor have to rely on the mercy of the law, the police,
| and the courts. They don't like having their things
| stolen, they don't like being accosted in the street,
| they don't like disorderly conduct around them -- but
| they don't have nice villas or townhouses to retire to.
|
| I don't think Anatole France really had thought things
| through when he wrote that quote...
| anthk wrote:
| That's poverty related, not race. Keeping fighting over
| the skin color instead of joining forces together against
| these money-addicted thugs.
| Maxion wrote:
| There aren't any beggars or any people sleeping under
| bridges in my country who don't want to do that
| themselves. We have social security for everyone, and
| homeless shelters for those who cannot behave well enough
| to not be evicted from apartments.
| Maxion wrote:
| As someone not from the US, this whole Affirmative Actions
| seems to just be reversed racism. I.e. in the end more-or-
| less still unfair.
|
| 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.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| > Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism.
| I.e. in the end more-or-less still unfair.
|
| 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.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| This post reeks of smugness. I hope you aren't from
| western Europe, as you can easily see that there is
| discrimination based on race with regards to eg policing-
| where crimes committed by certain individuals of a
| protected status aren't even allowed to be reported on.
| And FYI- equality is also enshrined in the US
| constitution, but constitutions are (universally) subject
| to interpretation
| xienze wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| megaman821 wrote:
| They tried this with orchestra auditions by doing them
| behind a curtain but they didn't end up with the "right"
| mix. As of yet they haven't figure out how people's
| auditory senses are racist.
| parineum wrote:
| When I was growing up ('90s, 00s), that was the
| "movement" and teaching that was going on. It's
| colloquially known as being "colorblind". It has
| radically shifted the opposite direction. It's the
| difference between equality and equity, equality of
| opportunity vs. equality of outcome.
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's because no matter how much you tell people "don't
| see race", it doesn't stop a large percentage from being
| raised by explicitly racist people, of the "That football
| player is acting like a n***" type. If the people who
| understand that racism is bad do nothing, and the racists
| are the only ones who act on stuff, what do you think
| happens? You can't counteract racism with silence.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Is there any shred of evidence that a large percentage of
| people are raised by explicitly racist people? That is
| just total fantasy on your part.
| throw38264 wrote:
| China had this policy as well.
|
| Minorities, like the Uyghurs, were exempt from the
| 1-child policy and they got extra points on the national
| college exam.
| Clubber wrote:
| >this whole Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed
| racism
|
| 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._
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| If it were absolute, then affirmative action would never
| have been necessary in the first place.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| They weren't...
| ScoobleDoodle wrote:
| The socioeconomic class of the family is the highest
| indicator of socioeconomic class of the children in that
| family.
|
| 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.
| gwright wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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/10.1
| 177/23780231211001...
|
| Please explain how to reconcile this data with your
| statement.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism.
|
| Nothing "reversed" about it. Racism is racism.
|
| This is the second time the current Supreme Court has
| reversed a previous unconstitutional Supreme Court
| decision. I love it!
| toofy wrote:
| in addition to this, in this scenario, it's worth bearing
| in mind that they both should have achieved their dreams.
| 1024core wrote:
| > If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become
| a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success
| story that motivates the action.
|
| But that begs the question: should GP still get the benefit
| of AA if their parent took advantage of it and succeeded in
| life?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Did discrimination stop since then? Did the percentage of
| underrepresented minorities get balanced out since then?
|
| 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.
| 1024core wrote:
| But then you end up with a "creamy layer" that always
| stays at the top.
|
| As The Boss said, "meet the new boss, same as the old
| boss"...
| azinman2 wrote:
| Except if this creamy layer is a minority, society at
| large will still be trying to push them down. I think
| it's important to have some cream to resist this and
| provide counter examples.
| brightball wrote:
| Something else that isn't really factored into most of these
| conversations is the level of gatekeeping around professions
| and schools where a much larger group of people can succeed
| or even flourish, yet never get the opportunity due to
| limited class sizes.
|
| 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?
| euix wrote:
| What's that saying? Something like: "It's not that Einstein
| was so brilliant, it's that so many more Einsteins spend
| their whole lives in the farm fields" and in between is
| there is a whole spectrum of talent vs opportunity and
| recognition going from brilliant and unknown to famous and
| undeserving.
| joh6nn wrote:
| "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
| convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near
| certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died
| in cotton fields and sweatshops." -- Stephen Jay Gould
| bamfly wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| jmoss20 wrote:
| Really?
|
| 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.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Yeah if Physicians didn't have a monopoly on medicine, OP
| probably would have lived in a middle-class school district
| and not had every advantage of a 1-5%er.
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| The supply of physicians is artificially limited by
| Medicare funding for residency programs at teaching
| hospitals. This shortage will only get worse as the
| population ages.
|
| https://www.ama-assn.org/education/gme-funding/save-
| graduate...
| exhilaration wrote:
| The corporations running America's hospitals and health
| systems are fully aware of this problem and have lobbied
| state governments to give physician's assistants, nurse
| practitioners, and in some cases even pharmacists the
| same powers as doctors. Depending on your state, you'll
| find an NP or PA where you might have expected a doctor
| 10 years ago -- places like urgent care clinics and
| standalone ERs.
| ummonk wrote:
| Using parental income as well as parental education level in
| admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without
| any need for race-based affirmative action.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > parental income as well as parental education level in
| admissions
|
| 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.
| kaitai wrote:
| That's where things fall down, though. I've done some
| admissions work (I am not professionally in admissions or
| HR or anything, I was just an academic mathematician). A
| lot of "qualifications" are experiences you can buy. You
| can buy volunteer experiences here or there, whether as
| literally as flying your child to Africa to volunteer or
| as simply as not asking your kid to contribute to paying
| the rent and letting them tutor for no cash. You can buy
| your kid test prep classes -- yes, the poor kid can get
| an SAT prep book from the library but the rich kid can
| have a tutor take their child by the hand and
| cajole/harass/massage the kid through test prep. You must
| pay pay pay to have your kid participate in traveling
| soccer league, dance team, lacrosse, etc. Remember travel
| soccer and similar activities are a way of divesting from
| the public schools, ensuring that this money and coaching
| benefits kids whose parents can pay (the right kinds of
| kids, the kids you want your kid to marry). What else?
| The music lessons, the robotics contests, the school
| district that has a full suite of AP or IB classes rather
| than just a couple, but in which houses start at $425k...
|
| 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.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment. If
| someone is a regular A student while dodging bullets with
| a mother on crack, they are probably a much stronger
| human than someone who comes from an upper middle class
| family and gets valedictorian, is class president, does
| volunteer work and won a teen writing award or some-such.
| worrycue wrote:
| > Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment.
|
| So help the poor. This has nothing to do with race.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Indeed, but the goal of affirmative action as actually
| practiced is not to help people who are unlucky in terms of
| where they are born and are growing up, but to literally
| just achieve desired racial balance. It is pure racism,
| it's all about skin color.
|
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| You don't believe there are 300 multi-generation American
| black students per year that wouldn't be utterly out of
| place at Harvard?
|
| Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing
| to back them up, because your claim seems completely
| insane.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I love this confessional personal anecdote of ambivalence. I
| often wonder how so many people seem to be so sure about how
| they feel about seemingly everything. But you, I relate to.
| e40 wrote:
| This smacks of (and I don't mean this in an unkind way) of
| pulling the ladder up after you use it.
|
| 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.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high
| school] and had a perfect score on the SATs
|
| > 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| > 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.
| Maxion wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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?
| kaitai wrote:
| Nah, I just want to have a fair chance in any industry I
| go into, rather than being measured on a different meter
| stick.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Fun, that's something that black people want, and yet are
| denied, simply for being black.
| burkaman wrote:
| Not every workplace and residential area, those are often
| too small to expect perfect statistical representation.
| But for every industry, yes I think that's the goal.
| "every group label that can be created" is quite broad,
| this obviously only applies to labels like gender,
| ethnicity, etc. that have no impact on ability.
| nradov wrote:
| Should professional sports have gender balance?
| falcolas wrote:
| Is there a reason they should not? Or at least have
| representation?
|
| 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.
| goatlover wrote:
| > 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Are you sure about that? I don't think there has ever
| been a tennis match played under normal rules where a top
| pro woman has beaten a similarly ranked pro man. In the
| most recent such major exhibition, Karsten Braasch easily
| defeated both Williams sisters even though he was only
| ranked #203. The difference in speed and power is
| enormous, to the extend that at elite levels women and
| men are playing totally different games.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tenn
| is%...
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to
| fill roles in the NFL, for example.
|
| 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].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjGBqDwhUU
| [deleted]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| We live in a society where it's impossible for any woman
| to ever even do college football in any serious capacity.
| Of course there are zero NFL capable women in that
| system, do you think people just magically and
| spontaneously arise from the aether fully developed to
| such capacity?
| nradov wrote:
| How is it impossible? There are no rules barring women
| from playing college football. They can try out for the
| team like any other student, and if they're good enough
| then they'll get playing time.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| It requires a physical and genetic predisposition to even
| start to qualify for the NFL and most college teams -
| which was my point.
| burkaman wrote:
| Kind of a complicated question, but not necessarily,
| gender (or sex I guess) does impact ability in many
| sports.
|
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| So you believe that in every industry where men have less
| than 50% representation (also college admissions), they
| are being discriminated against, because our goal should
| be 50/50?
| burkaman wrote:
| Direct discrimination is not always the primary cause,
| sometimes there is a self-selection issue caused by
| broader societal or cultural issues. But yes, in nursing
| for example, there is no inherent reason for the 90/10
| women/men gender split in the US, and we should aim to
| equalize that. I don't know what causes it, probably some
| combination of discrimination by employers and patients,
| and cultural norms that discourage men from pursuing
| nursing.
|
| 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.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| You don't see any possibility that the 90/10 split is in
| some part due to each genders' preferences, in general?
| You don't think that, in general, women prefer more
| social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?
|
| 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.
| burkaman wrote:
| > You don't think that, in general, women prefer more
| social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?
|
| 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.
| balls187 wrote:
| Equal proportion? No.
|
| Equal opportunity to participate, yes.
|
| It starts with a basic belief--do you agree that US
| Society is disadvantageous for certain racial
| demographics?
| falcolas wrote:
| > is the end goal that every industry, workplace, and
| residential are
|
| 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.
| athenaRising wrote:
| "Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that
| everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it
| would be a natural conclusion" - no, there's always
| endogenous interactions. Protected class identity isn't
| randomized.
|
| "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.
| parineum wrote:
| > it would be a natural conclusion
|
| 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.
| falcolas wrote:
| Ironically, when it comes to nursing, no small part of
| the gender difference is because of discrimination
| against male nurses by doctors, nurses, and patients.
|
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| Likewise, there's discrimination against women doctors by
| doctors, nurses and patients. These are two sides of the
| same shitty coin.
| balls187 wrote:
| Nursing may be 88% female, but outcomes in nursing show a
| disparity based solely on race.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4799908/#:~:
| tex....
| prottog wrote:
| > if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone
| has the same opportunities available to them, it would be
| a natural conclusion
|
| 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?
| worrycue wrote:
| To have complete equality of outcome between ethnic
| groups would surely involve homogenisation of their
| cultures. That sounds totalitarian as hell if you ask me.
| falcolas wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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".
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Can you take the smallest slice, "people who are
| literally exactly you" and find no preferences that can't
| be attributed to discriminatory experiences?
| worrycue wrote:
| > 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 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.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Additionally WRT disabilities we actually need disabled
| people (i.e. pregnancy) in order for society to continue!
| vxNsr wrote:
| You're saying you want to encourage 85 year olds with
| arthritis and glaucoma to keep working until they keel
| over? Why put them through that?
| falcolas wrote:
| No, I'm not saying that - and it's rather disingenuous to
| even infer that statement from my post.
|
| 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.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| How are women absent from these discussions? And what
| industries are you referring to?
| falcolas wrote:
| The SC canned AA due to racism, even though AA also
| applied to gender and disability. So the value of AA for
| women (and men) and disabled people was completely
| disregarded.
|
| 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.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| My understanding is that they didn't can AA whole cloth -
| but that race cannot used as a consideration in
| admissions.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| MIT's acceptance rate for women is more than double that of
| male applicants (11% v 5%)?
| falcolas wrote:
| Those NBs are really making some inroads into MIT then,
| aren't they?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Sure, but we're talking here specifically a policy based on
| a racist concept, which goes on to normalize it, aren't we
| ?
| falcolas wrote:
| The policy was based on several factors, of which race
| was one.
|
| 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.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT
| stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin
| color is.
|
| 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.
| hondo77 wrote:
| > 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?
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Depends on what they lost on.
|
| 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.
| hondo77 wrote:
| > A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job
| by not getting into medical school.
|
| Into _that_ medical school. There are others.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| pedantic
| parineum wrote:
| If that were always true, AA wouldn't be needed. OPs data
| could have just gotten into a different school where they
| don't discriminate.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| When his dad was coming through it was probably necessary.
| His dad capitalized on it and made seemingly good use of it
| by becoming a doctor.
| xienze wrote:
| > 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...
|
| 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!
| mtklein wrote:
| Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you
| deserved to be there like any of us.
|
| 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.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| Hmm, I can definitely say I've seen a version of that at
| Indian IITs. all great students but most feel like imposters
| there. also the subtle thing is that the risk/reward calculus
| gets f-ed up, meaning, for all the students who have been at
| the top of their games wherever they came from now the
| rewards for significant incremental efforts were minuscule.
| So I have seen many disengage & get into 'enjoy life' mode.
| SCAQTony wrote:
| "It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's
| slow death." -- Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)
| blagie wrote:
| I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either;
| it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it.
| There seemed to be little correlation between ability and
| impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But
| I digress.
|
| 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.
| kernal wrote:
| >2) It's a pretty random process if you get in or not. The
| level of noise in admissions is huge.
|
| So the person that got into Stanford by writing
| #BlackLivesMastter 100 times was just a coincidence?
| sanderjd wrote:
| > 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at
| MIT than there's space for. Elitist universities
| manufacture scarcity.
|
| 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.
| googhopeful000 wrote:
| as someone who's going through the Google hiring pipeline
| right now (as a candidate), I just wanted to say thanks
| for these nice words of encouragement / rational thinking
| about all of this.
|
| 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.
| blagie wrote:
| Hiring is a die roll. Here's a good model:
|
| - 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I would disagree with your larger point. While I didn't go
| to GATech (although I did get in), I did go to MIT and a UC
| as well as a state school and community college. I've also
| worked for a couple of FAANGS, startups, etc. So I've seen
| a diversity of environments and the people in them. MIT by
| far had the highest concentration of top talent of anywhere
| I've been. It also had _culturally_ the most ambition which
| pushed people into excellence, even if they didn't know
| they were capable of it. I was in an honors society at my
| UC, and there were very bright people who went onto top
| graduate schools, but overall the percentage of them was
| lower in the school (which was already hard to get into),
| and the ambition level was much less despite (for this
| group) raw talent being similar.
|
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| My friend, you absolutely deserved to go to MIT. I'm sure the
| person you "beat out" for your spot landed at a different, but
| equally impressive college and had an experience that they
| wouldn't trade for anything.
|
| > 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.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say
| Indian heritage?
| peruvian wrote:
| I'm a white Latino and no, we don't. Maybe on paper if
| someone assumes I'm mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the
| privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I'm
| hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I've
| often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when
| alone but not with me.
|
| 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.
| erickhill wrote:
| I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in
| the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto
| Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles.
|
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| It also doesn't help that
|
| 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.
| 1024core wrote:
| I grew up in India, where they have taken "affirmative action"
| to the logical extreme: there are explicit quotas in
| admissions, jobs, etc. You can have up to 50% (if not more)
| seats in a college reserved for somebody or the other from some
| historically marginalized/discriminated classes. As a result,
| you have situations where somebody from a marginalize class
| scores, say, 30 in the entrance exam and still gets in, whereas
| somebody from the "general" class scores 90 and still doesn't
| get in.
|
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of resources,
| but for a lack of familial support. I live in a state where
| those inner-city schools receive substantially _more_ funding
| (per student, and total) than ones in wealthy suburbs. Yet,
| guess what, the wealthy suburbs still have wildly better
| outcomes. Turns out the parents working several jobs to try
| to make ends meet have less time to push their kid to succeed
| than the stay-at-home moms. Why are poor neighborhoods
| predominantly made up of groups that are minorities in the
| American population? Because America, within the last few
| generations by law, and up through today by social
| convention, has given fewer opportunities to succeed to these
| marginalized groups, including in education.
|
| 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.
| 1024core wrote:
| > Inner city schools are terrible, not for a lack of
| resources, but for a lack of familial support.
|
| 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.
| Covzire wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea, how about universities lower costs?
| They're spending insane amounts of student Tuition on
| Administrators that were never necessary in the 80's or 90's or
| even most of the 00's. Why are colleges hiring so many
| administrators, some even approaching 1 administrator per 1
| student, how is that sustainable?
| mips_r4300i wrote:
| Every day just after 5pm, sitting in my college's Engineering
| atrium, I would start to see a veritable army (dozens and
| dozens) of youngish, well-dressed people walk out to the
| parking lot and leave. They weren't faculty, because I knew
| all of the faculty, and they weren't students. They had
| little embossed metal nametags.
|
| I suddenly realized that the classrooms and labs I knew were
| only a tiny part of the actual building, and we were
| outnumbered.
| shultays wrote:
| I was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with
| HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the
| first hire from country X"
|
| 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
| whateveracct wrote:
| Hah this mirrors my life & experience to a T! [1] I had other
| "high-achieving" kids at my school be sour grape-y about the
| MIT thing, saying I only got in because I was Mexican. On the
| one hand, it probably helped. On the other, I was imo clearly a
| cut above them academically.
|
| 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.)
| prottog wrote:
| > Both are parts of who I am and neither deserves shame or
| uplifting.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| balls187 wrote:
| Do you think this ruling will help or hurt people who identify
| as Hispanic?
| surement wrote:
| > I went to MIT, and to this day I wonder how much checking
| "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go.
|
| 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.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Take every advantage you can get. Don't be sorry.
| tqi wrote:
| I think the idea that anyone "deserves" to what they get is
| misguided at best. None of us got to where we are on our own,
| so I think all that we can really judge ourselves on is how we
| use the opportunities that we are given.
|
| 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.
| e40 wrote:
| I completely agree. I think these scores were merely a made
| up metric so they could discriminate against Asians.
| az226 wrote:
| Harvard has said that 85% of students who apply would do well
| academically, but they only accept like 4%.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| If your family benefited from it and taking it away is now
| 'good' then it sounds like you're saying you couldn't care less
| about any future generations who could've used this ladder to
| better their lives. As the immigrant, much like your father,
| whose father is a construction worker, that's how it reads.
| peruvian wrote:
| This. "I got mine so no one else needs it". And sorry GP but
| you absolutely got into MIT partly because of your ethnicity
| - along with your grades of course. I benefited from that as
| well and it was fairly clear.
| catiopatio wrote:
| The problem is that it's a zero sum game - if you've
| benefited from it, then someone else was discriminated
| against on the basis of their race for your benefit.
| uoaei wrote:
| That's simply not true, it is largely on colleges to
| improve staffing and facilities to accommodate more
| students. It is well-known that populations generally
| increase so especially public schools should probably try
| to understand and address that. Due diligence is
| something we should ask of our publicly funded services.
|
| It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own
| education out of some sense of guilt.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Someone else, who historically was a white person that
| benefited from their race in every other aspect of
| society
| dmix wrote:
| Everyone obsesse about Harvard/MIT but AA affects every
| school and not all of them give you a fancy big name on a
| resume.
|
| 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.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| >> I was valedictorian and had a perfect score on the SATs
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Why do you think you didn't belong? I know a lot of white and
| Asian MIT grads and only one had perfect SAT scores. And
| several were valedictorian, but I'm not sure it was the
| majority.
|
| 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.
| catiopatio wrote:
| He wonders because there's been systemic sustained racial
| discrimination for the benefit of people of his race.
|
| It's one of the insidious and corrosive ways affirmative
| action undermines the accomplishments of its potential
| beneficiaries.
| saddd wrote:
| Hispanic isn't a race.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Do white people in general feel that way because of
| systemic sustained racial discrimination for their benefit?
|
| 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?
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Most white/Asian people (especially men) living now
| haven't really had any "systemic" advantages. It's been
| the opposite for a while now.
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| This is an oft debated topic. Some possible examples of
| system advantages include family wealth. Blacks
| historically weren't allowed to have jobs that paid, or
| were paid less than whites for the same work. Or weren't
| allowed to own real estate. Or weren't given access to
| the same loans (including federally subsidized loans).
| Even as early as this year there have been cases of
| discrimination relating to real estate and race.
|
| 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.
| prottog wrote:
| > Or weren't given access to the same loans (including
| federally subsidized loans)
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| mantas wrote:
| What about people who come from families who immigrated
| into US very recently? On both ends of affirmative
| action. Why would sub-Saharan african immigrant get a
| preferential treatment while eastern european one
| wouldn't?
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| uoaei wrote:
| The opposite was true for the entire time affirmative
| action was not in place. Hindsight doesn't make history
| less relevant for our present for addressing
| intergenerational inequities, just like foresight-blindness
| doesn't make our present actions less relevant for our
| future.
|
| It's a hard problem.
| nsfmc wrote:
| i won't speak for gabe, but i (hispanic) had two distinct
| (and memorable) instances at mit where a classmate told me,
| to my face, that the only reason i was at mit was because i
| was hispanic. one passed it off as common knowledge in a
| group conversation, the other said it to me, unprompted,
| while we were talking to each other. they were assholes, to
| be sure, but it's not some hypothetical scenario.
| chasil wrote:
| Our world has foolish ideas with regard to class, and it is
| best to set them aside.
|
| 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.
| ben7799 wrote:
| You have standard high achiever imposter syndrome and probably
| would if you were white/non-hispanic as well. You deserved to
| be there...
| max_ wrote:
| Why don't they Just ban people from divulging what college thet
| went to during Job applications?
|
| 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.
| duped wrote:
| I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that
| establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by
| the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and
| precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few
| cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company
| towns).
