I could understand how this applies to state universities, but how does the US Constitution have this kind of jurisdiction over Harvard?
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peopl…
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,…
> 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?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#424The 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…
> 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 peopl…
Appreciate the context, thanks. It doesn't feel less weird to me yet but maybe I gotta let things sink in a bit first.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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 suspi…
Traditional African/Arabic names. Jamaal, Aisha, Hakeem, etc.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peopl…
> 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…
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...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
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."
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#428The 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…
> 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 peopl…
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...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peopl…
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,…
> 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/File:Be...
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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#430The 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…
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...