Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there's the rub: "We would not need affirmative action if [reality was different]." Ergo, we need affirmative action. That is not to say we shouldn't also put significant effort into eradicating institutional prejudices, eliminating poverty, and investing in all communities. However, that effort will take generations and may never fully succeed, which means affirmative action, in its various forms, is necessary t…
Trying to force the outcome of something is never going to work. We need to fix the pipeline.
Now, you may be right. It’s a hypothesis. But the other hypothesis is “standard admissions criteria are not adequately measuring how good candidates are.”
One way or the other, you have to make a presumption.
My presumption is that non-white people, as a group, are just as good as white people. That’s why I support continuing to experiment with admissions criteria until we find ones that give us close to equal representation (i.e. affirmative action.)
It sounds like you disagree, you think the tests are measuring reality accurately, and it’s the non-white applicants who need to be better. Why?
This isn’t a scientific debate, it’s a philosophical one. It’s two ways of interpreting the same data.