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| The private nature of Harvard is debatable. The value of the
| subsidy represented by the tax exemption of their endowment is
| $50k per student per year.
| duped wrote:
| It's not debatable, Harvard is a private entity. The fact
| they receive tax preference or federal funding and whether
| they should if the government considers their acceptance
| policy to be racist is a very different question than the one
| in the opinion, as far as I can tell.
|
| And whatever debate could be held seems to be absent in the
| opinion, which is why I asked.
| [deleted]
| torstenvl wrote:
| I was also confused by this, at first. However, it's explained
| in footnote 2 of the majority opinion. Title VI of the Civil
| Rights Act makes the analysis identical for public institutions
| and private institutions subject to the Civil Rights Act.
| leephillips wrote:
| However, the text of the opinion only invokes the 14th
| Amendment, not this Act or any other federal law. So I share
| this confusion.
| mindslight wrote:
| Yeah, I do not understand this claimed basis of Equal
| Protection either.
|
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Corporations are also private entities and they have to also
| adhere to the Civil Rights Act and not discriminate based on
| race/ethnicity, why wouldn't Harvard?
| adolph wrote:
| _The Equal Protection Clause operates on States. It does not
| purport to regulate the conduct of private parties. By
| contrast, Title VI applies to recipients of federal funds--
| covering not just many state actors, but many private actors
| too. In this way, Title VI reaches entities and organizations
| that the Equal Protection Clause does not._
|
| p 129 of
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| From majority opinion:
|
| "The universities' main response to these criticisms is 'trust
| us' ... Universities may define their missions as they see fit.
| The Constitution defines ours."
| alberth wrote:
| DEI?
|
| Does this impact internal corporate DEI programs?
| HeavenFox wrote:
| One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so
| hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most
| qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest?
| If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few
| Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?
| rendang wrote:
| One explanation is that the officials involved are "true
| believers", not acting out of fear of pushback but out of their
| own values.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Thousands of very well paid administrators depend on this
| problem persisting, hence it's not supposed to be ever solved.
| shmde wrote:
| Wow flagged within 30 mins before people could even start having
| a discussion. HN audience is wild.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > HN audience is wild
|
| Predictable, too.
| flowerlad wrote:
| It is important to note that Harward's admission policy that is
| the subject of this case was designed to favor White students
| over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate
| against Asian Americans.
|
| 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...
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| > White students over Jewish ones
|
| Isn't Judaism a religion? Most Jews I know are very white.
| rendang wrote:
| Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group originating in the Near
| East, but with some admixture from Europeans. At least the
| plurality if not majority of American Jews are nonreligious,
| see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religious_bel
| ief...
| flowerlad wrote:
| Good question. There is no consensus on who is considered
| white. Nazis considered Jews to be a separate and inferior
| race. At one point in the US, Italians were not considered
| white. Irish, Greeks and Poles were not considered white at
| some point, and were discriminated against in the US. "No
| Irish need apply" (NINA) signs were common at one point in
| history.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This ends up moving the burden onto individuals.
|
| 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.
| einszwei wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Look at grade averages for med schools over time.
|
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| IIRC some med schools are getting rid of grades in favor
| of pass/fail. This makes it hard to tell which students
| are great and which ones barely passed.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| > who's to say they won't bend their standards on
| grading?
|
| Schools that do this will lose their accreditation.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Schools that _don't_ do this will lose accreditation
| soon.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Wishful thinking. The Physician club is one of back
| scratching, not critical evaluation.
|
| 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.
| ekam wrote:
| Taking the same texts and having the same books mean
| nothing since the point of tests is the grades so what
| matters is if they had the same grades or not
| ekam wrote:
| I just saw the stats from a medical school-- I believe it was
| UCSF but correct me if I'm wrong-- where the average Asian
| reject had higher scores than the average Black/Hispanic
| accepted applicant
| elishah wrote:
| > I just saw the stats from a medical school-- I believe it
| was UCSF but correct me if I'm wrong--
|
| 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...
| ekam wrote:
| Affirmative action was banned across California and the
| article you cited itself says that the problem is only
| with UCs and not CSUs. The reasons proposed (distance,
| costs, number of UCs vs CSUs) intuitively ring true to
| me. Today's decision is obviously correct from a legal
| standpoint (equal protection clause bans all race-based
| discrimination) but the difference between CSUs and UCs
| actually suggests a positive path forward for helping
| boost Black and Latino enrollment in UCs- step one might
| be building a lot more and making them cheaper.
| [deleted]
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| An asian applicant scoring 25 on the MCAT has a 6%
| acceptance rate.
|
| 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.
| jeltz wrote:
| The one who is the best surgeon which could be any of them
| judging from my experience from other jobs. All the best
| programmers I know did well in school and on tests, but
| beyond a certain point test scores mean very little and other
| factors not measured by tests matter more.
|
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| UPenn Med School lets in minorities through a side door, no
| MCAT required. [1]
|
| 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...
| jppittma wrote:
| Do people who do better on standardized tests make better
| doctors? I take the null hypothesis. One's grades and test
| scores in high school are poor predictors of one's
| professional efficacy after a certain point.
|
| 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.
| bouncing wrote:
| America has long had most of the best universities in the
| world. Getting rid of all standardized tests and instead
| relying on (heavily inflated, or not) grades, combined with
| bullshit essays, is going to significantly undermine that.
| oluwie wrote:
| Standardized tests have been known for years as an very
| unfair way of judging students. People with resources to
| prepare and study for those tests often end up with inflated
| scores than for people who don't have the resource to prepare
| for them. High school grades have been consistently found the
| be #1 leading indicator of how well a student is going to do
| in college.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| They have been _claimed_ for years; what is _known_ is that
| they beat the hell out of every other way of judging
| students, especially subjective ones. When standardized
| testing was adopted in the first place it was rightly
| heralded as a tremendous win for diversity.
| graeme wrote:
| Could you name a metric where rich people get _less_ of a
| boost due to their wealth and status than standardized
| tests?
|
| To properly compare standardized tests vs. an alternative
| you need the other half of the comparison.
| flowerlad wrote:
| So untrue. The best resource for preparing for standardized
| tests is Khan Academy. It is free.
|
| 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.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| And the alternative is letting rich parents hire agencies
| who will prepare their kids with a perfect portfolio of
| extracurricular activities starting year 10 that poor kids
| have no chance to match.
|
| At least poor people have a chance when it comes to
| standardised testing.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| The question is not "Does being rich help you with the
| SAT?" The question is "Does being rich help you more on the
| SATs the other possible criteria?" Because being rich and
| having resources helps with everything.
|
| 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.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| So you're saying the SAT gives a _bigger_ advantage to
| people with resources to prepare, compared to a GPA which
| is the result of many assignments and tests across four
| years? That does not sound remotely plausible to me.
|
| 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."
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Are you discounting that the factors that go I to the GPA
| are wildly different between schools?
|
| 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?
| omginternets wrote:
| >America has long had most of the best universities in the
| world.
|
| That's a very questionable claim.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| In terms of research, it's been roughly true since WWII.
| Persecution by the Nazis and the war drove the cream of the
| European scientific establishment to the US, and the US
| poured a large amount of government funding into science
| funding after the war. Things are changing, first because
| the European scientific community has recovered and also
| because scientific research has been taking off in Asia.
| 93po wrote:
| In terms of reputation, name recognition, notable people
| who come out of them, publishers of leading research, and
| advancers of technology? If you looked at a list of the top
| 20 I would bet more than half are in the US.
| omginternets wrote:
| Many of those people are imported from foreign
| universities. If the claim had been "American
| universities are better able to drain talent and fund
| research", I'd agree. In terms of educational quality,
| it's _questionable_.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the claim had been "American universities are
| better able to drain talent and fund research", I'd
| agree. In terms of educational quality, it's
| questionable_
|
| Education quality at most top universities is middling,
| they're designed for smart people who will reach for
| knowledge. Being around the best people drained from
| around the world provides fertile ground for that.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| What do you know? You're claiming something else but
| framing it as fact. You don't know anything!
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The ability to fund research and attract the best
| researchers (not necessarily educators) is useful at
| education's high-end, which is why many come to the USA
| in the first place. It isn't so great for standard or
| remedial education, however.
| _jab wrote:
| Care to elaborate? I know I'd been making the same
| assumption about American universities - Harvard, MIT,
| Berkeley, and Stanford do seem to represent a good share of
| the world's best universities.
| throwawayXX1X wrote:
| India had a caste system for a long time. The lower castes were
| relegated to menial jobs while upper classes enjoyed ruling.
| After India got independence in 1947, a new legislation was
| passed with 20% seats given to the lower castes. Soon, people
| demanding more and more seats, A classic case of vocal minority.
|
| 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...
| govg wrote:
| The Mandal Commission in 1980 determined the fraction of OBCs
| to be 50%, a later sample survey in 2006 showed it to be around
| 40%, [0] current reservation policies for this category are
| around 30%.
|
| 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...
| solardev wrote:
| I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a
| scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's
| background difficulties.
|
| 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.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play.
|
| 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.
| dcsommer wrote:
| > I wonder if a matrix like that would even be legal.
|
| 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.
| Balgair wrote:
| Even if it did happen, it would immediately become useless.
| What's the old adage? Once a metric becomes a target, it
| ceases to be a good metric.
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Yeah, that's a good point :/
| ars wrote:
| I read an article somewhere about parents "divorcing"
| before their kids goes to school so that he gets extra
| points on the admission sheet.
|
| They also "move" to a worse zip code for the same reason.
| solardev wrote:
| For me, the goal wouldn't be to rank the oppressed against
| each other, but to provide resources for all those who need
| it.
|
| 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.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| That's what the University of Michigan used to do, it was ruled
| unconstitutional in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003.
|
| 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.
| koolba wrote:
| > ... 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You're worried about skin color being used as a determining
| factor, but you were admitted based on zip code. That's trying
| to admit disadvantaged people, but _not_ doing so based on skin
| color. So maybe in this specific case, they 're already looking
| at it with more nuance? Or at least a different axis than skin
| color?
| solardev wrote:
| While a charitable view, my impression is that was unlikely.
| The school itself was already located in an impoverished
| area. They didn't need to recruit from the other side of the
| state to find disadvantaged students. And their materials
| said nothing public about special admissions for
| disadvantaged people.
|
| 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.
| glonq wrote:
| > _I often wished universities ... would use a scoresheet-like
| "matrix of oppression"_
|
| Be careful what you wish for. Like most well-intentioned ideas,
| this would become terribly exploited/gamified.
| everdrive wrote:
| I don't think this is a bad idea conceptually, but I worry that
| the implementation would be a race to the bottom. Who gets to
| decide who's been the "most oppressed?" It seems like nearly
| anyone could feel slighted by this.
| solardev wrote:
| It's not really about "who is the MOST oppressed" but rather
| that there are many oppressed peoples who are right now
| slipping through the cracks altogether.
|
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think the qualification of how to label the matrix parent
| mentions is irrelevant. The chart clearly exists and has
| been used. Whether we call it something like 'race
| conscious equity generator' or 'oppressed totem pole' is
| just a way to polarize each side of the spectrum ( and adds
| to the point GP made about whether it is just a play for
| making people fight over relatively stupid stuff ).
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Are you talking about assimilation vs maintaining
| cultural heterogeneity (like "melting pot" vs "salad
| bowl" models)?
|
| (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.
| everdrive wrote:
| One thing I've heard people suggest is move away from
| oppression whatsoever, and move towards a purely economic
| consideration. I would definitely be in favor of this, but
| I'm sure this approach would have its own detractors.
|
| 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.
| Bo0kerDeWitt wrote:
| This idea of a "matrix" often occurs to me when such topics are
| discussed. What attributes would you add to the matrix? You've
| suggested race, family wealth, zip code, whether a parent was
| an addict. You could also have height, physical beauty, IQ,
| degree of disability, sporting aptitude. Perhaps even degree of
| neuroticism or autism. The problem is, the matrix quickly gets
| bigger and bigger. The number of unique matrices starts to
| increase exponentially. What you end up with is a unique matrix
| for each individual. So why not do away with the matrix
| altogether, and just treat people as individuals, without
| fetishizing one or a couple of the attributes?
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| I think there are two questions here, both of which are
| totally valid, difficult, and important.
|
| 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.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Institutional racism is highly corrosive to society.
|
| 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...)
| solardev wrote:
| Yeah. There's nobody really fighting for poor white men,
| except maybe Bernie? But it's all too easy to capitalize on
| their grief and anger and redirect it into cultural wars
| instead. That anger is politically more potent left unchecked
| and weaponized than actually addressed.
|
| 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...
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I find it interesting that certain people seem unable to
| comprehend that Donald Trump is the result of that racism
| by Democrats:
|
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It is goes further back, and is way more international.
|
| 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.
| solardev wrote:
| Our politics are really, really ugly these days, with no
| room for this sort of nuance anymore. It's really sad.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Can't Harvad et al just stop taking Pell Grants and all other
| Federal funding and mostly admit who ever they want? If so would
| they do this or do they value that funding too much?
| poorbutdebtfree wrote:
| This is good. When life and death is on the line I don't want
| some guy/girl/thing with a lower SAT/IQ score than me doing the
| differential diagnosis.
| mikece wrote:
| The SCOTUS opinion here:
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
| Footnote7341 wrote:
| The most elite colleges already pre-empted this ruling by rapidly
| moving towards non-merit based admissions
|
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Won't people be able to prove statistically that they are
| obviously still using affirmative action policies via GPAs/SAT
| scores/racial mix? I'm not that great at statistics but that
| doesn't seem like a very hard task even using basic figures of
| merit like ratio of applicants to population of accepted
| students. Seems like something easy to bring a class action
| suit against a University after a few years of data is
| available.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The elite schools are cartels of opportunity that feed themselves
| a self-affirming diet of the smartest people to maintain their
| place. It's a diversion to look at your race versus somebody
| else's race. That's only a small fraction of the admission. A
| fraction of the best and brightest across races will gain
| admission, but the rest are usually the elites. These people pay
| for college out-of-pocket but the colleges themselves don't
| actually need tuition to function, their endowments are well-
| funded by the same families ahead of time to maintain the
| business talent conduit.
|
| 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.
| thegjp210 wrote:
| These are good points. I think a compelling argument can be
| made towards the admixture of the best and brightest with the
| daughters and sons of the rich and famous. Net net, I think
| that the opportunities provided to the best and brightest from
| exposure to, and friendship with the offspring of the
| spectacularly rich is why schools and network spun out of
| Harvard have generated such an effective flywheel effect over
| the generations. Granting access and pedigree to society's
| elite by a school isn't purely a vocational exercise - and the
| social element is why the Ivies and Oxbridge have thrived so
| spectacularly.
| aliljet wrote:
| [flagged]
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Relevant summary from the decision:
|
| > 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.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| > 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 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...
| skrebbel wrote:
| The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite
| literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come
| understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so
| long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong.
|
| 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?
| naveen99 wrote:
| math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined
| to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide
| which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back
| to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems.
| Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in
| negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring
| them back to the top !
| arcticbull wrote:
| Lottery? Seems to be the foundation of the immigration
| system.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Why stop at the students, choose the professors by lottery
| too, Nih grants by lottery... May as well just burn limited
| resources. Lottery math doesn't work. Someone has to fund
| the lotteries. And lotteries funding lotteries ain't going
| to do it. Someone has to actually produce something of
| value for there to be value to allocate.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I think the argument here is that once you've already
| filtered down to qualified candidates by primary
| criteria, then you can lottery off the rest instead of
| performing a secondary sort.
| naveen99 wrote:
| I guess the secondary sort is reserved for university,
| with a tertiary sort waiting at the corporate level. the
| heavy lifting is being done by the sorting, not the
| lottery at each level.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| _I genuinely don 't get why the race thing is part of the
| equation._
|
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a
| civil war to end racial discrimination.
|
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| It was during oral arguments with Waxman. Below is the full
| quote from https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/john-
| roberts-affirma....
|
| _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."_
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| > In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a
| civil war to end racial discrimination
|
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| How do you define modernize?
| chris_wot wrote:
| The problem is, according to my reading of SCOTUS, that you can
| have affirmative action on anything _but_ race. It occurs to me
| that it would have been far more effective if Harvard based
| their selection criteria on socio-economic considerations
| rather than race.
|
| 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.
| gghffguhvc wrote:
| As a non-American, I think watching season 4 of The Wire, which
| has an education and politics focus, was both eye opening and
| profound. Highlighted the profound gap between US and where I
| grew up on a number of issues.
| rrauenza wrote:
| > I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate
| based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please
| correct me of I'm wrong.
|
| In theory, but in practice it often includes "unless you are
| Asian."
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-fight-school-dis...
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| To preface: I don't really have an opinion on affirmative
| action per se:
|
| 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.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd lump UNC in there. It's a fairly elite
| public school, but still a public school, with 20k students
| and a 20% admission rate.
| prossercj wrote:
| For many in America, the race issue is more about who we are as
| a nation than it is about practical results. We want to
| identify as abolitionists, who defeated the slaveholders and
| moved toward "a more perfect union" (a line from the
| Constitution which Lincoln echoed in relation to the war).
|
| 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.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Equality has fallen out of vogue, the new hot term is equity.
| goatlover wrote:
| Because the focused has shifted to outcome over equal
| opportunity or treatment in the present. Some of us think
| that's misguided and the equal opportunity approach was
| working.
| hedora wrote:
| The equity approach is so blatantly racist / classist
| that I can't believe it has taken root in left leaning
| states like California.
|
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor
| White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic
| kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by
| income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian
| student population.
|
| 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.
| spacephysics wrote:
| The underlying important question is what do you define as
| equality?
|
| 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"
| BobbyJo wrote:
| >The underlying important question is what do you define as
| equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity?
|
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| [flagged]
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > At a most naive level, yes. But the post-modern left's
| big assumption is that evolutionary, biological, and
| other factors can't play a roll in those outcomes.
|
| Democracy's big assumption too btw.
|
| > At some level we have to be okay allowing for
| inequality of outcomes because we cant even identify let
| alone control all the social and biological variables of
| being human.
|
| We are. MIT isn't admitting people with IQs in 60s due to
| genetic defects are they? It's a matter of degree, and
| managing that requires measuring. We can't measure
| people's inborn abilities, so we have to make palatable
| assumptions measure what we can, and act accordingly. The
| "to discriminate or not to discriminate" choice is purely
| one of lesser evil. There is no good answer here.
| dcow wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand your MIT point. So what are the
| numbers today? Where's the gap?
|
| In my example Native Americans are expected to thrive in
| a college environment that promotes binge drinking
| despite having equal distribution of IQs. That's arguably
| unfair to them and isn't solved by tweaking the input
| distribution by identifiable racial characteristics.
| Rather, it's an unfortunate adversity that needs to be
| overcome (ideally with awareness, empathy, and support of
| other people even those who do not have to face that
| adversity).
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > Rather, it's an unfortunate adversity that needs to be
| overcome.
|
| Well yeah, but again
|
| > ideally with awareness, empathy, and support of other
| people even those who do not have to face that adversity
|
| the question here is _how much_ support and what kinds.
| Any amount based on race is still a form of affirmative
| action, it 's just not happening in a college admissions
| office.
| dcow wrote:
| In the context here I think people take affirmative
| action to mean "official race-based consideration in the
| college admissions process". While helping others out
| when they demonstrate need is action, it's usually just
| called being a decent person and you don't have to limit
| it to artificial racial boundaries.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > While helping others out when they demonstrate need is
| action, it's usually just called being a decent person
| and you don't have to limit it to artificial racial
| boundaries.
|
| 100% But back to the context: controlling for racial
| disparity. If your answer is "just be nice" then you're
| choosing the "wait it out for 100's of years" option.
| That's totally your prerogative, and I personally flip
| flop between the two in terms of which I think is better
| for society.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| calf wrote:
| But what empirical historical example of "outcome equity"
| has proven as harmful in scale and magnitude as slavery
| or other oppressive, authoritarian social orders? How
| much of this concern is founded in actual history? Even
| one example would help ground such a hypothetical
| concern.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > No, because this assumes that different groups have
| equivalent values.
|
| 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.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| In favor of affirmative action, one argument that doesn't
| even require comparing "equality of outcome/opportunity"
| between individuals, is that the university should have
| some say in the makeup of its incoming class, and should
| have a right to minimize its homogeneity. You might argue
| that race is not an attribute upon which homogeneity can
| legally be measured, but that won't change the fact that
| it's a proxy for life experience. All else being equal, two
| people of the same skin color will have more in common with
| each other than two people of differing skin colors, by
| definition of "all else being equal." So if you're an
| admissions office building a freshman class with the goal
| of optimizing the learning experience for each member of it
| - which includes the learning experience from interacting
| with classmates - then which would be the better outcome:
| (a) one where everybody looks the same and has a large
| degree of overlapping life experience simply due to shared
| skin color, or (b) one where each student has a chance to
| meet another student with a completely different upbringing
| from their own?
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| "the university should have some say in the makeup of its
| incoming class, and should have a right to minimize its
| homogeneity." If they don't take federal funding, I could
| understand that. Both Universities involved in this case
| do, so are subject to the Constitution of the United
| States.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Both Universities involved in this case do, so are
| subject to the Constitution of the United States.
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I agree with you; however, the federal government is of
| course a government actor and cannot continue to give
| funding to these schools if they continue to use
| affirmative action. Without the funding, the school
| essentially closes its doors or offers severely curtailed
| services.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I agree with you; however, the federal government is of
| course a government actor
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I'll consider myself outplayed as I am not going to take
| the time to research a response that may just end with me
| saying "I'm wrong" :)
|
| Either way I'm happy with today's ruling and look forward
| to everyone getting a little more equal treatment under
| the admissions process.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| But race discrimination should (in theory) be illegal
| regardless of federal funding status. So if it's already
| illegal, and the assertion is that universities don't
| have the right to minimize homogeneity in their classes
| (presumably along legal, non-racial axes), then taking
| that logic to the extreme, why should admissions offices
| have any discretion at all? Should every university that
| accepts federal funding be required to follow a
| standardized rubric when evaluating applicants?
|
| 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...
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Is it soviet or is it meritocratic? I think the Soviet
| Union was inherently corrupt and would wager that more
| discretionary decisions were made there than in the US
| today. I would be fully on board with your suggestion of
| a baseline and companion lottery system. I think all
| discretion should be removed. Let the most qualified
| people in based on high school grades and standardized
| test results. Everyone should have the chance to succeed
| based on that.
|
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| This is fundamentally the _only_ thing that bothers me
| about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal
| posts were "equality of opportunity" (as they historically
| have been) then I'd have no problem continuing to fight
| until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the
| goal posts to "equality of outcome" (what people mean when
| they say "racial equity") and say "look we're still a
| racist society" I just can't get behind that definition and
| framework.
|
| 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.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I'm more than happy to forgive white people for the sins
| of their parents once white people no longer inherit from
| their parents any assets gained during segregation, any
| houses bought with new deal mortgages (black people were
| barred from these), any building in an HOA that has
| historically banned renting to blacks, any legacy
| admissions preferences which originated when black people
| couldn't attend colleges, any businesses started with any
| new deal era loans (again, barred black people), any
| benefits from degrees or education fostered from
| segregated schooling etc.
| carefulobserver wrote:
| Under what moral philosophy is it acceptable to hold
| people responsible for things they had no part in? Other
| than your abstract idea that "history should be fair," do
| you have any justification for this idea?
| greedo wrote:
| I had no part in interning Americans of Japanese descent
| during WW2. But I believe that the country I live in is
| responsible for addressing that wrong. And I feel the
| same about addressing the wrongs of slavery and racism
| that continue to this day.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I'm more than happy to forgive black people for the sins
| of their parents once they no longer inherit from their
| parents businesses that get preferential treatment in
| government contract bids, any houses bought with special
| mortgages designed to subsidize minorities, etc. etc.
| etc.
|
| Or you could realize that civil society is impossible if
| you insist on punishing people of the present for the
| sins of the past.
| cma wrote:
| > if you insist on punishing people of the present for
| the sins of the past.
|
| I think Germany's reparations for the Holocaust make
| sense, for instance.
| dcow wrote:
| Did German jews get a tax break? Or was the burden
| carried by all?
|
| Generally, I think the nuanced take is that nobody is
| saying they don't want to help right past wrongs if the
| effects are still present today. They're saying that
| doing so on an artificial boundary of a protected class
| is toxic and backwards and does not positively contribute
| to the solution.
|
| What if we just invested more in poor and disparaged
| communities and added a 10% federal poor and disparaged
| communities tax. I don't see anything rhetorically sour
| about that (the number isn't the point). A burden shared
| by all to work towards a better world given to those
| communities with clear needs...
| dcow wrote:
| I have inherited nothing from my parents except financial
| help with my college education. My dad is utterly in debt
| from funding his 7 children's college educations because
| he believes (correct or not) that _that_ is how you set
| your kids up for success. He will likely die barely out
| of debt. I am white. I have worked for everything I have.
| I bought an auction property in the low income
| neighborhood in my city and have invested blood swear and
| tears and financially to the point where I am in debt for
| years to come to turn it into a nice property for the
| neighborhood. I do not take my privileges for granted. Do
| I deserve your scorn?
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > I have inherited nothing from my parents except
| financial help with my college education. My dad is
| utterly in debt from funding his 7 children's college
| educations...
|
| Contradicting yourself much? The whole point of the
| previous comment was if your father was black he would be
| much less likely to get the loan in the first place,
| which would result in, at the very least, crippling
| college debt for yourself, which would in turn lead to
| renting until you're ready to pass the ghost.
| orangepurple wrote:
| He didn't get a loan. His father paid out of pocket,
| massively harming his own finances to help his children.
| dcow wrote:
| No, the point is I have no traceable lineage to a hoard
| of wealth amassed by slave owners 6 generations ago that
| is filling the family coffers as people seem to be
| implying is true of all white Americans. My family
| immigrated over here 3 generations ago from shit
| conditions in a war torn Europe.
|
| Furthermore you have no idea my family's situation and
| whether my father would or would not have been actually
| more likely than a black man in a similar situation to
| "get a loan" (he didn't even get loans like you suggest).
| And generally your comment doesn't even apply to my
| situation it's cant be reduced in the way you're trying
| to argue it can. Also student loans ensure that there
| isn't discrimination in who can take out a loan for
| college. Arguably my dad paid a tax because he didn't
| have use take out loans and help pay that way.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| > My family immigrated over here 3 generations ago from
| shit conditions in a war torn Europe.
|
| And? How's that even matter in this conversation? The
| United States of America as an entity benefitted greatly
| from wealth generated through slavery. Doesn't matter
| whether your ancestors were slave owners. They came over
| to this country and immediately had more rights than any
| black person walking down the street.
|
| > Furthermore you have no idea my family's situation and
| whether my father would or would not have been actually
| more likely than a black man in a similar situation to
| "get a loan" (he didn't even get loans like you suggest).
|
| We know for a fact that this is the case.
|
| > Also student loans ensure that there isn't
| discrimination in who can take out a loan for college.
|
| Student loans also conveniently are non-dischargable
| except by death. Almost like being enslaved.
|
| > Arguably my dad paid a tax because he didn't have use
| take out loans and help pay that way.
|
| What's your father's poor planning have to do with the
| plight of other people?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| With all due respect, white people don't need your
| forgiveness. When will the black Africans who's ancestors
| sold people into slavery earn your forgiveness? They
| don't need it either.
|
| No one alive in the US has legally owned slaves. The more
| we focus on this insane rhetoric of "sins of the father"
| the longer it will take for everyone to just see each
| other as humans. I'm a jew from a tiny family, most of
| them died in the holocaust and Russia. I don't expect
| reparations from the current Germans or Russians, they
| had nothing to do with it. I came to this country in my
| early teens with my parents who had literally a few k to
| their names after selling all their possessions in our
| home country.
|
| My dad died essentially a pauper. My brother and I each
| are by all measures financially and socially successful
| now. People should stop spending so much effort blaming
| the past for their present, just get on with it. Its your
| life, do or do not.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| I'd never pay that. Because the money would go into
| someone's pockets, sure, but not the disadvantaged. Just
| some fat cats of the "right" color running the group
| collecting the money. I mean look at what happened with
| Black Lives Matter.
|
| > 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.
| dcow wrote:
| I mean yeah it was a rhetorical device. You're paying for
| people to stop making everything about race, was the
| point.
| camgunz wrote:
| LBJ gave the commencement speech at Howard more than 50
| years ago and said:
|
| 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.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _It 's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free
| America to make things right._
|
| 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.
| carefulobserver wrote:
| I would challenge you to cite any government program in
| history in any country that has successfully achieved
| "equalization of outcome for racial groups." For those
| advocating extreme measures and philosophies, the burden
| of proof should be very high.
| dcow wrote:
| Then why have the goal posts moved? That's my only
| challenge to the status quo. Presumably they've moved
| _because_ moving them is the only way (or at least the
| only cheap /easy way) to maintain a narrative of
| injustice. Shouldn't we be able to pursue this vision
| without frivolously chasing a metric we have absolutely
| no understand of let alone control over?
|
| 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?
| camgunz wrote:
| The goal posts never moved. They were always:
|
| - 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...
| amluto wrote:
| I think you jumped to a poorly argued conclusion with:
|
| > 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.
|
| https://archive.is/bjv8J
| camgunz wrote:
| > the results of removing affirmative action seem to have
| been a pretty clear benefit to black students at the
| University of California campuses
|
| 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/137/1/115/63609
| 82?guest...
|
| [1]: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/studies-
| supporting-mi...
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I think the problem is obviously a racial hierarchy is
| motivated to pretend that minority status is already
| faded into history, especially if it isn't faded right
| now. Similar to how my boss says that his kneecapping my
| career is in the past now, there's a new peer review
| quarter and I have new opportunities so why should I be
| mad? Maybe sure 10 years from now it'll be whatever, but
| he just sabotaged me last quarter. Of course to him it's
| water under a boat, he has every motivation to pretend it
| to be so, and to say my pointing out that I'm still a
| harmed party to be goalpost moving or whatever nonsense
| he wants to come up with to say it doesn't exist anymore
| and therefore he doesn't even have to lift a finger to
| make it up to me.
| dcow wrote:
| It's important for me to be very precise and clear here:
| I am not arguing that speaking up and pointing out that
| you were actively wronged is moving the goalposts. It's
| literally not and I'm not trying to silence you or
| discourage the royal your initiative to do so! I think
| your boss should probably be fired and you should get a
| bonus.
|
| 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.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free
| America to make things right.
|
| 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"?
| howinteresting wrote:
| p25, p50, p75 wealth among Black and white families for
| starters.
| strstr wrote:
| Is attending a prestigious college an outcome or an
| opportunity?
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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."
| f154hfds wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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'!
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > Your example of handicaps is disturbing
|
| 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.
|
| > 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. Having
| people who look like you in places of power is important
| because they can advocate for you.
| calf wrote:
| White fragility is demanding that minorities provide a
| well thought out, objectively quantified solution or else
| nothing is worth trying. We see this over and over again.
| suresk wrote:
| I agree that the goals and means to get to them are fuzzy
| and it feels frustrating at times, and things like
| affirmative action felt like trying to make two wrongs
| equal a right. But it also feels shitty and callous to
| say "Sorry about the whole segregation thing, hopefully
| everything evens out in a few hundred years or so.."
|
| 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?
| djur wrote:
| How exactly has equality of outcome been "proven to be
| doomed"? At the aggregate level, at least?
| akomtu wrote:
| If the outcome doesn't depend on your actions, there's no
| point in doing anything. Such a lethargic society cannot
| function, so to push it into motion the ruler has to use
| force and cruelty. The people will do the work, not
| because they hope to get something, for the outcome is
| always the same - cheap food and 4 hours of sleep - but
| because they want to avoid punishment.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I don't think anyone seriously suggests "equality of
| outcome" should mean "regardless of any actions/decisions
| you take in life". I would treat it as meaning "given two
| different large subsets of society that differ
| markedly/measurably on key indicators, there shouldn't be
| a difference in average outcomes between those born into
| one subset vs the other". Depending on the
| indicators/subsets in question that may well be a
| worthwhile & achievable goal. Particularly if the
| "outcomes" being measured go beyond just material wealth
| (e.g. health/wellbeing outcomes).
| dcow wrote:
| Equality of outcome can only be enforced currently by a
| tyrannical government. It's wholly doomed unless we can
| identify and correct for every hidden variable affecting
| outcomes.
| f154hfds wrote:
| One issue is there's infinite metrics to measure outcome,
| and any measurement you choose will have certain groups
| excel in compared to others. Once we achieve equality in
| a certain metric we will always have new ones to work on
| essentially forever. This may be a good goal for
| people/institutions but it can't contribute to
| discrimination being indefinite in scope.
|
| 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).
| kneebonian wrote:
| Equality of outcome is just a fancy way of saying
| tyranny. Freedom can only exist and only be freedom if
| you have the right to fail or succeed, if no one can fail
| or succeed because everyone is made the same there is no
| freedom, there is no choice.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cdmcmahon wrote:
| Equality of opportunity after centuries of slavery and then
| legal discrimination in a society that allows (and even
| outright promotes) inherited wealth and opportunity is not
| possible.
|
| 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."
| [deleted]
| ryandrake wrote:
| That's a very good way of framing it: Opportunity is
| largely inherited, therefore there cannot be real
| equality of opportunity.
| f154hfds wrote:
| You're changing the definition of opportunity here to
| still mean outcome I think.
|
| > <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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Opportunity is not a boolean "have" vs "don't have". It's
| a probability distribution, and much of that probability
| is inherited.
|
| 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.
| f154hfds wrote:
| I agree that opportunity is a spectrum but I disagree
| that it's inherited in our country because I disagree
| with your definition of opportunity. It's a spectrum in
| the sense that people can succeed regardless of societal
| prejudice or discriminatory laws, even though they'd have
| more opportunity if that prejudice didn't exist. Equal
| opportunity does not necessitate an equal outcome, nor
| does it imply it.
|
| 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.
| onos wrote:
| It's reasonable but then you learn that poor Asians do
| well. They inherit nothing, go to poor schools, but then
| do well.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Asians are not a homogenous group. For example, Filipino
| and Vietnamese outcomes did not do as well as Taiwanese,
| Korean, and Japanese immigrants in the wave from the 60s.
|
| 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.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Asians are not a homogenous group. For example,
| Filipino and Vietnamese outcomes did not do as well as
| Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese immigrants in the wave
| from the 60s.
|
| 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/
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Imagine my ancestors stole all of your ancestors stuff
| and I still get to keep it all and anything I 've built
| using it._
|
| 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?
| nameless_prole wrote:
| [dead]
| akomtu wrote:
| This example is about generosity. In this case you don't
| owe anything to your less fortunate peer, but not sharing
| it is greed and when greed is the driving force of our
| society, it's not surprising nobody wants to share his
| wealth. In a society of a far future that will run on
| generosity, being obsessed about possessions will be seen
| as a weakness. It seems that some proponents of the
| "affirmative action" sense that future society, and try
| to implement it here, but since they poorly understand
| human nature, and since their own nature is imperfect,
| they pervert the high ideal.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and
| Hispanic kids academically on average
|
| Why is that the case?
|
| For Asians, I don't see what systemic privilege they could
| have that would need to be compensated away?
| crackercrews wrote:
| Asians spend much more time than others on homework. [1]
|
| 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0731121422
| 1101...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| So, because they study more, and their family places more
| importance in studying, they should be brought down
| because they are not the right race?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I think it's more that admissions aren't actually
| optimizing for academic success. They're optimizing for
| career success. If you just look at academic signals
| you'll accept the most academically successful students
| but that's not the point. It's not unreasonable to punish
| applicants for spending more time studying because
| studying skews the metric they're using to predict career
| success.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > studying skews the metric they're using to predict
| career success
|
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| They've been using academic success to predict career
| success. I agree it's a good predictor. It's not
| foolproof though. The issue is that it can be skewed by
| devoting more resources to academic success instead of
| for example starting a business or political action or
| sports. Is someone less likely to have a successful
| career because they started a business instead of
| studying an extra hour every day? This is why the most
| elite schools switched to extracurricular and interview
| heavy admission criteria which ended up disfavoring
| asians who tend to spend more time on academic 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Where did you see that in my comment? I don't think that
| at all.
| adventured wrote:
| They're not concerned with the angle used - any angle
| that works is acceptable - just that more successful
| groups are brought down, and they're concerned with the
| levers used to bring them down (as a matter of cultural
| control). The idea is to be able to dominate politically
| through manipulation. For some political machines that's
| viewed as a critical tool: intentionally segment people
| into conflict groups (forever subdividing as you go),
| spur endless conflict and cultural control through the
| conflict (hate speech controls = end of free speech, and
| so on).
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| So hard work should be punished?
| crackercrews wrote:
| I definitely did not say that! I was just answering GP's
| question with a simple fact and link.
| koolba wrote:
| No of course not. We'll just ban it to level the playing
| field.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Lot of schools no longer put emphasis on SAT/ACT scores.
| So yeah that's basically what they did.
| nfw2 wrote:
| The ironic thing is that standardized tests are the most
| objective metric we have. Things like extracurriculars
| reflect more on the parents and community than the kids.
| mcphage wrote:
| > So yeah that's basically what they did.
|
| You think you need to work hard to get a high SAT score?
| orangepurple wrote:
| I needed to work hard to get a very high SAT score
| because I'm a dummy. But I did it.
| tbihl wrote:
| The 'systemic privilege' you're looking for is _culture_.
|
| Unfortunately, the treatment is even more complicated than
| the diagnosis is simple.
| rd wrote:
| It's a zero-sum game. There's no such thing as taking
| privilege "away" from Asian kids. If you increase the
| acceptance rate of some race, it has to be decreased from
| somewhere. There's literally nothing else that can be done.
| tester756 wrote:
| Why would it take hundreds of years instead of e.g 80?
| ix-ix wrote:
| Generational wealth.
| nfw2 wrote:
| All else equal, poor white kids probably get a leg up as well
| if they can articulate it in some way in their application.
|
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| Yep, I got some scholarships for being the first in my
| family to go to college, and also from the Dante Alighieri
| Society for my Italian heritage. They really didn't put
| much of a dent into tuition, and I worked full-time or took
| on loans for the rest. I wouldn't describe myself as "poor"
| but my parents were lower-middle class.
| purpleblue wrote:
| 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.
| rd wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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:))
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| The rest of the developed world: why do you care so much
| about race? Just decide on household income
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > 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.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| 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?
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| 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.
| tester756 wrote:
| Good thing that you don't have to rely on school and
| start putting effort yourself
|
| Skew the odds
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| > areas with lower housing wealth.
|
| So, in other words, lower income.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > 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?
| sib wrote:
| 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...)
| purpleblue wrote:
| 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.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| That would run the risk of helping the poor. We don't
| like doing that here in the USA.
| prepend wrote:
| 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_S
| laver...
| earthboundkid wrote:
| 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.
| tbihl wrote:
| 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?
| giardini wrote:
| Yes, and generations have passed, so that train has left
| the station, so to speak. Reparations are no longer an
| acceptable solution.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| And yet the grandkids of those slave owners sure as hell
| still profit from their ill gotten gains
| BobbyJo wrote:
| > 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/intergen
| eration...
| prpl wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes. I was sort of lumping redlining in with Jim Crow,
| although I guess it's technically a distinct thing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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!)
| JackFr wrote:
| > Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of
| Loving vs Virginia)
|
| Minor nitpick, _Loving_ was 1967.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This decision was a big win for Asians. Who right now are
| being discriminated against.
|
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Asians do have a general leg up in terms of family income
| (which correlates to education success), so if we were
| discriminating based on income, then we could come up
| with something fair that gives poorer people (which can
| act as a proxy for disadvantaged minorities) more
| opportunity, but at the expense of rich people since we
| don't have unlimited resources. The problem being that
| now you are denied getting into Harvard because your mom
| and dad are too rich...and I don't think many people
| would think that is fair either.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Appreciate the context, thanks. It doesn't feel less weird to
| me yet but maybe I gotta let things sink in a bit first.
| adventured wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Many beneficiaries of "affirmative action" are not
| generational African Americans whose ancestors experienced
| slavery and Jim Crow, but immigrants or children of
| immigrants from Africa:
| https://www.msnbc.com/podcast/harvard-s-complicated-
| relation...
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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)
|
| SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic
| cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.
|
| 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.
| Melchizedek wrote:
| So clearly non-Jewish whites are by far the _most_
| discriminated against considering their share of the
| population and SAT scores. Why is this fact never mentioned
| in the media?
| gmarx wrote:
| You'd need to know the percentage and scores for ivy
| league applicants to say such a thing a clear. It's
| likely true but not from these numbers
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| If anyone was confused at first glance as I was, these are
| the mean SAT scores nationwide and not at the ivy league
| institutions. I was very surprised for a moment to think
| the average SAT score at these colleges was in the 1200s...
| makomk wrote:
| Legacy admissionss are part of the problem with Harvard's
| affirmative action scheme that made it really blatantly
| discriminatory - basically, they kept those legacy admissions
| and balanced them out by putting a thumb on the scale against
| other groups that didn't benefit from legacy admissions
| either, primarily Asian candidates.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| To me - very simply put - merit doesn't make much sense when
| one set of people didn't get any of the opportunities the
| other set did. It's like comparing height with one person
| standing atop a stool. The nuance here is to find the lost
| potential in marks and tests due to a lack of opportunity.
| Race is a crude proxy and it really doesn't have to be based
| on just race. But it'd mean admins spend more time
| interviewing and verifying people's background and make
| subjective decisions based on that.
| [deleted]
| az226 wrote:
| Legacy is always brought up in these discussions. The amount
| of students who get into Harvard because of the boost from
| their race outnumbers the number of legacy students who get
| boosted from their status 20 to 1. Basically a race and
| legacy blind policy would reject 20 times more minorities
| than legacy applicants and then if the policy is race and
| legacy discriminatory.
| jenenfnfnfnf wrote:
| > Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of
| "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of
| generational knowledge and connections
|
| Had?
| akiselev wrote:
| Pasadena, a decent sized city in Los Angeles County that
| houses _Caltech_ of all places, was forced to officially
| desegregate in the 1970s but they 've still got tons of
| policies left over that discriminate in housing [1]. South
| Pasadena real estate agents unofficial redlined the
| neighborhoods well into the 1980s and possibly even the
| 1990s. Schools, especially in Altadena, were still highly
| segregated when I went to elementary school there _in the
| 2000s._ In the 21st century, for f**k 's sake.
|
| 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...
| greedo wrote:
| Oh the racism spread to the West very early in those states
| histories. Look up sundown towns, and Portland's history.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Caltech itself famously had more black students in the
| 1970s than it did in the following three decades
| kbelder wrote:
| From that article, I don't see any racially discriminatory
| laws still in place in Pasadena. Plenty of laws
| discriminating against the poor, though.
| thegaulofthem wrote:
| > (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!)
|
| 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.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| > appalling revisionist history
|
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| _> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of
| "legacy" admissions, [...] 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._
|
| 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_.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn't also discriminate
| against Asians.
|
| 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?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > the US had formal, legal discrimination against black
| people
|
| 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.
| amluto wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. The US had _state, local
| and private laws, regulations, and institutions_ that
| discriminated against black people with varying degrees of
| formality. The discrimination in question existed and was
| widespread in the US.
| mcv wrote:
| Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example,
| reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out
| thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are
| very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are
| probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of
| both.
|
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "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.
| cloverich wrote:
| 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.
| scarmig wrote:
| [flagged]
| HideousKojima wrote:
| And the moment you allow for wrongs that far back,
| there's no reasonable stopping point. People of Norman
| descent in the UK have measurably greater wealth than
| those of Anglo Saxon descent. Should those of Anglo Saxon
| descent be able to get reparations from those of Norman
| descent because of William the Conqueror's invasion? And
| then what about the Welsh, can they get reparations from
| the Anglo Saxons? My own ancestry is primarily Scottish,
| French Canadian, and Irish, can I get triple reparations
| from the English?
|
| https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/07/anglo-saxons-
| deserve-re...
| lifeformed wrote:
| It's not about ancient wrongs, the wrongs being talked
| about were happening as AA was implemented. We're talking
| about things happening in 1971, not just the 1850's.
| mech987987 wrote:
| I figure that there is no binary distinction between what
| is ancient and what is modern enough to matter.
|
| Would you agree that older wrongs are only different from
| newer wrongs as a matter of degree, rather than a matter
| of kind?
| malkia wrote:
| Yes, that's true, and yet generations and generations
| have suffered from this and this affected their children
|
| for example it took so many years to get to this:
|
| https://www.santamonica.gov/blog/statement-apologizing-
| to-sa...
| caeril wrote:
| How are the children and grandchildren of Japanese-
| Americans living through the 1940s doing
| socioeconomically? Arguably, they were subject to worse
| racism, harassment, and violence than African-Americans
| for about two full decades, _and we literally put them
| into camps_.
|
| Chinese-Americans worked largely as indentured labor on
| railroads and various other large projects both before
| and after the Civil War. How are their descendants faring
| today?
|
| Howabout Ashkenazi Jews, who have suffered probably the
| worst through all of recorded history? We're talking TWO
| MILLENIA of oppression, not a measly two centuries or so.
| Where are all the Jewish kids killing each other and
| flunking out of school for all of their historical
| oppression?
|
| The generational racism trope/excuse is played out, has
| been massively contradicted by every model minority you
| can think of, and needs to die. It has no basis in
| reality.
|
| Do people who regurgitate this insane idea just think
| Asians and Jews don't exist? The only way one could
| possibly entertain an obviously incorrect hypothesis is
| if you intentionally blind yourself to the voluminous
| countervailing evidence.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Japanese Americans who were interred were paid
| reparations after a hard-fought battle. Maybe we should
| do the same for other oppression?
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| There are kids applying to college very literally right
| now whose parents were legally discriminated against by
| the Federal government in the 1970s.
| scarmig wrote:
| How _exactly_ does present-day affirmative action
| recompense the victims of racist policies from half a
| century ago?
|
| Are their children materially worse off statistically?
| Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods
| that everyone who's materially worse off should be
| uplifted. What racism exists now against their children
| should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not
| something that's passed on from generation to generation.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| You cannot have a world that has generational wealth and
| privilege while not having generational disadvantages.
| Your definition of victimhood is incredibly narrow here,
| and wrong.
|
| Using the Federal policies is simply a stark example of
| how recently racism was aggressively state-sanctioned.
| The purpose of affirmative action is to help directly
| break the racist biases in a complex process to being
| able to attend college.
|
| It is not a singular solution, nor is it a perfect one. I
| feel like you are attempting to topple AA since it's not
| a magic bullet to the complex problem of racism in the
| US. It is an imperfect effort in part with many others to
| try and tackle the various inequalities in the US.
|
| Even if the US was able to have a truly holistic effort
| to solve racism and the wrongs minorities have
| experienced, what good does funding k-12 schools,
| scholarships, etc. do to help disadvantaged college
| applicants right now? Nothing. The common dissent is that
| if they are poor or otherwise disadvantaged then they
| should receive benefit from programs targeting those
| disadvantages. But those still are unable to directly
| address the various unique ways in which a black person
| with some set of disadvantages is different than a white
| person with the same checklist. The problem is simply too
| complex and the breadth of experiences of minorities in
| the US far too broad to be tackled any way but directly
| imo, which is what AA attempts to do.
| scarmig wrote:
| We agree that there are still racial biases in the
| present day that disproportionately affect Black
| applicants. But that's not the only disadvantage, and as
| AA is set up, a Black kid whose parents are doctors who
| goes to a ritzy boarding school is considered
| "disadvantaged" compared to a poor Viet kid in a crappy
| public school who has to spend all his evenings doing
| deliveries for his parents' restaurant. That is, frankly,
| ridiculous.
| ilovetux wrote:
| > How exactly does present-day affirmative action
| recompense the victims of racist policies from half a
| century ago?
|
| Referring to five decades in relation to a century makes
| it sound like a lot more time has passed than has
| actually passed.
|
| > What racism exists now against their children should be
| remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something
| that's passed on from generation to generation.
|
| How can it not be? If a parent is traumatized how can
| that not affect their child? Do you think that the black
| children from the 50's were not affected by their parents
| showing up beaten, bruised and bloodied or by seeing
| their parents hanging from a tree after they didn't come
| home the night before?
|
| Entire generations of people were victimized in ways that
| are hard to explain to someone who has not lived through
| it, and acting like everything needs to be calculated as
| a 1:1 transaction if it is even to be considered is not a
| constructive way to enter the discussion.
| [deleted]
| adbachman wrote:
| > How exactly does present-day affirmative action
| recompense the victims of racist policies from half a
| century ago?
|
| Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was
| discussed.
|
| Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers
| preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents,
| your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally
| at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you
| have representation in that process?
|
| Affirmative action is an artificially generated
| membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for
| people who may otherwise be excluded.
| scarmig wrote:
| That's missing the point: how does giving person A
| preferential access to college recompense person B who is
| distinct from person A?
|
| As far as legacy admissions go, they're noxious, but
| you're not accounting for the ~99% of people who don't
| have that privilege.
| mcphage wrote:
| > the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege
|
| What percentage of _accepted_ students have that
| privilege? It 's pretty high.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A quick search suggests that for Harvard (one of the
| institutions specifically sued here), it's 36% of the
| class of 2022.
| scarmig wrote:
| That's irrelevant, though, when you're talking about the
| vast majority of people who apply who don't get accepted
| _because_ of those factors. Telling someone "you're
| privileged because a child of a Kennedy gets a leg up in
| going to Harvard and shares your skin color, even though
| you don't get that same leg up" is ridiculous, to say
| nothing of Asians who are discriminated against despite
| having relatively few legacies.
| diputsmonro wrote:
| Victimhood can be passed through generations if the
| parents' harm was not remedied. Merely ending harm does
| not remedy it. If someone is prevented from getting a
| home loan, job, raise, education, etc. because of racist
| policies, that absolutely affects the kind of life and
| opportunities that their children will have.
|
| As an analogy, if I have stolen money from you for years,
| stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair
| the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money
| back, or something of comparable value.
|
| Affirmative action programs are specifically designed to
| seek out and uplift people who have been generationally
| affected in that way. It recompenses them by giving them
| job/education opportunities that they would likely have
| had if their parents (and _their_ parents, etc.) weren 't
| artificially held back.
| scarmig wrote:
| How? By having the kid get a smaller inheritance? Or by
| having the kid not having the privilege of having college
| educated parents?
|
| If those are the metrics we're using, then use them
| directly: prioritize first gen college applicants,
| applicants whose parents rent, applicants whose parents
| don't have professional jobs. Otherwise, why should a
| poor Asian immigrant going to a crappy public school be
| considered "more privileged" than a rich Black kid who
| goes to Andover?
|
| > if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me
| from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage
| I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or
| something of comparable value.
|
| The comparison here would be more something like "your
| grandfather killed my grandfather, therefore I should get
| privileges over you."
| ilovetux wrote:
| > It's impossible for someone born in 2000 to have been
| wronged by something done in 1800. Crimes committed
| during their lifetime? Absolutely, and fix those.
|
| That is disingenuous, Slavery didn't end until the 13th
| amendment was ratified in 1865 which is 65 years later
| than you said, but really, slavery was not even a crime.
|
| Systemic abuses continued long after that and even into
| today. Those are not crimes either...they are written
| into law like how property taxes are used to fund public
| education which ensures that people of means get a good
| education and those that struggle will continue to
| struggle.
|
| Lynchings, murders, beatings, being forced by gunpoint to
| not vote...those are crimes and (while they do happen
| even today) they happened a LOT in the 50's and into the
| 60's. The people who committed those crimes are
| grandparents/great-grandparents and a lot of whom are
| alive today.
|
| Wrongs against minorities are not some long-ago, almost
| mythical events that we need to just move on from. They
| are still happening, and they are indicative of a society
| that values sameness and predictability over the
| individual rights and freedoms of the people.
|
| That being said, giving a leg-up to a minority applicant
| over someone else is, in fact, one way to decrease the
| effects of the abuses that were experienced.
| gmarx wrote:
| 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
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| dayvid wrote:
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| > 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| >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.
| haberman wrote:
| > 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...
| thworp wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| nightski wrote:
| Universal healthcare sets a base standard which is
| fantastic but it in no way equalizes healthcare across
| the economic spectrum.
| naasking wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| pkulak wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| NeverFade wrote:
| 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?
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.
| thworp wrote:
| 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.
| parineum wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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?
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| Additionally we had issues where banks were being
| prosecuted for not giving housing support to primarily
| black neighboorhoods all the way still to STILL IN 2023!
| https://apnews.com/article/city-national-bank-redlining-
| sett...
| ThatGeoGuy wrote:
| > Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for
| example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start
| out thinking: it's been 150 years!
|
| 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/Fi
| le:Be...
| Y_Y wrote:
| Historically, many slaves were not permitted or able to
| reproduce, this is one thing that distinguishes the slave
| trade in the United States. Trying to make amends for
| those slaves whose line ended with them is probably
| impossible.
|
| 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?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Population wise there are more slaves today than 100
| years ago, so the world has not quite moved on.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> it is probably not worth putting a time limit on
| suffering_
|
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| > _...how do you propose to make things right for all the
| suffering of the past?_
|
| 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.
| prottog wrote:
| Your society would be doomed to forever look back at
| historical grievances and never make progress.
|
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| > _Under your and his vision,_
|
| 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?
| ThatGeoGuy wrote:
| I think it is probably unwise to pre-suppose an extreme
| here (that society will never "progress").
|
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> The default action today is "do nothing and don't
| acknowledge the problem."_
|
| 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.
| ThatGeoGuy wrote:
| Look I'm not exactly engaged enough to dismantle this
| piece by piece so this will probably be my last comment
| but:
|
| > 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| You may be right - I suppose that apart from my first
| point about ambivalence being the default, it doesn't
| necessarily apply to you personally. But it _does_ apply
| to the general ideology this thread is addressing. I 'm
| sorry if I grouped you in with views that you don't
| share.
| wizofaus wrote:
| > tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and
| oppressors a) look exactly the same
|
| 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".
| javajosh wrote:
| _> To you._
|
| 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/rwan
| da/inda...
| wizofaus wrote:
| Accepted, the Tutsi/Hutu division isn't one where
| difference in genetics/appearance seems to be a major
| factor, though I'd still assume the average Tutsi or Hutu
| could easily distinguish one from the other in a way
| outsiders mightn't be able to.
| wk_end wrote:
| I think you may have misread the comment you're
| responding to.
| concordDance wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| mcv wrote:
| I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting
| hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated
| against as a group.
|
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking
| about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing
| the damage done.
|
| 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.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| If some groups were so oppressed that they now put a cost
| on the rest of society via crime and welfare costs,
| fixing that will be a long term net benefit for other
| groups, not an expense. We can discuss the most effective
| way to fix it, but pretending the problem doesn't exist
| won't make it go away.
| mcv wrote:
| > Lifting one group up is almost always at the expense of
| other groups, which is isomorphic to punishment.
|
| 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?
| sokoloff wrote:
| > Who is hurt by better funding for schools in poor
| neighbourhoods?
|
| 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.
| Denzel wrote:
| You missed the part where it's not a zero-sum game. If
| you're interested in the economic concepts behind why an
| economy is a positive-sum game in an open system, look
| up: production possibilities frontier (PPF) and
| comparative advantage.
|
| 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.
| namaria wrote:
| >Whatever that money would otherwise have been spent on
| is harming the recipient of that now foregone benefit.
|
| 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?
| fugalfervor wrote:
| > If you raise taxes to do it, taxpayers are harmed.
|
| 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".
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Not necessarily. Life is not a zero sum game.
|
| 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.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the
| wrongs, reimbursing the damage done.
|
| 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.
| vore wrote:
| How would you feel on the other side of this? Given how
| recently discrimination was still legal, is it really
| great that you can shrug and say "well, tough tits I
| guess"?
| [deleted]
| paiute wrote:
| > Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic
| responsibility, only individuals do.
|
| 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.
| blueboo wrote:
| Groups were advantaged over groups. Your line of
| reasoning itself draws a boundary--in history--and
| thereby quite conveniently sidesteps the issue.
|
| 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.
| lom888 wrote:
| But perpetuating the logic of groups being advantaged
| over groups only keeps the identitarian mindset going. By
| openly favoring certain groups the discrimination never
| ends. All you need to do is look at India where the
| active discrimination in favor of scheduled castes goes
| on ad infinitum to see that the effect of any
| discrimination amplifies sectarianism. The line needs to
| be drawn somewhere. You don't fight fire with fire, you
| fight it with water. You don't solve discrimination with
| more discrimination, you fight it by having people not
| accept the logic of identitarianism.
| mcv wrote:
| The discrimination doesn't go away if you ignore it. The
| discrimination has continued. It still is. Not forced by
| the law any more, but still many times perpetrated by
| individuals based on other individuals' membership or a
| perceived group. That is the real identitarian mindset
| you should be worried about.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| "you can't simply draw a boundary... Https if people
| don't have responsibility... Only individuals do"
|
| 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
| bandrami wrote:
| It doesn't really have anything to do with "guilt", it
| has to do with the fact that white middle class
| intergenerational wealth was built entirely through
| housing, which was government subsidized for white people
| and whatever the opposite of subsidized is for nonwhite
| people (they didn't just not get the loans, the
| government took active steps to discourage private
| lending and devalue nonwhite neighborhoods to push up
| property values in white areas).
|
| If the racial aspect of it is intolerable to you, there's
| an easy fix: a 100% estate tax distributed universally as
| a nest-egg to 18 year olds.
| blackle wrote:
| 9/11 was not a systemic injustice, it was perpetrated by
| a small group of extremists in a single act. Racial
| discrimination was a systemic injustice perpetrated by
| lawmakers, enabled by an unjust society, with country-
| wide effects lasting multiple decades (if not centuries).
| It's not a logical fallacy to think that a systemic
| injustice requires a systemic solution.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| _it was perpetrated by a small group of extremists_
|
| A small group of extremists cheered on by a vast number
| of international Muslims worldwide and domestically.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| But the solution is to remove the injustice. That's not
| what's contended here, I think.
| mcv wrote:
| It is what I'm discussing. Not sure what else there is.
| fugalfervor wrote:
| That is one proposed solution. There are many others.
| otikik wrote:
| > Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic
| responsibility, only individuals do.
|
| Then the words "accomplice", "collaborator" and
| "facilitator" would not exist.
|
| I believe countries, families and things in between can
| be guilty of stuff.
| sokoloff wrote:
| "accomplice", "collaborator" and "facilitator" are all
| singular nouns rather than collective nouns.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > You've got to try to make things right.
|
| 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.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... when black people call the police, there's the non-
| zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
|
| 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...
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Statistics matter, anecdotes do not.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Unless they are the FBI crime statistics, then we are
| back to anecdotes.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| The way you analyze statistics matters too. For instance
| most don't cross-reference crime statistics with economic
| background and see how drastically that affects any prior
| (likely racist) conclusions.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Have you cross-referenced that? What I saw was that the
| lowest economic quintiles of some groups committed less
| crime than the wealthiest quintiles of other groups. The
| "economic" in "socio-economic" is important, but so is
| the "socio", which may include being discriminated
| against in the past.
|
| 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.
| eastof wrote:
| Don't the statistics show that black people have about
| the same rate of deaths per encounter as other groups?
|
| 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.
| tildef wrote:
| Worth noting that this paper has been retracted:
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014148117
| LanceH wrote:
| The bar was set at non-zero, so a single (true) anecdote
| surpasses that.
| j_walter wrote:
| The point of saying "when a black person calls police"
| implies that the "non-zero" is in reference to an
| increase from the status quo of "when a white person
| calls police".
|
| Everyday there is a non-zero chance of being shot by
| police whether you intiate the encounter or not.
| belorn wrote:
| Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot
| of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem
| cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior
| and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past
| is being put behind them.
|
| 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.
| Teever wrote:
| Germany paid reparations.
| mcv wrote:
| But not to Greece.
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| And not to Poland.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Germany has paid reparations to Polish individuals harmed
| by the second world war.
|
| > 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.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| And not to Ukraine
| belorn wrote:
| The West and east Germany split was a form of
| reparations, including conceding and dismantling of the
| German industry and railroad system.
|
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| Ta-Nehisi Coates' _The Case for Reparations_ was widely
| dismissed for the title in 2014, but it 's a chronicle of
| this sort of thing, and it's very much ongoing.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-
| cas...
| 93po wrote:
| > Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.
|
| Ask any black person and there's your answer.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Ask justice Thomas
| 93po wrote:
| Ask any black person with a net worth that isn't $30
| million
| rayiner wrote:
| The decisive majority of black people agree with justice
| Thomas that colleges shouldn't use race as a factor for
| admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2019/02/25/most-amer...
| gmarx wrote:
| Where did you get 30 million? One online source estimates
| 1 million net worth and has some reasoning to back it up.
| My guess is that if he has owned a house in the DC area
| since he has been on the supreme court, he would have a
| lot of home equity too but probably not up to 30 million
| ryan93 wrote:
| Thomas was anti affirmative action going back 50 years to
| when he graduated from yale law. he grew up very poor.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Seems like you are moving the goal post?
|
| 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| [flagged]
| kneebonian wrote:
| > t's obvious that they're talking around it, especially
| when "culture" comes up.
|
| I 100% think it is because of culture and has nothing to
| do with race. I have a friend who is black, he grew up in
| the Ivory Coast and moved to the US for school, he is
| hard working, contentious, polite, and all the other
| things that are associated with success. This is because
| he was raised to value education, to work hard, to do
| good for the world, the importance of family, etc.
|
| In comparison I spent several years doing humanitarian
| work in the inner cities of northern Ohio. There I saw
| veneration of doing as little as possible, hostility
| towards education, glorification of violence, and a host
| of other things that lead to negative outcomes.
|
| I won't pretend that some people aren't racist, but no
| person can tell me with a straight face that the inner
| city culture and everything that comes with it isn't part
| of the reason we have the disparity in our country.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I won't pretend that some people aren't racist, but no
| person can tell me with a straight face that the inner
| city culture and everything that comes with it isn't part
| of the reason we have the disparity in our country.
|
| I'd posit that when the institutions of society
| disrespects, discriminates against, humiliates and
| _murders_ members a group with impunity for generations,
| it 's not very surprising when that group is
| disrespectful of society and its institutions is it?
|
| And while, for the most part (leaving aside voter
| suppression, gerrymandering and other mechanisms that
| disadvantage/disenfranchise) the government _mostly_ no
| longer murders /discriminates with impunity, there's
| plenty of anti-African American _bigotry_ (I use that
| term instead of "racism" as there's only one _human_
| race, and we 're _all_ part of it) still around.
|
| While I don't think it's constructive for those who have
| been/are being abused/discriminated against for nearly
| _half a millenium_ to distrust the institutions that have
| done so, it 's certainly understandable.
| rd wrote:
| Why do you think that the inner city culture has evolved
| to be the way it is? Say, in comparison to, Menlo Park or
| NYC or Virginia suburbs culture?
| rayiner wrote:
| At least in part, it's the 20th century political
| alliance between black politicians and white social
| liberals. These are not problems that existed in the
| first half of the 20th century. Ironically, you're now
| seeing the same social breakdown in working class white
| communities, who historically were aligned with white
| social liberals. Fatherless "barstool conservatives" are
| the product of that alliance.
|
| Almost all the disparity in income mobility between black
| and white people is caused by disparities between black
| and white men. (Black women have similar mobility to
| similarly situated white women in terms of individual
| income.) And Harvard's Raj Chetty has shown that the two
| things that eliminate racial disparities in income
| mobility for black boys is growing up in a neighborhood
| with (1) low levels of racism among whites; and (2) high
| levels of fathers living at home with their biological
| children:
| https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
| There's only a handful of places in America,
| unfortunately, that meet both criteria.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| >are intrinsically inferior to whites. Most white people
| (and plenty of black people) choose to believe the
| latter.
|
| Your assertion is that most (>50%) of whites in the US
| believe that blacks are inferior? I find that hard to
| believe.
|
| It's my impression that these folks are mostly
| concentrated in certain states and retain power solely
| due to the fact that land mass = power due to the nature
| of our government.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| John Wood Jr. would be a good person to listen to for
| getting a very interesting answer to this very complex
| questions.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very
| real discrimination after that
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > You've got to try to make things right.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You can give poor people money, but that has nothing to
| do with black people. Black people aren't asking for
| money because they're poor, they're asking for money
| because the country was built with their ancestors'
| uncompensated labor, it was entirely legal, and the
| descendants of their owners still enjoy the fruits of
| that uncompensated labor.
|
| You can _also_ give poor people money, but changing the
| subject to poor people instead of black people is an
| instant smokescreen.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Why do you think the country is richer because of
| slavery?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Why do you think the country is richer because of
| slavery?_
|
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Do you think that if the South had freed the slaves
| before the civil war GDP would have dropped?
|
| 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?
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| Slave societies are generally poor. Africa's economy was
| largely slave-based until relatively recently (and still
| is the only place where you have active slave markets,
| the reason why slaves came from Africa was because it was
| the only place where there was a local slave industry,
| largely due to the trade into the Middle East), Brazil's
| slave trade was 10x larger than the US (the US never
| actually had a large first-generation slave population
| because mortality was so low and fertility so high),
| Caribbean the same, the Middle East the same, India the
| same.
|
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| In part because when labor is free you have less
| incentive to innovate;
|
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| I think you have the economic history of the cotton gin
| backwards there. The slave economy was much more tobacco-
| centric before the cotton gin, because even with slaves,
| cotton was too labor-intensive to be worth large scale
| agriculture before the cotton gin. The cotton gin is a
| good example of Jevons paradox, where making something
| more efficient (in this case, making cotton harvesting
| more labor-efficient) ends up increasing demand (in this
| case, of cotton-harvesting labor).
| btilly wrote:
| Except that the country wasn't built on that labor. It
| was built on agriculture and industrialization, mostly in
| non-slave states.
|
| 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.
| greedo wrote:
| There was a lot of slavery outside of the South, long
| before cotton became king.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > they're asking for money because the country was built
| with their ancestors' uncompensated labor, it was
| entirely legal,
|
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| No one is going to be able to go back in time and change
| history.
|
| 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.
| skippyboxedhero wrote:
| I would look at what happened in South Africa. An
| explicit part of Mandela's agenda was setting an end
| point for the discussions around what happened during
| apartheid.
|
| 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).
| cloverich wrote:
| You dont need to go back in time or define who is and
| isnt to blame. A few simple tax based measures (ex: free
| college for black people for 200 years) and genuine
| atonement (ex: replace civil war relics that downplay
| southern role in slavery and its associated atrocities)
| and wed be light years ahead of where we are today.
|
| Staple an endpoint on it then move on. The trick is doing
| SOMETHING meaningful and country wide is whats missing.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why restrict it to black people? Then you have to get
| into defining black and not black?
|
| Instead, just offer free college to everyone.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If we neutralize generational economic disadvantage, we
| also eliminate any merit to the claim to compensation for
| economic injury to past generations.
|
| 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.
| Pladbaer wrote:
| Well, it's an intersectional issue. You have to take into
| consideration that the academic successes or failures of
| an individual are going to be heavily impacted by the
| schools they had access to.
|
| Which is directly tied to the above mentjoned issues.
| khasan222 wrote:
| What I believe they're trying to say is that it already
| has not been a meritocracy, and because of human nature
| that stain will always be there somewhat at least this is
| a attempted washing of the stain
| iosono88 wrote:
| [dead]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I specifically wrote "less meritocratic" to imply that
| meritocracy is a spectrum. Obviously, humans are
| currently unable to achieve perfectly meritocratic
| institutions, but it is a spectrum where we can attempt
| to be more meritocratic than less.
| justinclift wrote:
| Sounds like there would be plenty of edge cases in this
| kind of thing too.
|
| 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.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it
| didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right."
|
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The problem with your logic is that if you leave the past
| the past then there's effectively no punishment for
| discrimination in the present.
|
| 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.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The Ukraine war is not 50 years ago and clearly affects
| the entire country. If Russia decides to pay reparations
| that could make sense but it's a different issue by a
| long shot.
|
| 50 years later after a bunch of people have been born,
| died, and moved in and out? No way.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why or why not does the time matter? And what length does
| or does it not matter?
|
| This is not math, no matter the answer it's clearly
| opinionated, hence this Supreme Court case.
| chmod600 wrote:
| In one year, the people involved are basically the same.
| In 50 years, a lot of births, deaths, and immigration
| have changed the population dramatically.
|
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Well clearly you have all the answers lol. Again your
| logic is faulty. There is no world government compelling
| action thus by your own logic any government can simply
| fail to take action until the duration you have mentioned
| has passed and then they are absolved of responsibility.
| tester756 wrote:
| Just like in "statute of limitations"?
| endisneigh wrote:
| Irrelevant. The question isn't about legality. It's
| morality and one of ethics. Even if it were legal it's
| the government itself that would need to be compelled.
| There's no higher force. There's the citizenry which
| takes us to the current discussion and thread.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| How convenient that groups can simply run out the clock
| on this stuff.
| tester756 wrote:
| The concept of "statute of limitations" exists.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'd believe that conservatives were genuine about this
| argument if they were actively supporting policies that
| repaired more recent oppression.
| emkemp wrote:
| True, but in American law at least, some crimes like
| murder don't have a statute of limitations.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Justice is often thwarted by death. Welcome to the human
| condition.
| mistermann wrote:
| Let's hope the sins of the fathers are not visited upon
| the sons!
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| How much money do you think the Germans and Russians owe
| the Poles, Belarussians and Ukrainians for WW2?
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
|
| Should we ignore all that came before, knowing that it
| informs and structures our societies, ideas and
| proclivities? I say, "no."
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/XCyO8meahME?t=410
| e40 wrote:
| [flagged]
| mahdi7d1 wrote:
| This legacy system in likes of Harvard boggles me. If
| someones parents went to Harvard it might be actually logical
| to be harder for him to get into not easier. His educated
| parenting is already a huge plus for him and if he is unable
| to get into the same university it's on him.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| What you need to know about Harvard is that they are a
| business. Their business is to amass donations from alumni
| and the likes. Their endowment fund is currently over $50
| billions.
|
| Rich and successful alumni means more donations, so it
| makes sense to take in the kids of rich and successful
| people.
| gmarx wrote:
| You are making some assumptions about what Harvard is
| attempting to do when filling its classes. If its goal is
| to have a class full of people who did the most with what
| they had you have an argument. If their goal is to maximize
| alumni support (financial and otherwise) then maybe not
| skotobaza wrote:
| Well if your parents went to Harvard then they had money to
| pay for Harvard. And they probably have money to pay for
| their children.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Harvard and similar universities are all about
| "donations" to the school, so yeah. It's definitely an
| assumption of generational wealth.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| This is good, but it also leaves out that the Civil Rights
| Act legislation made this kind of "thumb on the other side of
| the scale" for "disadvantaged races" patently illegal.
| Affirmative Action was, therefore, a recognized court
| exemption - explicitly stated by judges as a temporary
| measure - and which has been further narrowed in multiple
| later cases brought to it (cf. University of California v.
| Bakke, Gratz v. Bollinger).
|
| 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.
| cheekibreeki2 wrote:
| It's an idea as obsolete as daylight savings time.
| j45 wrote:
| It's a part of the equation because the Equation is so designed
| to be against it by the variables that are included and
| excluded.
|
| 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.
| aredox wrote:
| Because the US uses race as a trigger to keep the poor fighting
| amongst themselves.
|
| That's why.
| edgyquant wrote:
| The reason often given is that most poor people are white
| russdill wrote:
| I think if you want the historical context, read the dissenting
| opinions from the other justices. Such as
| https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Jacks...
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| A tangent question I have, and have asked here before without
| any satisfactory answer:
|
| 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"?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| There is another reason, less talked about, that higher
| education started considering factors like socioeconomic
| status, race, ethnicity, and national origin in admissions.
|
| 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.
| Balgair wrote:
| I'm going to assume positive intent on this and that it's not a
| troll comment.
|
| 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.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Differences in racial health outcomes are absolutely
| concerning and the medical training issues you call out are
| unacceptable.
|
| 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-...
| onetimeusename wrote:
| > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have
| opportunities that more priviledged people have already.
|
| 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...
| crooked-v wrote:
| Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for
| example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results
| from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely
| focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Or an Asian name maybe?
|
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| They never run these experiments right and this one looks to
| be no different. What they choose as "Black" names are those
| associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the
| same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like
| Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. You never see them
| use names like Cletus or Billy Bob or other names associated
| with lower class whites.
| Volundr wrote:
| > What they choose as "Black" names are those associated
| with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with
| "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya
| for blacks and Heather for whites.
|
| 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.
| treis wrote:
| Traditional African/Arabic names. Jamaal, Aisha, Hakeem,
| etc.
| thworp wrote:
| It would be quite illustrative to have had the same
| experiment run in the late 19th/early 20th century with
| southern Italian and Irish peasant names.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| If black-coded names are more strongly associated with
| being lower class in spite of data demonstrating that
| they actually have the same class distributions as white-
| coded names then _that is racism_.
| eli wrote:
| This is incorrect.
|
| 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.
| saltcured wrote:
| I am hesitant to wade in here. I am not asserting
| anything about the actual study, but just observing this
| thread.
|
| 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.
| eli wrote:
| I don't think it's even relevant. Hiring practices that
| are based on class discrimination but result in racial
| discrimination can still be racist even if that isn't
| their intent.
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Yes, but this sort of gotcha study is missing the fact
| that any merit-based system will discriminate against
| minorities that are not given a proper education.
|
| 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.)
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The Emily and Jamal paper explicitly accounts for this by
| controlling for parent's education level. There's a _whole
| section_ on this.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| influx wrote:
| This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021,
| women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students",
| does that argue that we should have affirmative action for
| men's admissions to college?
| dahwolf wrote:
| No, doesn't count for men. They're just broken and need to
| "step up".
| Natsu wrote:
| I've long thought that poverty is the best way to do this,
| because it's self-correcting. We'll probably never be truly and
| fully equal in every way, just because random stuff happens and
| there's only one perfectly equal state out there, but a whole
| lot of unequal possibilities.
|
| 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.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
|
| Completely agree, but I think the dirty secret is that
| affirmative action and its supporters have no intent to help
| the poor, not anymore at least. Its current intended use is as
| a weapon to wage class warfare. Create and support plebian
| race-based factions and pit them against one another so they
| can't fight the elites.
|
| It's an archaic but convenient leftover from another time.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Create and support plebian race-based factions and pit them
| against one another so they can't fight the elites.
|
| So pretty much the opposite of class warfare?
|
| Class warfare would be warfare between classes. What you're
| describing is racial warfare intentionally engineered to
| avoid class warfare.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _I 've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate
| based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please
| correct me of I'm wrong._
|
| 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.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| [flagged]
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| [flagged]
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _it 's been debunked countless times_
|
| Change my mind then, and debunk it. Refuting isn't
| debunking.
| goatlover wrote:
| Claiming it's a myth and has been debunked is not the same
| thing as actually debunking.
| prepend wrote:
| [flagged]
| Supermancho wrote:
| Making someone else do a simple google search, because
| you simply want to reply "nuh uh" is uncharitable.
|
| https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/selectivebias/
|
| https://www.city-journal.org/article/college-admissions-
| bias...
|
| As I understand it, there was some evidence: Asians
| applications were being suppressed, due to volume to
| maintain...a more diverse student body (or maybe just
| every elite school was racist?). https://www.forbes.com/s
| ites/christopherrim/2023/02/27/what-...
| JamesBarney wrote:
| [flagged]
| chimeracoder wrote:
| [flagged]
| prepend wrote:
| [flagged]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| [flagged]
| prepend wrote:
| [flagged]
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
|
| 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.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| > 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."
| djur wrote:
| I don't think it's accurate to say that affirmative action
| programs are driven by racial animus. What's your evidence
| for saying so?
| cogman10 wrote:
| No, it isn't. From a strict textual reading, the 14th says
|
| > 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.
| nyolfen wrote:
| what about admittance to a restaurant?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Easy, the civil rights act is great.
|
| 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%2C3
| 8&q=pov...
|
| [2] https://www.neh.gov/article/1921-tulsa-massacre
|
| [3]
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/poverty-
| rates...
| [deleted]
| nyolfen wrote:
| > Easy, the civil rights act is great.
|
| 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?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Whenever the Attorney General receives a complaint in
| writing signed by an individual to the effect that he is
| being deprived of or threatened with the loss of his
| right to the equal protection of the laws, on account of
| his race, color, religion, or national origin, by being
| denied equal utilization of any public facility which is
| owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State
| or subdivision thereof, other than a public school or
| public college as defined in section 401 of title IV
| hereof, and the Attorney General believes the complaint
| is meritorious and certifies that the signer or signers
| of such complaint are unable, in his judgment, to
| initiate and maintain appropriate legal proceedings for
| relief and that the institution of an action will
| materially further the orderly progress of desegregation
| in public facilities, the Attorney General is authorized
| to institute for or in the name of the United States a
| civil action in any appropriate district court of the
| United States against such parties and for such relief as
| may be appropriate, and such court shall have and shall
| exercise jurisdiction of proceedings instituted pursuant
| to this section. The Attorney General may implead as
| defendants such additional parties as are or become
| necessary to the grant of effective relief hereunder.
|
| 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.
| nyolfen wrote:
| it applies to schools that receive public funding, like
| harvard
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >Where in the 14th does it say anything about school
| attendance? When did school attendance become a right?
| Which amendment does that come from?
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > public schools may not discriminate on the basis of
| race
|
| 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.SS2000d. "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.
| rendang wrote:
| I'm not a legal expert and was wondering about the same
| question. Does the reasoning imply then that if Harvard
| wanted to forgo Pell Grants and other public funding a la
| Bob Jones University back in the day, they'd be permitted
| to practice AA?
| remarkEon wrote:
| I am not a lawyer but my understanding is it just means
| that as long as they do, they are evaluated as a public
| institution for the purposes of interpreting compliance
| with the Fourteen Amendment. I don't know if it would be
| permissible to do explicit racial discrimination and call
| it AA, and then say "well we don't take federal funding
| anymore so we're good". Interesting thought experiment,
| however.
| firstlink wrote:
| It's telling that not a single reply to your comment actually
| engages with the question about poor smart white kids. The
| answer is simple: poor white kids are the outgroup, and
| "mainstream" American society would like them to kindly go
| away. They aren't wanted. Society has no use for them.
| [deleted]
| aylmao wrote:
| It's worth thinking about this beyond the money-- what values
| does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative
| action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-
| determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and
| tolerance.
|
| 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.
| calf wrote:
| Norm Finkelstein recently said the careerist trajectory of
| college education (in America, but probably everywhere
| really) has been steadily going on for over half a century,
| and it really is a loss for cultivating an freethinking
| public commons.
| jldugger wrote:
| > But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just..
| well, let poor people come first?
|
| 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.
| dudul wrote:
| European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you.
| In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US
| it would be _unthinkable_ to include race in these policies.
| Just help poor people and that 's it.
|
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Europeans don't really have much of a right to comment on
| this issue, especially given their own attitudes towards
| race. The sheer levels of racial hostility in most of your
| collective political discourse would make the far-right in
| the US blush.
| dudul wrote:
| Good move not providing any example, probably much simpler
| to lump 30-ish different countries all together that way.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure that Googling for racism in Europe doesn't
| pull up any relevant stories for you to educate yourself
| with.
| scohesc wrote:
| I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street
| protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations
| and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue
| to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from
| organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA
| has been known to work with entertainment and critical
| industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace)
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Or maybe you just weren't as aware of the problems black
| people face in america? The amount of times my conservative
| family members tell me "Such and such wasn't a problem when
| I was a kid" while completely ignoring the problems proves
| it isn't a genuine concern.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| That's because it is.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| But the identity and diversity stuff was a thing long
| before that time.
|
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Finally somebody who gets it.
|
| 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.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here
| because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me
| put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is
| of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various
| excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted
| and abused into in orders to support it.
| nameless_prole wrote:
| [dead]
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| One issue is it isn't applied fairly. I know a Chinese-American
| who inquired into AA and was turned away because he wasn't a
| "traditionally disenfranchised" minority.
| [deleted]
| whinenot wrote:
| Because the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic
| minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a
| non-white person or community that was starting to become
| prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them.
| At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became
| unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of
| the most blatant examples include:
|
| - 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...
| dionidium wrote:
| > _- Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black
| or brown neighborhood.[1]_
|
| 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.
| whinenot wrote:
| If that interstate was never routed through that
| neighborhood, would members of your family be financially
| better off today? A fully paid off house unlocks _a lot_ of
| financial freedom for the current occupants and potentially
| generational wealth for future family members.
| gmarx wrote:
| This is a new argument in the past few years and it
| doesn't make sense. You do not need a parent with a paid
| off house to go to college and be successful. I didn't
| have that and I don't know many people who did. My
| friends whose parents have paid off houses now did not
| have them back when the kids were going to college and
| how would that have helped anyway? Home equity loan
| instead of student loan? How often is that choice made?
| There are some rich families who manage to pass wealth on
| generation after generation but it's rare in my
| experience and not needed to succeed
| animal_spirits wrote:
| The one thing I can think about is that it is much harder
| to maintain a strong and healthy community if your
| community is divided by an interstate.
| dionidium wrote:
| [flagged]
| whinenot wrote:
| I personally avoid living near interstates. The noise,
| the pollution & the walkability around them generally
| suck. YMMV.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Do you believe that people who can not afford a car can
| have the same long-distance family+friend support that
| you had? Do you think that your situation applies to
| everyone?
| [deleted]
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Then it should be explicitly a penalty to white people, no?
| This is the same country that passed a law called the
| "Chinese Exclusion Act".
| kneebonian wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| postmodest wrote:
| Let's imagine a hypothetical America, where we remove the
| economic aspect. Let's imagine that every household in
| america pulls in $250k/year and prices are uniform for every
| household across the nation. No one is poor. Everyone goes to
| the same excellent free schools where the teachers also make
| $250k/year. We've removed economics as a variable. Everyone
| is equally educated and equally rich.
|
| 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.
| zpeti wrote:
| Because divide and rule works way better in America based on
| race and not class...
|
| It's intentional. These political footballs are half real,
| half tactics.
| MockObject wrote:
| > 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 is there really any better explanation?
| jeltz wrote:
| An alternative one: A culture which has a history of
| structural racism due to slavery which therefore still
| thinks about many topics through the lens of race despite
| it often not being the best suite lens.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Dr. Martin Luther King said he dreams that one day his
| children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but
| by the content of their character.
|
| Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of
| people's skin.
| sotorfl wrote:
| William J. Bennett's Aug. 12 commentary is the latest
| example of a recent trend in conservative public relations
| --opponents of affirmative action claiming to be the heirs
| of Martin Luther King Jr. They invoke the sentence from
| King's 1963 speech looking forward to the day his children
| would be judged by "the content of their character," not
| the "color of their skin."
|
| 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.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| 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."
| Timon3 wrote:
| Do you think that Dr. King would argue that, aside from
| affirmative action, we live in such a world today?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, arguing with my dad some time back he says,
| "Minorities have unfair rights over whites: affirmative
| action."
|
| "Name another," was my response.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Name a single unfair right that whites have over others,
| today?
| panarchy wrote:
| They might not be law enshrined rights but...
|
| More peaceful police interactions?
|
| Fewer police interactions (for the same initial
| conditions other than race)?
|
| Better housing options?
|
| Better renting options?
|
| Biased voting districts from gerrymandering?
|
| Better healthcare outcomes?
|
| Better employment opportunities?
|
| Greater upwards mobility in general?
|
| Greater social outcomes?
|
| Greater chances of being taken seriously?
|
| Better cultural representation?
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| These are all statistical measures. For any one
| individual may not see the benefits of these privileges.
| Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will
| tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable.
|
| There are thousands of homeless white men in my city.
| Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but
| what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding
| downhill often by their own addictions?
|
| This is why the focus on race seems like such a
| distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when
| we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > These are all statistical measures. For any one
| individual may not see the benefits of these privileges.
| Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will
| tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable.
|
| Some variation is unavoidable, but statistically
| significant variation isn't! Why should people in those
| underpriviledged groups accept a society which gives them
| fewer chances?
|
| > There are thousands of homeless white men in my city.
| Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but
| what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding
| downhill often by their own addictions?
|
| Yes, it does matter? If police interactions are calmer
| and you live longer, you have more chances to turn your
| life around. We as a society have more chances to help
| them.
|
| > This is why the focus on race seems like such a
| distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when
| we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
|
| We should help the poor, _and_ we should work to remove
| disparities between races and ethnicities. Why are those
| things opposed in your mind?
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| 1) Many people of that race may be independently wealthy
| and do not need help. Grouping people by race is a bad
| measure of "need"
|
| 2) I haven't heard realistic plans for actually helping
| people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems
| achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.
|
| 3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge
| cases.
|
| 4) You could easily find other ways to group people to
| locate "disadvantage". Religion is an easy one, but
| affirmative action based of religion sounds quite
| discriminatory.
|
| 5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People's
| difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by
| actual experiences.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > 1) Many people of that race may be independently
| wealthy and do not need help. Grouping people by race is
| a bad measure of "need"
|
| But people are being treated badly due to their race. Why
| can't we use race as one criterium to decide who needs
| help? Why do we have to pretend that racism isn't a real
| social thing that affects peoples lives?
|
| > 2) I haven't heard realistic plans for actually helping
| people of a specific race. Helping poor people seems
| achievable, helping black people sounds presumptuous.
|
| Well, if you define these plans as unrealistic you're not
| going to find realistic plans. But affirmative action for
| example is a very realistic plan - so much so that it is
| (or was) reality!
|
| > 3) Race itself is a nebulous grouping with many edge
| cases.
|
| Sure, but people are being treated badly due to those
| nebulous groupings with many edge cases. Why do we have
| to ignore that?
|
| > 4) You could easily find other ways to group people to
| locate "disadvantage". Religion is an easy one, but
| affirmative action based of religion sounds quite
| discriminatory.
|
| Do you have statistics showing that a similarly
| statistically significant difference exists between
| different religions?
|
| > 5) The focus on race is actually just racist. People's
| difficulty of life is not measured by privilege but by
| actual experiences.
|
| "The people who identify racism are the real racists!"
| isn't as good of an argument as you think. People have
| different experiences due to their race. Attempting to
| find ways to curb that isn't "racist", it's "normal
| social behavior".
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| > But people are being treated badly due to their race
|
| Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to
| stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
|
| > affirmative action for example is a very realistic plan
|
| It's also kinda racist.
|
| > people are being treated badly due to those nebulous
| groupings
|
| This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race.
| However, I do not see why this means people need "help".
| What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still
| have no answers.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to
| stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
|
| Why should the affected groups, or society at large,
| accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to
| make things fair in light of this fact?
|
| > It's also kinda racist.
|
| Can you explain why? You cited MLK Jr. earlier. He didn't
| think that AA is racist. Where do you disagree with his
| position?
|
| > This is one of the valid reasons to discuss race.
| However, I do not see why this means people need "help".
| What kind of help? How are you going to help? I still
| have no answers.
|
| No, you've gotten answers, you just don't like them. I've
| explained pretty clearly why this means people need
| "help", what kind of help and so on.
| MockObject wrote:
| > Why should the affected groups, or society at large,
| accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to
| make things fair in light of this fact?
|
| That's exactly what the court just did. It prevented
| universities from being racist.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I'm trying to take your reply in good faith, but I'm
| really not understanding. Can you walk me through your
| thought process? The earlier discussion was:
|
| >>> But people are being treated badly due to their race
|
| >> Unfortunately, I do not think you can force racists to
| stop being racist. Bigotry is perfectly legal.
|
| > Why should the affected groups, or society at large,
| accept this? Why shouldn't we band together to try to
| make things fair in light of this fact?
|
| So the court helped black people in regards to the
| bigotry of racists by "preventing universities from being
| racist". Your solution to racism is to treat everyone
| equally - which in turn means that black people just have
| to accept the bigotry of racists. So your solution is for
| them to just suck it up. Am I understanding you
| correctly?
| Volundr wrote:
| > We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy
| discussing race and ethnicity.
|
| Why not both? I expect you'd find the cross-section of
| people who want to, say, give black people better medical
| outcomes, and those who support helping the homeless and
| poor is quite large.
|
| I feel like "what about the poor" reliability shows up
| when discussing helping brown people, but as soon as
| something is designed to help the poor the same
| politicians show up to condem it as entitlements or
| socialism.
|
| I've seen no evidence to suggest that anyone trying to
| better minority outcomes has ever actually distracted
| from implementing programs to help the poor.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| What do you think should be done to help underprivileged
| races?
|
| The focus on race breeds inaction because we insist
| something must be done before we have any idea how to
| solve it.
|
| Focusing on minorities isn't helpful either because
| minorities includes demographics that are doing quite
| well.
| Volundr wrote:
| Well for example we already discussed that black people
| have worse health outcomes, we could perhaps study why
| that is and focus on fixing those things, ex through
| outreach programs.
|
| Assume we can fix poverty entirely. We already live in a
| world where, accounting for income, black people have
| worse health outcomes than whites. Why do you assume
| helping poor people will fix that? Wouldn't it be more
| reasonable to assume we'd now love in a world where no
| one is poor , and black people still are underserved by
| our healthcare system? How do you propose fixing it if we
| can't acknowledge the racial disparities?
|
| > The focus on race breeds inaction because we insist
| something must be done before we have any idea how to
| solve it.
|
| Bull. We aren't unable to implement programs help the
| poor because people dare mention race. Plenty of people
| are trying to push for programs to help the poor
| regardless of race. It's not the people who acknowledge
| that black people are more likely to be poor standing in
| the way.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| > study why that is and focus on fixing those things, ex
| through outreach programs.
|
| This isn't a solution, it's passing the buck along.
| Volundr wrote:
| Outreach programs can't be part of the solution? Why not?
| The suggestion was based on studies that found a high
| amount of distrust of the medical system.
| djur wrote:
| Representation in the Senate.
| Volundr wrote:
| None. Non-whites have plenty of unfair disadvantages
| however.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Let's fix the unfair stuff instead of introducing more
| unfair stuff then
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Do you think being an African American hurt Barak Obama's
| chance to be the Democratic nominee for President? Or to
| be elected President?
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I can name several more
|
| 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.
| kacesensitive wrote:
| 1. Not a right 2. Not a right 3. Not a right 4. Not a
| right 5. Not a right 6. Holy shit not a right
| [deleted]
| sotorfl wrote:
| [dead]
| panarchy wrote:
| https://indypendent.org/2015/01/the-white-race-was-
| invented-...
|
| 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.
| sornaensis wrote:
| Really, people had to be told that people with white(r)
| skin, are similar..?
|
| 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.
| MockObject wrote:
| People naturally mix. They work together, worship
| together, and marry each other, unless this natural
| mixing is opposed by external forces.
| panarchy wrote:
| It wasn't that they just said that they looked different
| obviously, what a ridiculous assertion . They seeded
| talking points of racial supremacy amongst them to divide
| them when before they saw themselves more unified as
| workers with their race not having inherent merit.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > 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? (snip) 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.
|
| 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)
| crackercrews wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate
| based on race, so long as it's a minority race"
|
| 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.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| https://thehill.com/changing-
| america/enrichment/education/57...
|
| Why would White students choose to claim non-White ancestry
| at these levels if it's going to disadvantage them?
| etchalon wrote:
| Because people believe things which are untrue?
| az226 wrote:
| Patently false
| etchalon wrote:
| Not "patently false", but, complicated:
|
| 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.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans
| as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| So what had Asian Americans done to deserve being treated
| worse?
| goatlover wrote:
| Who's we and how do you delineate those groups?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The United States is a legal entity. It's the one
| responsible for the harms, and it's the one responsible for
| the reparations.
|
| 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. :-)
| orangepurple wrote:
| Please identify the slave owners and punish them, not the
| rest of us. Most people in American didn't own slaves.
| Hell even most white people that weren't Jewish didn't
| own slaves. The reputation was earned:
| http://heyjackass.com/
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| Why did you harm these groups? What are you doing to fix what
| you have done?
| zo1 wrote:
| There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in any
| fair way. We are just making more victims that future
| generations will look down on us for.
|
| I want to leave a fair world to my children, not one filled
| with hate and systemic racial discrimination.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| > There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in
| any fair way.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic
| "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor"
| program?
|
| 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.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| > In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that
| doesn't exist in the way many people think.
|
| 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?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| California has been trying to overturn it's race-blind
| policy for some time. The original policy was instituted
| about the same time as everyone else's. The intent of
| overturning it, of course, is to then go further and
| institute a policy more like the one seen in this case.
|
| It has been overturned at the referendum level every time.
| prpl wrote:
| Laziness? It's cheap and it gives them a lever they wanted.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I expect part of this was just retaining their right to do
| so as they are losing a degree of flexibility in admissions
| here.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > [In California], they already for a long time do not
| consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law.
|
| They do to an extent, they just try to hide it as "holistic
| review" or such, make it hard to prove.
| nradov wrote:
| You are referring to California _public_ colleges. Some
| California private colleges which received federal funding
| were still using racial identity as a factor in admissions. I
| received an email from my _alma mater_ today stating that
| they were discontinuing this practice due to the Supreme
| Court decision.
| rayiner wrote:
| There was a logic to the idea of racial preferences as
| originally envisioned. Studies show that the income gaps
| between American descendants of slaves and indigenous Americans
| basically have been unchanged even after segregation and legal
| discrimination was ended. The reasoning goes that racial
| preferences are necessary to undo these disadvantages.
|
| 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.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| The answer is basically: America has managed to make race and
| socioeconomic status incredibly highly correlated, especially
| in its large coastal cities where basically all poor people are
| non-white. It's nothing like, for example, Northern European
| cities with large white working class populations.
|
| 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.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| One of the things of "why not class only" is because in America
| race matters a lot. I mean it quite literally: studies have
| shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent
| to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less
| qualification. In some cases black people with a college degree
| have job prospects similar to a white person with a felony
| record.
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| > studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name
| makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of
| magnitude less qualification.
|
| Can you link to a study showing this? How did this study
| define what an "order of magnitude less qualification" means?
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| http://thecrimereport.s3.amazonaws.com/2/fb/e/2362/criminal
| _...
|
| 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...
| 0xcafefood wrote:
| Got it, so not studies in the sense of a peer reviewed
| publication. Maybe something more like a "position
| paper."
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| You can't exactly double-blind study black people but how
| many studies do you really need? My original stance was
| only "in some cases, discrimination exists". You're
| really ridiculous about the bar of evidence you expect
| from me here.
|
| "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and
| Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination"
| https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertr
| and...
|
| "Systemic Discrimination Among Large U.S. Employers"
| https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/4/1963/660593
| zuminator wrote:
| One of the issues with the US is not just that certain races
| are more likely to be poor but they are segregated as well,
| meaning that there are counties, neighborhoods, and school
| districts where minorities are concentrated, at levels
| sometimes approaching 90% or more. And as a result of that,
| historically the residents of those neighborhoods weren't just
| economically deprived, but cut off from power, and influence.
| People lived in dilapidated housing. They couldn't afford to
| repair because banks wouldn't issue loans. They couldn't afford
| good schools because schools are funded by county or district
| in the US and so a poor local population means underfunded
| schools. They couldn't get good jobs because they had a poor
| education. All of their friends, family and neighbors were
| similarly dirt poor. In other words there was a cycle of
| pervasive generational poverty which didn't exist in the
| mainstream culture. Even if they scrimped and saved to try to
| move to a better neighborhood, they were often either entirely
| excluded on the basis of race, or faced rampant and sometimes
| dangerous discrimination upon settling in the new neighborhood.
|
| 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.
| danabrams wrote:
| For 350 years of US history africans and their descendants were
| enslaved. Native Americans were ripped from their land and
| relocated, often with genocidal levels of casualties.
|
| 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)
| arbuge wrote:
| > it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a
| harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people
|
| Do you have any sources for that?
| danabrams wrote:
| Do I have any sources that systemic racism is real?
|
| 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.
| ix-ix wrote:
| I once failed an undergraduate student because they
| argued that racism ended in 1965 and that racism did not
| exist after that. It's like they didn't pay attention in
| class at all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have
| opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right?
|
| 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.
| variadix wrote:
| People want to play identity politics, not solve tangible
| issues like income disparity and economic mobility.
| kylerush wrote:
| Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other
| races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people
| (or "model minorities" like Asian race) are not
| disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or
| disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it's the
| opposite.
|
| 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.
| thworp wrote:
| But it could be cultural. All the facts point to that being
| the cause. If there is so much racism against black people
| how could Nigerians and Carribean Blacks be some of the most
| prosperous ethnic groups in the US?
| lolinder wrote:
| This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated
| topic.
|
| 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.
| kylerush wrote:
| The point you're making is that some cultures devalue
| educational achievement and success? So much so that we
| should expect to see members of those cultures
| disproportionately lacking access to opportunity because
| they "don't want it?"
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to think the intent is to benefit
| individuals of specific races. This has very much been
| something where the intended benefactor is American society in
| general.
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| OP's point is still important, though: you're talking about
| the wrong kind of diversity. If you go to a school with a
| bunch of kids who grew up in upper-class neighborhoods in
| Washington, D.C., who cares if a few of those kids have black
| skin? They're contributing _~nothing_ to the diversity on
| campus, because they grew up in the same place and come from
| the same income level.
|
| 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.
| pknomad wrote:
| Guessing UT Austin?
| asimpletune wrote:
| Yeah, great experience
| pknomad wrote:
| Oh yeah I bet. I agree with you on positive benefits of
| having a diverse class, fwiw.
|
| 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?).
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| I have wondered this myself and I think the answer is that
| American universities want to discriminate based on wealth.
| They actually want the richest kids possible going to their
| schools. Their business model depends on it.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| I am from India and have lived in the U.S for over 2 decades. I
| have observed "affirmative action" arguments in two continents.
|
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| At some point, you have to declare the war against something,
| over. The war against polio, the war against dengue fever, etc.
| even while there may continue low-grade outbreaks. Perfect is
| the enemy of the good.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| Go read any article/book about living as a person of color in
| America, also read about the history of slavery, jim crow, and
| civil rights. You might understand then, you will never get
| that story via HN or American mainstream media. I mean if
| you're serious about it at all, read about it from the
| perspective of those who are being discriminated against.
| fundad wrote:
| It's foreign to most American college students too, almost all
| US colleges accept almost all applicants.
|
| A very small number of private, public and military colleges
| attract so many applicants they have to select students for
| admission.
| sbdaman wrote:
| [flagged]
| TheFreim wrote:
| Could you explain why?
| stcroixx wrote:
| [flagged]
| zapataband1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| I think he might be talking about "Racism in US college
| admission has been banned" which sounds like a good thing. Do
| you argue that Asian and Indian students should be rejected
| because of their race in favor of less qualified black or
| Hispanic students? I would love to hear your case for why
| that is ok.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| "Less qualified" opens a can of worms. If one student spent
| twice as long studying does that make them more likely to
| have a high income after they graduate? Because in the end
| that's what these schools are looking for, "How do we admit
| the people who will be the most successful in their
| career?" Just looking at grades and test scores can't
| figure that out. Academic success may be correlated with
| cultural values in a way that income isn't.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| > Just looking at grades and test scores can't figure
| that out.
|
| Do you have any citations to back up that assertion? I
| think we've reached the point of calling these metrics a
| bit more than correlations.
|
| I hear this all the time from pro affirmative action
| groups, but I don't think it's backed up by any science.
| People who practice more are going to be better at that
| thing. Same in sports, musics, medicine, literally
| everything. Hard work it turns out pays off. It's very
| unfortunate that some can't do the hard work required to
| make the grade. But that doesn't mean that they should be
| elevated _over others that did_ make the grade _based on
| the color of their skin_. I can't even believe I have to
| argue this.
|
| Looking at academic factors should be the strongest
| determining factor, economic factors is fine, but looking
| at race is racist, by definition.
|
| Advocacy groups trying to change the definitions of words
| as a way to sort of "legislate from the bench" is
| dishonest and an obvious attempt to avoid the debate on
| very controversial topics. It will always be racist to
| make determinations based on race. Attempts to change
| this definition is racist.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I absolutely believe hard work pays off. But different
| people value different things. If one person works
| incredibly hard to get their grades and test scores up
| and the other works just as hard to start a business who
| is the harder worker? The academic criteria says it's the
| first person, but I don't think that means they will have
| more success in their career. And in the end maximizing
| career success is what admissions is trying to do.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| I think an economic based affirmative action makes more
| sense, so don't put words in my mouth. Let's just celebrate
| rule by 5 people in a country of 330M dumbocracy
| stcroixx wrote:
| [flagged]
| jl6 wrote:
| One question I have is: did it work?
|
| 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?
| peterfirefly wrote:
| More recent immigrants from Africa with an Ivy League degree,
| yes. That looks superficially like an improvement to many.
| w10-1 wrote:
| The improvement was clear and obvious in many aspects of
| society, but the question is whether the cost was worth it, and
| whether it's really a long-term solution, since it may
| exacerbate some aspects.
|
| 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.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I wrote my thoughts on this news (and how it relates to MLK)
| here:
|
| "I Have A Dream" Today https://synystron.substack.com/p/i-have-a-
| dream-today
| seanw444 wrote:
| This comment section is a frightening wake-up call to how
| peoples' mindsets are nowadays. I choose to believe that it's
| over-represented on HN because most people that exercise interest
| in the topics HN is made for, are the stereotypical liberal
| types.
| kernal wrote:
| Racial discrimination is racial discrimination no matter how you
| try to sugar coat it.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Regardless of what your take is on the substance, as a former
| lawyer, I was really struck at the language in the various
| concurrences and dissents. They are very clearly pissed and/or
| disgusted with each other in a way that is very not-normal, even
| for hot button cases.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| This issue is personal for justices Thomas, Jackson, and
| Sotomayor especially. I think that is reflected in their
| opinions.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Sotomayor as well. What fascinates me about Thomas's dissent
| is towards the end he talks about HBCUs and how effective
| they are. You'll find language of his in a lot of places
| suggesting black separatist--type sympathies. He was a
| genuine radical in his college years in that respect, and
| he's still clearly sympathetic to sone extent.
|
| 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).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > I think Justice Thomas has a genuinely nutty
| jurisprudence
|
| 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.
| ekam wrote:
| Yeah he does seem to have a somewhat cohesive and distinct
| philosophy of his own that undergirds his decisions and
| that's been underappreciated given his influence over the
| Court and American jurisprudence
| fzeroracer wrote:
| [flagged]
| b8 wrote:
| Thomas Sowell successfully convinced me that affirmative action
| is a disservice with his cogent affirmative action book.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Justice Thomas's concurrence cited Dr. Thomas Sowell TWICE in
| support of the disservice affirmative action can have on
| preferentially-admitted students of color. Justice Sotomayer's
| dissent dispelled Dr. Sowell's sage publications.
|
| 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."
| subpixel wrote:
| I'd rather live in a society that made it an imperative to have
| more students from more ethnicities be eligible for the best
| universities every year.
|
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Even more so because all these discussions evolve around elite
| institutes only. Which doesn't help 99.999999% of people.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| That's probably not going to happen in the USA given current
| status of public schools barely hanging on.
| imtemplain wrote:
| [dead]
| ricardoplouis wrote:
| Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we
| still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which
| overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the
| historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on
| affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or
| historical harm will only increase the number of white students
| at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race based
| admissions will serve the greater interest without addressing
| past (and current) systems of white supremacy.
|
| Link to demographics on legacy admissions:
| https://www.culawreview.org/journal/legacy-admissions-an-ins...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| From your source
|
| > In addition, 70 percent of Harvard's legacy applicants are
| white.
|
| From US Census:
|
| > Race and Hispanic Origin
|
| > White alone, percent
|
| > 75.5%
| jasonlotito wrote:
| From the source of the source you quoted:
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| onetimeusename wrote:
| > overwhelmingly favor rich and white students.
|
| 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...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| This ruling will overwhelmingly help Asians and only marginally
| help white people
| gnicholas wrote:
| It will be especially helpful for Asian people who don't have
| Asian-sounding last names. I suspect that schools will
| continue to discriminate against Asians, and I wish that my
| mixed-race kids had a less Asian-sounding last name.
| chmod600 wrote:
| " I have a dream that my four little children will one day live
| in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their
| skin but by the content of their character."
|
| --- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-spee...
| arpyzo wrote:
| If you agree with this decision on the grounds of supporting
| meritocracy, consider that the real travesty with regards to
| meritocracy in college admissions are legacy admissions.
| xyzelement wrote:
| How big a deal and how common is it in reality? "We have one
| fewer spots because we admitted the son of a donor" and "we
| won't accept you based on race" are different magnitude.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| It's the difference between "we're setting aside this slot
| specifically for you because of who your parents are" and
| "we're placing you in this competitive pool that will make up
| a certain percentage of the overall class."
|
| They're vastly different in terms of magnitude.
| kemayo wrote:
| It has a surprisingly strong effect as schools get more
| prestigious / exclusive. At schools like Harvard, which have
| in incredibly low admission rate (something like 5% of
| qualified applicants get an offer, I think?), legacies get a
| massive bump.
|
| 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.
| deilline wrote:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 43%, crazy.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| For one specific private university. If you consider
| every state university and College, I expect far more
| people are impacted by affirmative action
| arpyzo wrote:
| Legacy admissions are not just a few spots. They constitute a
| high percentage of admissions. I've seen estimates ranging
| from 10% to 35%.
| kadomony wrote:
| Interesting to see if companies will be slapped back to reality
| away from their DEI bullshit that hires lesser qualified
| individuals simply because of their levels of melanin.
| Eumenes wrote:
| A win for meritocracy - https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-
| illustrates-graphic...
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Then the headline should be: "Legacies are banned from top tier
| private schools".
|
| Around 25% of admissions in Ivy League schools are legacies.
| Unsurprisingly, this does not seem to _outrage_ certain parts
| of society that much.
| Eumenes wrote:
| That's bad too.
| throw0101c wrote:
| Meritocracy may not be what you think it is, or achieve the
| results you assume. See recent books by Markovits and Sandel:
|
| * 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...
| Eumenes wrote:
| Okay, but race based admissions for college is bad and I'm
| glad its revoked.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The best method of college entrance is whats done in east asia.
| China does the Gaokao (hard SAT), and students list their
| university preferences and filters students into colleges based
| on their score and their preferences. Japan takes entrance exams
| for a university. These seem like infinitely fairer methods than
| the US where they try and correct for disadvantage in a variety
| ways.
| AlanYx wrote:
| China practices affirmative action by giving certain ethnic
| minorities additional points on the gao kao. There's a good
| 2017 paper by Ding et. al. that explores the effect this has.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| In the U.S.: go to shitty school, get shitty SAT score,
| disallowed from college. Repeat.
| w10-1 wrote:
| In California: 10% of each shitty school gets in to the top-
| tier UC system
| alsaaro wrote:
| China uses an ethnic quota system for underrepresented
| minorities for university admissions, just like India and the
| United States (until today).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| American schools are not looking to maximize academic success.
| They want to maximize career success because that's how
| prestige is measured. They're certainly not trying to be fair
| either, they're trying to maximize donations.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Clarence Thomas's concurrence does not mince words:
|
| > 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| Justice Thomas is (to me) an extremely frustrating figure, but
| this a compelling argument for the 14th Amendment.
| tdonoghue wrote:
| Clarence Thomas is the epitome of what makes America the
| greatest country on earth.
| l3mure wrote:
| His corruption is truly inspiring.
|
| https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-
| un...
| Georgelemental wrote:
| What's the scandal here? What law was broken, what rule
| violated? I can't tell...
| l3mure wrote:
| > Thomas didn't report any of the trips ProPublica
| identified on his annual financial disclosures. Ethics
| experts said the law clearly requires disclosure for
| private jet flights and Thomas appears to have violated
| it.
|
| > Justices are generally required to publicly report all
| gifts worth more than $415, defined as "anything of
| value" that isn't fully reimbursed. There are exceptions:
| If someone hosts a justice at their own property, free
| food and lodging don't have to be disclosed. That would
| exempt dinner at a friend's house. The exemption never
| applied to transportation, such as private jet flights,
| experts said, a fact that was made explicit in recently
| updated filing instructions for the judiciary.
|
| > How many times Thomas failed to disclose trips remains
| unclear. Flight records from the Federal Aviation
| Administration and FlightAware suggest he makes regular
| use of Crow's plane. The jet often follows a pattern:
| from its home base in Dallas to Washington Dulles airport
| for a brief stop, then on to a destination Thomas is
| visiting and back again.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Thomas asked the relevant body (Judicial Conference)
| whether he was obligated to report the trips, they told
| him no. The rules have since changed, and Thomas is
| adapting to follow the new rules.
| https://thehill.com/regulation/court-
| battles/4038748-clarenc...
| imperio59 wrote:
| Harvard and UNC are well intentioned but they are trying to fix
| inequities which start much earlier.
|
| 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.
| SaintSeiya wrote:
| Good: race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc
| should not be used as an advantage, or disadvantage in totally
| unrelated matters (education, work, etc)
| [deleted]
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I got an email about this from my university president expressing
| his disappointment with the ruling. He assured everyone the
| campus will continue to strive for more racial diversity and that
| this ruling is a hindrance to that goal because race based
| discrimination is a good thing for achieving diversity.
|
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her
| experiences as an individual -- not on the basis of race.
|
| 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.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Whatever your opinion about recent supreme court decisions, this
| has all underscored what has been true for a long time:
|
| 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)
| [deleted]
| andrewprock wrote:
| The judicial branch does not legislate. It interprets existing
| legislation. In this case they were interpreting the 14th
| amendment to the US Constitution.
|
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| "Interpret" is just a word. In practice the Court has
| enormous power in interpreting laws, to the point where it
| can completely change the policy that laws implement, or
| strike them altogether.
|
| 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.)
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4732/supreme-court.aspx
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Penumbras and emanations of the 4th amendment to allow us to
| have abortions? Not legislating!
|
| Saying "equal protection of the law" means you have to give
| people the equal protection of law? OMG legislating from the
| bench!
|
| The funny thing is that everywhere voters actually have had a
| chance to vote on affirmative action, they vote it down (Most
| recently prop 16 in california). Every single time. And yet
| left wing institutions keep finding a way to worm around
| whatever the law is. The legislative intent is clearly in
| agreement with this ruling so these "oh no they're legislating
| from the bench" arguments are nonsensical.
| kindatrue wrote:
| This also works in the opposite direction though:
|
| 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.
| mjh2539 wrote:
| There's only approximately 330 million of us, but yes, your
| main point is correct. I think that judicial activism has led
| to a perversion of both the legislative and the judicial
| branches. Why try to pass legislation that requires broad
| consent and lots of work when you can just bank on getting your
| policies through via the judiciary? At the same time, why
| constrain the judiciary's decisions on something as irrelevant
| and inflexible as the constitution?
| notlegislating wrote:
| The legislation in question (the Civil Rights Act) prohibits
| all racial discrimination and it was only previous (in my
| opinion, misguided) Supreme Court decisions that allowed
| affirmative action as an exception to that in the first place.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| SCOTUS rules on the constitutionality of laws. It doesn't write
| or institute any laws whatsoever. Now people need to get into
| college on merit instead of scoring high in the Victim
| Olympics. That's a great thing for our society.
| malnourish wrote:
| Did all pre-Affirmative Action college applicants matriculate
| based on their merits?
| splitstud wrote:
| [dead]
| topposter32 wrote:
| I only hear complaints from either side when the tables are
| turned against them. When its in their favor it's just the
| right thing to do.
| ellisv wrote:
| Eh. I think we should be complaining about the court all the
| time. They're not doing a great job.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps there are pro-slavery people still complaining about
| the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment?
| topposter32 wrote:
| Those amendments were made by the legislature.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| But somehow, some people only feel the need to mention it when
| they don't like the result.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yep. Roe vs. Wade was one of the most egregious examples of
| "legislating from the bench" in the latter 20th century? How
| many people who would hand-wring over recent SCOTUS decisions
| oppose Roe on these grounds? Or is this a convenient
| exception? Griswold? How about Lawrence vs. Texas?
| mehlmao wrote:
| Please explain how Henry Wade could enforce the overturned
| Texas Penal Code statutes without violating the
| constitutional right to privacy.
| Aunche wrote:
| In the right to privacy is so broad that it applies to
| abortion, it should also apply to self-medicating
| yourself with narcotics. I'm not saying that
| decriminalization of drugs is a bad thing, but it's
| something that obviously shouldn't be decided by the
| Supreme Court.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Yep, and if it applies to abortion, why not third-
| trimester abortion? Why is that relevant to a privacy
| interest?
|
| 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"?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Where is the right to privacy in the Constitution, btw?
|
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| Right, like how the SCOTUS rejected the Independent State
| Legislature theory case. Some people were like "we really
| shouldn't be legislating from the bench", but when the SCOTUS
| overturned Roe v Wade they cheered it on.
| ellisv wrote:
| How was rejecting ISL was legislating from the bench?
| JustBreath wrote:
| > Some people were like "we really shouldn't be legislating
| from the bench", but when the SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade
| they cheered it on.
|
| 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."
| mywittyname wrote:
| The constitution doesn't enumerate every right a citizen
| has. It's a framework for judges (and congress) to
| determine what laws can and cannot be applied to
| citizens. The right to abortion was ruled to be protected
| by the 4th amendment.
|
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have disagreed with you
| there, and I think she's more qualified than you to
| comment on the function of the Court:
|
| > 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...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Ginsburg wanted to reopen the privileges or immunities
| clause.
| xienze wrote:
| > The right to abortion was ruled to be protected by the
| 4th amendment.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The Judicial branch also has the job of ensuring whatever
| misguided ideas the Legislative branch may come up with,
| regardless of what they are (Communications Decency Act, anyone
| here?) are compliant with the US Constitution and other
| applicable laws.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Laws aren't (and can't) be written to cover all current and
| future use cases. The judicial branch is meant to provide
| interpretation of the law.
|
| _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...
| JustBreath wrote:
| It's true laws don't account for the future. It's also true
| that laws can be created and updated by other means and quite
| often the judicial branch is used as a fast pass extension of
| the legislative branch.
|
| 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.
| damnesian wrote:
| >Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.
|
| If the Citizens United decision didn't teach us that, nothing
| will.
| kjfarm wrote:
| I completely agree with legislation via judicial branch being a
| bad idea. However, affirmative action isn't legislation. This
| is judicial review striking down policy (executive branch
| interpretation and implementation of legislation)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action
| https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/af...
| alsaaro wrote:
| Judicial review has upheld the constitutionality of
| affirmative action policies for 40+ years, what changed is
| the composition of the Supreme Court and its related
| willingness to legislate from the bench -- abandoning stare
| decisis and judicial restraint.
|
| We saw this with Roe last year.
| newacct3 wrote:
| What also changed was the timing of the decision, see
| O'Connor's "25 years" comment
| alsaaro wrote:
| Remember the Supreme Court upheld the legality of
| affirmative action in 2016 in Fisher v. UT-Austin, and
| two lower courts upheld the legality of affirmative
| action in this particular decision.
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Regardless of whatever the political currents are, it's
| sensible policy to strike down every pseudo law that
| doesn't have legislative backing of some kind.
|
| If they only selectively struck them down in favor of one
| group or another, then that would be a different matter.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| The greater corpus of American law is based on case law,
| meaning it is based on court decisions. It is a common
| law system.
|
| This is in juxtaposition to civil law systems that are
| based on codified legislation, for example in France or
| Germany.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Most case law is based on some kind of legislative output
| directly or indirectly via other case law. That's well
| known.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Agree except for the "willingness to legislate" changing.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| COGlory wrote:
| Some of the original Supreme Court cases upholding these
| policies went so far as to say that in the future, these
| exact things should be revisited because they were trying
| to bandage over decades of institutional racism.
|
| 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.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I think it's mostly about the current MAGA heavy SCOTUS
| though that got there mostly by duplicity and
| hamstringing Senate procedures and pure luck. The judges
| weren't selected for talent, they were selected for an
| agenda.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I think it's mostly about the current MAGA heavy SCOTUS
|
| 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.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Striking down Roa v Wade was an example of undoing such
| "legislating from the branch." The original Roe v Wade
| created in effect a new federal law, and last year's
| decision struck that down.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| I'm on the more liberal side of the spectrum, yet it's
| unfair to say that _this_ SCOTUS has been legislating from
| the bench. The prior Democratic balance of SCOTUS did
| exactly the same and stretched very widely the definition
| of things to fit modern progressive ideals. In my opinion,
| politicians should have made Roe v. Wade into law instead
| of relying on SCOTUS to legis-interpret in their favor
| indefinitely.
|
| 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.
| NeRF_ornothing wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the last time the supreme court of
| the united states had a majority of members appointed by
| a democratic president was in 1969.
| alsaaro wrote:
| There was hasn't been a "prior Democratic balance of
| SCOTUS" the SCOTUS has been firmly conservative since
| Rehnquist (1986) and probably before that. What is
| notable about this Robert's Court, is that they have
| overturned rulings affirmed by other conservative courts
| and even their own recent rulings!
|
| 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.
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| No it wasn't. You had a constitutional right to privacy,
| not to abortion. It was obviously tenuous reasoning at
| the time, and its shaky footing hasn't exactly been a
| secret ever since. Roe should have been codified into law
| if we really wanted to keep it around long term.
| AYBABTME wrote:
| Alright, prior SCOTUS had a more democratic balance, and
| at a minimum ruled more often than now in fairly tenuous
| ways in favor of progressive ideals. The end result was
| stuff I liked more than what they rule today, but them
| having voted in my camp doesn't mean I believe it was the
| right thing.
|
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| Well, in both cases, the decisions at the time implied that
| they were temporary.
|
| 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.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Roe v Wade's trimester system, like virtually all
| abortion cutoffs, was essentially arbitrary. Calibrated
| to fit what their gut felt was right. For evidence of
| this, look at the abortion cutoffs in Europe, nearly
| every European country has a different cutoff from the
| others. In Germany it's 12 weeks and in the UK it's 24.
| It's all over the place. If these cutoffs were based on
| science there shouldn't be this much spread.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| Racial discrimination has been explicitly illegal, and
| affirmative action - as currently practiced - is racial
| discrimination. You're right that it's not legislation, it's
| straight up illegal. The courts have been tying themselves in
| knots around this but somebody finally just read the law. If
| Congress wants to make some kinds of racial discrimination
| legal, they need to actually pass a law saying so.
|
| 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...
| eli wrote:
| Yes, exactly: it's a policy decision. Congress could pass a
| law altering what affirmative action is allowed if they
| wanted a different policy.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Often this is true, but this case was decided based on
| constitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Often this is true, but this case was decided based on
| constitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
|
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Hm, that's not my reading of the case, in particular this
| sentence from page 2 (the Syllabus):
|
| > _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?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| The judicial branch does not make laws.
|
| 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.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > The judicial branch does not make laws.
|
| > 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.
| cvoss wrote:
| This is just a dispute of semantics over what the word
| "law" means. The fact remains that the United States
| government has been designed from the start to have
| legislative bodies that pass statutes, and judicial bodies
| which do not pass statutes. If judicial bodies effectively
| pass or amend statutes by exercising too much control, then
| we have a fundamental breakdown occurring with respect to
| the design of the system.
| mywittyname wrote:
| They kind of do. Federal judges have a great deal of latitude
| in what they are allowed to accomplish with a ruling. They
| have the power to effectively change the text of a law to
| mean what the judge says it should mean (granted, it must
| also pass appeal).
|
| 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."
| theratattack wrote:
| > They interpreted existing laws
|
| In the dissent at least, the court is very much interpreting
| court precedent and almost entirely ignoring the law itself
| polski-g wrote:
| Liberal SCOTUS opinions talk a lot about morality and
| societal harm, rarely about the legality of the subject at
| hand. It is Congress' job to deal with morality and harm,
| not the judicial branch.
| koolba wrote:
| The Jackson dissent opener is a great example of this:
|
| > 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.
| eli wrote:
| Conservatives also care deeply about morality and
| society, but their opinions often hide behind whatever
| legal interpretation gives them the policy outcome they
| desire.
|
| Thomas is a textualist when the text is favorable. If
| it's not, suddenly historical context and the founder's
| intent becomes crucial.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a legal fiction. Both abortion and affirmative action
| were legislated from the bench. That's how they came to be.
| It's a classic thing. Having come to the conclusion that some
| thing should be law, the composition of the bench determines
| whether sufficient justification can be found. Then these
| decisions have the weight of law.
|
| 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > the composition of the bench determines whether
| sufficient justification can be found.
|
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| 600 million?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Not yet.
| kickout wrote:
| The population of the US is roughly ~330M
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| But don't forget to add corporations to the total, because
| they are people too according to SCOTUS.
| ketzu wrote:
| I see multiple ways of interpreting what you said:
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| IMO, a lot of people who didn't like the decision
| (whether because of which justices decided it or for some
| other reason) latched onto the "SCOTUS decided that
| corporations are people" shorthand because it seems
| absurd taken literally. Corporations are clearly not
| people (natural persons) the way you and I are.
|
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| When you really think about it, Citizen's United makes a
| lot of sense as a decision. It seems self evident to me
| that a non-profit trying to, say, save the local wetlands,
| should be able to make political statements like "Don't
| vote for Dave, Dave wants to pave our wetlands". Likewise,
| labor unions should be able to campaign against politicians
| trying to attack their ability to exist. Okay, so, only
| non-profit enterprises can engage in political speech. That
| still leaves you with the whole PAC thing, but maybe it's
| an improvement. What about Creedance Clearwater Revival? Or
| Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? Their art was certainly
| political, does that mean they should be barred from
| selling it?
| ghaff wrote:
| Corporations have had certain characteristics of people as
| long as they've existed. Do you want a corporation to be
| able to enter a contract that isn't with a specific person
| within the corporation, for example? Corporations also have
| freedom of the press/freedom of speech. The question in
| that decision was whether political spending by
| corporations was part of the free speech right. There's no
| question more broadly that corporations can put out a press
| release saying more or less anything (truthful) that they
| want.
|
| This is a really lazy trope whatever you think of the
| specific decision's result (or the reasoning).
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _The question in that decision was whether political
| spending by corporations was part of the free speech
| right. There 's no question more broadly that
| corporations can put out a press release saying more or
| less anything (truthful) that they want._
|
| 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| You're probably right. Most of the attention has focused
| on the financial angle. That said, organizations do have
| pretty broad latitude to advocate for laws and other
| outcomes. Conservation organizations do it all the time
| for example.
| sproketboy wrote:
| [dead]
| baron816 wrote:
| > 600 million
|
| You mean 330 million?
| kenjackson wrote:
| I don't love the decision, but I actually like the process. And
| I don't think it is legislating. It is interpreting the law.
|
| 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.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| When a neoconservative spends his life petitioning courts for
| this exact result instead of petitioning anyone in
| congress... it feels like dirty legislating. Part of it is
| because our congress is dreadfully inept.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Congress has more important issues to deal with, such as
| making it illegal to participate in any programs involving
| extraterrestrial craft without notifying Congress
| malnourish wrote:
| Our federal congress was dragged into ineptitude by a group
| of people who refuse to legislate or collaborate and would
| rather confirm judges.
|
| Some states are getting legislation done. Minnesota, for
| example, but same too with states that rapidly passed
| abortion curbs.
| NoRelToEmber wrote:
| He didn't petition congress because congress already
| legislated on this issue: neither the 14th amendment nor
| the civil rights act contain exceptions allowing racial
| discrimination, as long as it's for the right cause (and
| the courts get to pick which causes are right).
| ellisv wrote:
| > I don't love the decision, but I actually like the process.
| And I don't think it is legislating. It is interpreting the
| law.
|
| 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.
| lordloki wrote:
| Legacies aren't just about money. They are the "connections"
| that make elite universities beneficial to undergrads.
| ralusek wrote:
| They aren't legislating from the bench. Legislating from the
| bench is the opposite of what is being done here. The role of
| the judicial is to look at laws and actions and determine if
| they're legal within the meta framework. That is what was done
| here.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Legislating via the judicial branch is a bad idea.
|
| 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?
| solardev wrote:
| Even if 100% of the court agreed, 9 people can't possibly
| represent 300 million in any representative way.
|
| 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.wiki
| pedia.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.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > 9 people can't possibly represent 300 million in any
| representative way.
|
| 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.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The SC is, by design, a little undemocratic. They're a
| check against the more democratic parts of the government,
| with the limitation that they basically can only make
| things legal. Since the default is that people are free to
| do whatever, laws can only restrict people's abilities to
| do stuff. The Supreme Court gets to shoot down laws, so
| they can only let us do more stuff.
| catiopatio wrote:
| They're not supposed to be representative.
|
| 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.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The court is perfectly fine with discrimination as long
| as it fits their neocon views (see: Cakeshop vs
| Colorado), or as long as their donors pay them enough
| favors.
| catiopatio wrote:
| That's a reductive view of the laws and cases involved.
|
| The cakeshop case was about compelled speech, and the
| conservative justices' politics are not "neocon".
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you try
| to slice it. The compelled speech argument was a line of
| bullshit to discriminate against customers because it all
| hinged on their religious right to discriminate against
| people they did not like. That's the crux of it all.
| solardev wrote:
| There's not really checks and balances when all three
| branches are in cahoots for the benefit of party over
| people, primarily won through electoral shenanigans and
| political games. We literally have a system that
| continously overrules the will of the majority with a
| small group of electoral elites, justified using some
| byzantine algorithm of electoral boundaries. That isn't a
| democracy, it's a farce.
|
| 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.
| catiopatio wrote:
| > We literally have a system that continously overrules
| the will of the majority ... That isn't a democracy, it's
| a farce.
|
| Avoiding the tyranny of the majority is a major reason we
| _intentionally_ don't have direct democracy.
| solardev wrote:
| Through a legal framework enumerating basic inalienable
| rights, perhaps. But substituting a tyranny of the
| majority for a tyranny of the minority isn't an
| improvement.
| JustBreath wrote:
| I'm agree in essence, some kind of stipulation needs to be
| applied to supreme court decisions that incentivizes or
| outright requires the other houses to apply a more permanent
| solution.
| cvoss wrote:
| Whether to a sufficient degree or not, SCOTUS agrees with you
| on this point and exercises a strong reluctance to second-guess
| past generations of itself, especially on statutory (as opposed
| to constitutional) matters, since it is theoretically easy for
| Congress to amend its own statutes if ever Congress should
| disagree with how the Court has interpreted them.
|
| 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
| sebow wrote:
| Took them long enough to rule against this >actual<
| racist(/discriminatory) policy masked under the pretense of
| "helping" marginalized people through identity politics. It's
| never too late, but you have to wonder how much damage american
| meritocracy has already taken under this.
| pjc50 wrote:
| That won't stop people complaining about it.
| mahdi7d1 wrote:
| I never understood why are people against standardized testing. I
| would rather fail test than be judged by someone then deemed not
| worthy.
| accra4rx wrote:
| exactly. I have a kid in 4th grade . He got bad grades all year
| in his internal assessments. All the teacher would do is circle
| out the mistakes for silly mistakes. My kid scored a 96
| percentile , toping all the 4th grader in his school My kid
| knows how to solve and understand the concepts just lack in
| describing it. I completely favor standardize test as there was
| no person involved to judge (who can also be biased).
| fullshark wrote:
| I'm against building an entire education system around having
| children excel at standardized tests. Which is basically what
| will happen if it's the sole determinant of ability for
| universities.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I'm confused, isn't that what SAT and ACT are?
| psychphysic wrote:
| Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity
| because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white
| and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from
| affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).
| xyzelement wrote:
| If you read some of the comments here, you'd see that colleges
| have been discriminating _against_ Asians.
|
| As a group asian Americans have had no trouble being over
| represented in colleges based on purely merit.
| psychphysic wrote:
| I think there is likely differences in how we use phrases
| like Asian and oriental.
|
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Which weakens the systemic racism thesis, hence we don't talk
| about it.
| mucle6 wrote:
| I can see the social good of admitting disadvantaged groups, but
| how does it help the individual colleges?
|
| 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.
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| yes but Harvard is not a for profit entity.
| mucle6 wrote:
| I still find it hard to believe Harvard, with a 50 Billion
| dollar endowment decided to do something good for society if
| they though it would hurt them. I feel like colleges must
| have data to show bottom line benefits for affirmative action
| cod1r wrote:
| High quality education and resources being gate-kept makes less
| sense moving forward. Easiest solution is to let a LOT more
| people in regardless of background. Letting more people in means
| you get more money anyways. Who cares if letting in more people
| makes things less "elite". Elitism is cringe.
| Flatcircle wrote:
| What does this mean in practice?
| mchannon wrote:
| Double-digit increases of Asian students at top tier
| universities, primarily coming from decreases of nonwhite
| students.
|
| 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.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| >primarily coming from decreases of nonwhite students.
|
| Asians aren't White.
| tekla wrote:
| They are when trying to prove that minorities on the whole
| are discriminated against.
| legutierr wrote:
| > primarily coming from decreases of nonwhite students
|
| Given the actual numbers, its more likely that the largest
| number of applicants negatively affected by this will be
| white, in absolute terms.
| mchannon wrote:
| To the contrary, Stanford, for instance, has ~22% of its
| student body "White or Caucasian", when it used to be 40%
| in 2016. This swing didn't occur simply because white
| students stopped applying.
|
| 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.
| csa wrote:
| > Double-digit increases of Asian students at top tier
| universities, primarily coming from decreases of nonwhite
| students.
|
| 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.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Universities will come up with other justifications to keep
| their racial diversity high. If you're from a certain area,
| single parent household, went to certain schools, etc.
|
| 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.
| john013 wrote:
| [dead]
| hackeraccount wrote:
| Just to echo what other people replied. Law is over rated.
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| At top elite schools fewer blacks, fewer Latinos. Slightly
| fewer whites. More Asians.
|
| In relative numbers it probably impacts less than .1% of all
| students one way or another.
| asianavenyc wrote:
| Historically: Colleges were mostly establishment (liberal or
| otherwise)
|
| 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)
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| more asians, less blacks and a bit less latinos at top schools,
| especially private ones. Will be interesting to see if they
| move toward an income based affirmative action.
| zephyrus1985 wrote:
| [flagged]
| breakingrules wrote:
| [dead]
| purpleblue wrote:
| Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC, and yet score the
| highest in testing. So, activists will probably eschew this
| method as well because it will give Asians preferential
| treatment which they are loathe to do.
| pc86 wrote:
| When you say "income based affirmative action" do you mean an
| increase in need-base grants and scholarships, which already
| exists, or giving someone preferential admissions treatment
| _because_ their parents make less money regardless of
| academic ability?
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Admissions departments will find proxies for race. The next
| year of Harvard freshmen will not be majority Asian. The
| admissions department won't allow that to happen.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| > Admissions departments will find proxies for race.
|
| And that would be the same thing. If someone can prove it,
| it's illegal.
| onychomys wrote:
| A proxy of zip code, maybe. That would be racially blind, a
| poor white kid in the midst of a poor black neighborhood
| would be just as likely to get in as their black neighbors
| would be.
| slibhb wrote:
| If colleges stop considering standardized tests in order to
| keep the number of Asians down, is that illegal? Could
| courts force colleges to keep using the SAT?
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Yes to point one, no to point 2
| kllrnohj wrote:
| From the SCOTUS opinion:
|
| > "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.
| Levitz wrote:
| Far from it, the point is that the lived experience of
| the individual matters, just not their race explicitly.
|
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| What if they required a GPA of less than 4.0?
| mchannon wrote:
| If true, an in-person English fluency and personality
| interviewing process, even a supposedly race-blind one, tends
| to skew heavily against a majority of, but not all, Asian
| college applicants.
|
| That's probably what your theoretical proxy will look like,
| if you're correct.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Sounds like the equally-ridiculous "cultural fit" part of
| company interviews. Even if candidates pass all the
| measurable, competence-based criteria for the job,
| companies have the cultural fit card to play against those
| candidates for whatever unsavory reason the company wants
| to exclude them.
| sct202 wrote:
| This is something that actually got Harvard in trouble as
| alumni interviews rated Asians roughly similar to Whites,
| but the personality scores that the admissions offices gave
| Asians were lower even though they never met the
| candidates.
|
| "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...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| It is sad that most comments to this continually focus on the
| racial identity outcomes.
|
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| That discrimination is discouraged in any form or shape.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.
|
| Yep.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| You cannot solve racism through racism.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| But if affirmative action is racism, then you can't solve
| racism at all.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Please unflag this.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| 1. The largest beneficiaries of admissions policies at elite
| institutions are legacy admissions of wealth alumni's kids. If
| SCOTUS wants to interfere with the admissions policies of private
| institutions based on the equal protections clause, maybe that's
| a better place to start.
|
| 2. The vast majority of students attend colleges that accept
| almost everyone.
| mattmg wrote:
| In Brazil, public universities were dominated by the rich, mainly
| whites, since the entrance exams required high grades that only
| those who could pay for expensive exam prep courses would have.
|
| 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
| exabrial wrote:
| The LA Times I feel like is 0 for 2 recently on accurately
| reporting on the Supreme Court:
|
| > 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?
| newacct3 wrote:
| Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup
| of the California electorate compared to rest of country,
| official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return
| in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits
| with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x
|
| 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?
| danielrhodes wrote:
| Companies are not allowed to discriminate in their hiring. In
| other words, it is not legal to have affirmative action in a
| hiring decision (e.g. only hiring female candidates or only
| hiring black candidates).
|
| 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.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next?
|
| 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.
| adamrezich wrote:
| I would imagine that the other white candidates for the
| positions that you got the offer for feel quite differently
| ajonnav wrote:
| The decision affects private entities that accept some form of
| federal financial assistance (this is language from Title VI of
| the 1964 Civil Rights Act), not private entities writ large.
| Granted, that is still a big bucket.
| newacct3 wrote:
| There's apparently a bit of overlap between Title VI and
| Title VII. But will likely have a separate case
|
| > "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.
| ..
| Eumenes wrote:
| > Could racially discriminatory hiring strategies be next?
|
| 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.
| foofoo4u wrote:
| My employer has stated on company-wide broadcasts that they
| will use race as a factor for raises and promotions. This
| blatant racism has to come to an end.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| So stop being a coward and record and leak those
| conversations.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Maybe in 10 years once I've gotten enough to retire. Dont
| wanna get James Damore'd.
| nsajko wrote:
| Damore did nothing of the sort.
| crackercrews wrote:
| You're right, he merely shared his opinion, and look what
| happened to him! If someone leaked info they would
| probably face even harsher treatment.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| While I agree with your assessment of the situation, even
| then I wouldn't have a government policy which forces the DEI
| policies out. If the management, board, and ultimately
| shareholders of business want to run the most
| "progressive"/"woke" hiring and HR policies imaginable: they
| have the right to do so. Mind you I probably wouldn't want to
| even be a customer of such a company let alone work for it,
| but a private entity should be able to act as they see their
| best interest dictates.
| newacct3 wrote:
| > If the management, board, and ultimately shareholders of
| business want to run the most "progressive"/"woke" hiring
| and HR policies imaginable: they have the right to do so
|
| 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
| stcroixx wrote:
| Oh yeah, it surely will. Time to say goodbye to DIE statements
| when applying to jobs and forced indoctrination in the
| workplace. This junk is on borrowed time.
| prottog wrote:
| Very dystopian, and reminiscent of countless other "social
| revolutions" that happened in the not-so-distant history, all
| with terrifying results.
| roody15 wrote:
| The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative
| action was used to help people who had been systematically
| discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an
| attempt to make up for some of these wrongs.
|
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people
| should have the same outcomes everywhere.
|
| 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...
| dmix wrote:
| Why is this flagged? Previous discussions were at the top of HN.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Excellent analysis from Matthew Yglesias:
| https://www.slowboring.com/p/19-thoughts-on-affirmative-acti...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| So, legally, does this apply to corporate quotas by extension?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't think so, I believe this strictly for college
| admissions. However, there is no reason it couldn't be cited in
| future cases along those lines because they're in the same
| realm of judicial logic.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration
| using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex
| (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity),
| national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic
| information)?
|
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The court tends to rule narrowly. If no one takes the case to
| the Supreme Court then they won't decide on it.
|
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It's not a matter of ruling narrowly. Gender and sex based
| discrimination is already illegal in admissions.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Really? Gender-based discrimination is subject to
| intermediate scrutiny, not strict scrutiny (which is used
| for race). I thought it was well-known that some schools
| give boys a leg up because otherwise they would be 60/40
| girls/boys.
|
| 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...
| sowbug wrote:
| Narrow rulings are central to the process. It's the
| difference between a "holding" and "dictum." A court can
| express an opinion about something, but if that opinion
| wasn't essential to resolve the case before the court, it's
| nothing more than an opinion, and later/lower courts can
| ignore that part.
|
| http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/legal-
| miscell...
| gchallen wrote:
| > That said I'm not sure how much gender based affirmitive
| action there is in science/engineering today.
|
| Potentially quite a bit. Here's some recent data about
| admissions into the highly-competitive Illinois CS program: h
| ttps://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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I do know that 25 years ago or so there considerable weight
| given to gender in sciences and engineering. I do feel like
| all talk of it has disappeared, and wasn't sure if it was
| because it was no longer a factor or because race became
| the dominant talking point.
|
| 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?
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Harvey Mudd seems to discriminate heavily in favour of
| women.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It is already illegial to consider all of the characteristics
| you mentioned.
|
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is not true and is more nuanced than you're making it
| seem. See title 9 and the continued existence of schools like
| Wellesley college.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree that there is nuance, but I think this is still
| accurate in terms of the ruling. Protected class
| discrimination is illegal in the absence of the compelling
| interest.
|
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The tests for discrimination based on race and sex are
| different, and the bar is lower for sex-based discrimination.
| bouncing wrote:
| > "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.
|
| 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.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I think it's worth considering how much economic mobility is tied
| to economic status prior to college. I find a purely race based
| admission system fails to identify that, and in place gives an
| easier solution to building diversity compared to giving
| discounted education to those who can not afford it.
|
| 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.
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| Eumenes wrote:
| Good - lets do the workplace next.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Please God, please end the DEI Industrial Complex
| LargeTomato wrote:
| I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4
| Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm
| not) but no one guesses African American.
|
| 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.
| az226 wrote:
| In America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But
| nobody is enforcing these things and now they won't matter
| because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They just broke it out on the census (protip: that was a
| relic from the time Middle Eastern immigration was mostly
| Christian)
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| As today's ruling "proves" (both concurring and dissenting
| opinions brought this up): these racial background questions
| are "self-identified" / self-selected.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Egypt is in Africa, though. It's literally African.
| az226 wrote:
| Elon Musk is African American.
| rbrown wrote:
| why was this flagged?
| ldehaan wrote:
| [dead]
| kaitai wrote:
| A white legacy applicant at Harvard is 5 times as likely to be
| admitted as a non-legacy white applicant. "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."
|
| 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.
|
| http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Preferences for wealthy legacy elites are bad. Preferences for
| people of certain skin colors are also bad.
| verteu wrote:
| And "over 43%" of white admits are legacy ("ADLC"). I had no
| idea the proportion was so high!
| Georgelemental wrote:
| An important nuance from the majority opinion:
|
| > 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.
| adamrezich wrote:
| if I were a non-white adversarial nation with plenty of high-
| achieving youth, I would take maximal advantage of this decision
| and the US's student visa programs by doing everything I could to
| send as many students from my country to US colleges as
| absolutely possible, so as to deprive American youth of college
| education as much as possible.
| filoleg wrote:
| You better make sure your plan won't backfire and won't lead to
| a large number of those highly educated youths staying in the
| US afterwards and contributing to the US economy.
|
| 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.
| justrealist wrote:
| > Sotomayor, the court's first Latina, has been the boldest
| defender of what she prefers to call "race-sensitive" admission
| policies and has referred to herself as the "perfect affirmative
| action child."
|
| That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this
| outcome.
| Levitz wrote:
| Im really not so sure. I've seen plenty of support for
| "affirmative action", just not based on race. Most people are
| more than ok with giving those in need an edge, given their
| situation, but many are against promoting a rich black person
| over a poor white one.
|
| 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.
| remarkEon wrote:
| Sotomayor revealed in oral argument for this very case that she
| does not understand the difference between "de facto" and "de
| jure". There's plenty of other things to dislike her for beyond
| one liners in interviews.
| [deleted]
| pe0x40 wrote:
| There are different opinions on affirmative action, and I have to
| admit assessing people based on what group they are member of,
| even if your intentions are good, really doesn't sound that good
| to me.
|
| I can recommend Thomas Sowell book on the subject:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_...
| PKop wrote:
| Good thread summarizing and highlighting key points of the
| majority opinion:
|
| https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/167442708751463629...
| raincom wrote:
| Harvard used "personality score" to sort out applicants. Now,
| they got rid of "personality score", SAT/ACT/LSAT/MCAT, etc.,
| scores. They can tell their feeder schools even four years
| earlier, how to prepare admission packets for prospective
| students. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford can
| pick whatever students they want.
| newacct3 wrote:
| At the risk of getting sued and having it go back up to the
| same court that gave us this decision
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'd sort of imagine that if anyone has the legal minds to
| bend the system towards their will, it's Harvard.
| raincom wrote:
| Adcoms (admission committees) have learned their hard
| lessons. Williams R. Fitzsimmons and Rakesh Khurana of
| Harvard might have told everyone to not put everything in
| writing, just as CEOs tell underlings to not put in writing
| in order to not be found in the discovery process. And these
| professors and deans we ordinary mortals should emulate for
| ethical exemplars. Maybe, they should follow what they preach
| to students.
| anthk wrote:
| This is good. The criteria should be based on income, not the
| race.
| kneebonian wrote:
| A very interesting quote from the ruling:
|
| '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)).'
| pknomad wrote:
| FWIW, I always thought using ethnicity as a factor was a
| misguided approach.
|
| 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.
| purpleblue wrote:
| I'm happy this happened because Asians are the only ethnicity
| that suffers true systemic racism when it comes to education.
|
| 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.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| The only way affirmative action makes 'logical' sense to me is if
| people believe in biological differences of intelligence between
| races. Not saying I believe this, but it's the only way I could
| think of to logically allow for AA.
|
| 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.
| dahwolf wrote:
| We'll never know because it's a taboo topic. So we'll just
| pretend that almost every aspect of our body has racial
| differences due to populations being exposed to different
| environments/conditions and evolving to adapt, yet magically
| this one organ, the brain, is perfectly steady across time and
| location.
|
| 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.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| In which case the Race B children would be paying
| disproportionately -- one might even surmise that the Race A
| children (and their parents) would be net beneficiaries of the
| taxes paid by the Race B children (and their parents).
| Aeolun wrote:
| This may be the only time ever I've ever felt like I agreed with
| the conservative side of SCOTUS.
|
| 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.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Because we can't raise taxes on the very people getting legacy
| admissions into these universities.
| forinti wrote:
| I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing,
| because they would be much easier to accept. You could have 10%
| or 20% percent of candidates chosen by lottery, or have a lottery
| for all candidates who have the minimum pre-requisites, etc. Some
| sort of randomness whould guarantee a diversity of candidates and
| would even span across dimensions which are not even considered
| currently.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| A lottery doesn't guarantee randomness at all because the
| population is not evenly distributed. If you have 99 people
| apply who are white and 1 person apply who is black, the
| lottery is going to naturally favor white candidates by virtue
| of # of applicants.
| [deleted]
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > I would like to see lotteries used for this type of thing,
| because they would be much easier to accept.
|
| 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.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST proposed a
| merit lottery. Conservative advocates called it racist
|
| This is an uncharitable interpretation. AIUI part of the
| motivation for overhauling the admissions system was
| precisely to reduce the proportion of Asian Americans
| admitted, in order to satisfy some diversity goal set at the
| state level.
|
| So, even if the new admissions system wasn't racist on its
| face, it was introduced for the purpose of racial balancing.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| This is exactly what I mean when I say that merit lotteries
| will get exactly the same reaction where people just say
| "this is racist, you want to oppress Asian Americans."
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I'll say it again: in the TJ case, there was significant
| evidence that the motivation for abandoning the old
| system was 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/tjca4opn0
| 523...
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Again, I don't understand how this is relevant.
|
| People will oppose merit lotteries, like I said.
|
| And the system that is part of the suit isn't the merit
| lottery, btw.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You said "Advocates for a new admissions system at TJHSST
| proposed a merit lottery. Conservative advocates called
| it racist".
|
| I responded by explaining why the 'Conservative
| advocates' were correct.
|
| Do you deny that the changes were racially motivated?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm not interesting in talking about whether or not they
| were correct.
|
| I'm saying that conservatives aren't going to get on
| board with merit lotteries any more than other proposals.
| kelipso wrote:
| [flagged]
| gedy wrote:
| There's a lot of "blank slate" thinking and "meritocracy" is
| now bad.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Meritocracy is not "bad". It doesn't exist. Or, more
| precisely, "merit" cannot be measured objectively and can
| also be bought if you have the money.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| I don't think a lottery system is a replacement for
| affirmative action, it would still not be representative of
| the racial makeup of our population.
|
| And if rewarding hard work were the only criteria for
| admission, then legacy preferences wouldn't exist, either.
| That is the sort of thing affirmative action attempts to
| balance out.
|
| I don't have an answer, and I hope that all who have earned
| an opportunity are rewarded. But whenever I see that a group
| is under-represented relative to population, I have to wonder
| what the reasons are and what can be done to help.
|
| I am OK with having to work harder if it means someone who
| has had fewer opportunities, resources and support than me -
| not only in their lifetime, but for generations in their
| family - gets a boost.
|
| It seems some are afraid of having to work as hard as someone
| who was not born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
| parineum wrote:
| > it would still not be representative of the racial makeup
| of our population.
|
| I think the point is that it doesn't need to. College
| admission is 18 years late for trying to correct racial and
| social disadvantages.
| shanecleveland wrote:
| Early intervention is absolutely best. I have four
| children and we have about as much opportunity, support
| and resources as you could ask for, and it is still a
| huge undertaking to raise a family.
|
| Affordable/free preschool, childcare, school lunches,
| summer programs, etc., would all be helpful. Perhaps
| universities can (are?) getting involved in that. But
| until we do a better job as a country/society funding
| these programs for all, then disparities will persist.
|
| In the absence of that, the _need_ remains.
| parineum wrote:
| > Perhaps universities can (are?) getting involved in
| that. But until we do a better job as a country/society
| funding these programs for all, then disparities will
| persist.
|
| This is actually something I was thinking about reading
| through these comments. These universities should focus
| on "giving back" type programs, I think. Something like
| sending their professors to underprivileged schools to
| speak to or involve themselves in students lives.
| Mentorship programs that start much earlier in a child's
| life could make a massive difference.
|
| The problem with programs like that is they don't provide
| tangible results fast enough for administrator and
| politicians to justify themselves.
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| its basically a lottery today when admission rate for top
| tier colleges is like 5%.
| dmix wrote:
| A lottery for the top percentile is very different than a
| general lottery
| brewdad wrote:
| Nobody was suggesting throwing the 2.5 GPA kids in with
| the 4.5 GPA kids and sending them wherever. If MIT has a
| 4% acceptance rate, I can guarantee that more than 4% of
| those applicants could have succeeded there if a spot was
| available to them. Applicants already largely self-select
| whether to bother applying in the first place.
|
| The suggestion is that MIT or Northeastern State A&M for
| that matter set a minimum standard bar that they will
| consider. Then, all of those applicants that meet the
| standard are entered into a lottery to determine who gets
| the spots.
|
| It's not all that different from today except it
| eliminates the problems from whether Reader A or Reader B
| looks at your application and whether Reader A had a good
| night's sleep or a fight with their partner that morning.
| splendor_spoon wrote:
| Why assume this is a 'leftists' idea?
|
| > ...leftism is appealing to many who want to avoid work, so
| they won't be familiar with the concept of having their hard
| work pay off
|
| You seem unfamiliar with the values of those you classify as
| 'leftist'.
| kenjackson wrote:
| The idea is that there are more kids who could succeed at the
| college than there are spots. So find the right bar and do
| lottery.
|
| A lot of this comes down to what you think the mission of
| college is. Is it to educate the highest achieving kids who
| apply? Or to graduate a certain type of student? Or something
| else?
|
| For me I know it's not just to educate the highest achieving
| kids. If the top college in the world ended up accepting all
| terrorists who were trained to be exceptional students that
| wouldn't sit right with me. Even if I could acknowledge they
| had the best academic records. That seems like such a shallow
| goal for university.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The way I see it, this is only a problem if you _must_ go
| to one of the top schools in the nation, such as MIT,
| _because_ you want to be able to graduate and secure an
| extremely competitive job at the best companies with no
| questions asked.
|
| If you aren't actively trying to achieve stardom in the
| professional world, there are tons of good universities
| that will provide a great education and will look good on
| your resume, you just might not be hired right out of the
| gate at Apple with only one or two rounds of interviews.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I wonder if there's also a difference between engineering
| and non-engineering schools. I tend to agree that at MIT
| you mostly just want the very best engineers and the more
| objective the metric, maybe the better.
|
| But if I'm looking to educate the best politicians,
| judges, business people, activists -- I think that I
| really do care about a lot more than SATs and
| transcripts.
|
| It's funny because I feel like no one has this argument
| about Cal Tech. They might have affirmative action, but
| if they didn't everyone seemed to be OK with it.
| kelipso wrote:
| Going to ignore your ridiculous analogy but yes, the best
| universities are meant educate the highest achieving kids.
| That's how they keep being the best universities. The
| middle achieving kids can go to the middle universities;
| there are plenty and there is a whole gradient of them. Do
| we live in a meritocracy or not? Success is not 0/1, there
| is a whole spectrum from bum to whatever ideal you have,
| and appropriate motivations and rewards should be given to
| kids to succeed; otherwise you end up with a society that
| doesn't have anything to look forward to.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Why is the analogy ridiculous? You should read The
| Chosen, by Karabel, which is probably the best history of
| elite college admissions. Much of what we do in college
| admissions today are remnants to reduce the number of
| Jewish people at Ivy League schools -- and then later a
| focus on meritocracy. Colleges have historically taken
| stock of the "type" of people they accept and adjust to
| their liking.
| kelipso wrote:
| I'm ignoring analogies containing terrorists in it lol.
| It's true that colleges are historically and currently
| biased. But that does not mean that you just drop the
| idea of meritocracy and just say fuck it have a lottery.
| Instead you move towards the ideal and crack down on
| college biases, e.g, you can assign students to colleges
| based on prospective student's college preferences and
| SAT scores; that's how it works in plenty of countries.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I choose terrorists because everyone dislikes them.
| Seemed non-offensive. But you can make them whatever
| group you think is harmful in your mind (maybe
| progressives for you).
|
| The question is what is the ends meant to achieve by the
| meritocracy? The goal of most institutions in our world
| is to make the world a better place for us to live in. If
| the meritocracy seems to run counter to that then it may
| not be achieving its goal. And the point I was trying to
| make with the terrorists is that if you blindly treat
| meritocracy as its own ends then you can end up making
| the world a worse place for it.
| kelipso wrote:
| The thing about putting terrorists in an analogy is it
| distorts the intent of the analogy in unexpected ways, so
| you lose what you're trying to convey.
|
| The framework that I'm coming from is that
| work/talent/etc must be rewarded in a predictable manner
| in order for kids to have the motivation to perform and
| succeed. If the system gets unpredictable, kids will be
| demotivated and not compete in the system anymore. As in,
| if it's a lottery and my classmate who does worse than me
| gets into a better college than me, this isn't a fair
| competition so why try studying, I'll go into sports or
| something where the best person under the competitive
| framework wins.
|
| You argue that if the system is too predictable then too
| many undesirable people might succeed. Which might or
| might not be true, it's pure speculation. We're talking
| about high achieving students who want to get into good
| colleges; no need to compare them to terrorists. Purely
| test based systems work in plenty of other countries
| without the college graduates collapsing society.
| kenjackson wrote:
| What you point out is maybe partially true. There was an
| episode on the Hidden Brain podcast recently about the
| famous marshmallow test that speaks to what you're
| stating. On this show they point out that the discipline
| to eat or not eat the marshmallow is also a function of
| if you believe that the person will actually give you the
| second marshmallow when they return. The predictability.
|
| But most Black students face this level of
| unpredictability moreso every day leading up to college
| admissions. Another, unrelated study, asked teachers to
| watch for misbehaving kids -- with a mixed race group of
| kids. The thing was that none of the kids were
| misbehaving -- but the teachers still pointed to the
| Black kids. Black kids live with this level of
| predictability all throughout schooling where they'll be
| called out for doing the same thing as white students who
| aren't called out. Eventually you learn to just eat the
| marshmallow, because the second one isn't coming even if
| you have the discipline to not eat the first.
|
| So then this ties back to the lottery. It turns out that
| little in life has 100% predictability. There's no
| guarantee that my startup will make me billions, even if
| I seemingly do everything that Steve Jobs did. But I
| increase my chances and the lottery works the same way.
| But it also does something else -- it also provides a
| marshmallow for the kids who know that in their current
| environment they face steep odds to ever take 16 AP
| classes or work with their dad's research lab to win the
| Westinghouse/Intel Science Fair.
|
| It turns out that fairness isn't so easy to determine.
| woeirua wrote:
| You need to learn about legacy admissions. The best
| universities _are not_ educating the best students today.
| malnourish wrote:
| Do you believe we live in a meritocracy?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Not a perfect meritocracy, but yes, I believe Merritt and
| performance has a significant impact on outcomes.
|
| If you don't try, don't go to school, or don't go to your
| job, your average outcome will be much worse than someone
| that does
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > best universities are meant educate the highest
| achieving kids. That's how they keep being the best
| universities. The middle achieving kids can go to the
| middle universities; there are plenty and there is a
| whole gradient of them.
|
| How is what you described in any way incompatible with
| lottery systems? Did you not catch the phrase "So find
| the right bar and do lottery?" The best colleges set the
| higher bars, middle schools set a middle bar, etc etc.
|
| > Do we live in a meritocracy or not?
|
| Absolutely not. That's the lie we've been told all our
| lives by the haves. But either way, the lottery is _more_
| meritocratic: you have one seat, two people who are both
| qualified, how do you choose? Merit has already been
| established! After that, the lottery doesn 't care about
| race, age, etc etc.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Etymologically, meritocracy is equivalent to
| aristocracy... also how did the meaning of meritocracy
| drift to become positive ??
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > just to join a lottery
|
| I don't think he means a purely random lottery (at least I
| hope he doesn't). My son was a high achiever (valedictorian,
| top 1% SAT, honor society, etc. etc.) but still didn't get
| admitted to MIT because he was competing with 30,000 other
| similar high achievers for 1000 spots. That's where the
| lottery concept comes in - you have to compete to qualify for
| the lottery. It's already in place after all, they just try
| to make it less lottery-ish.
| solatic wrote:
| Acceptance into anything, beyond a table-stakes requirement
| of merit, is essentially a lottery. You work your ass off,
| you get an interview, your luck of the draw is someone having
| a bad day, is otherwise biased against you, or any number of
| other issues. It's naive to think that the people
| interviewing you are doing so solely on the grounds of your
| achievements on paper. This is true regardless of whether
| you're interviewing for an academic program, for a job, for a
| sale, for an investment...
|
| Society can either do the healthy thing and accept this and
| embrace it (won't happen, because it's not "fair"), or not,
| and make the inherent lottery explicit.
| bubblethink wrote:
| The issue is that the lottery is never enough. Effectively, the
| lottery percentage is removed from discussions and the fight
| moves on to the non-lottery percentage where the same arguments
| of diversity come back to the non-lottery percentage. This is
| not hypothetical, this is how the US immigration system is
| currently. There is a diversity lottery, which is a mostly
| foregone conclusion right now. And yet, there is race/country
| based quota in the skill based categories and proponents want
| quotas despite it being a skill being category. Once you create
| a lottery, you can't say, "Go do your thing in the lottery,
| this lane is for merit". So the lottery is a waste. Several
| attempts to phase out caps/quotas from skill based categories
| through legislature have failed so far. In the most recent
| case, the congressional black caucus opposed it as it would
| disadvantage the currently advantaged immigrants from African
| countries.
| AlexB138 wrote:
| Here's the opinion:
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
| tekla wrote:
| Its the first link in the article
| orblivion wrote:
| I could understand how this applies to state universities, but
| how does the US Constitution have this kind of jurisdiction over
| Harvard?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Private college status doesn't override basic rights elucidated
| by the Constitution which are further spelled out by various
| civil rights laws.
| orblivion wrote:
| Civil rights laws sure, but the constitution generally
| defines the role of and restrictions on the government.
|
| I think the answer must be that Harvard has government
| contracts or something (as others responded to me).
| ru552 wrote:
| Harvard receives public funds from the government. Assumingly,
| if Harvard chose to no longer receive those funds, they
| wouldn't have to comply.
| COGlory wrote:
| If this can't apply to Harvard, then presumably it's legal to
| have private schools that only allow white people?
| [deleted]
| orblivion wrote:
| I don't see how it would be unconstitutional, but it would
| probably be illegal per the civil rights act.
|
| 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.
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