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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#531

Post by Spivak »

bitcurious wrote: post #515
Spivak wrote: post #38

> 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…

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

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.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#532

Post by zo1 »

earthboundkid wrote: post #305
skrebbel wrote: post #162

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…

Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.

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.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#533

Post by [deleted] »

earthboundkid wrote: post #305
skrebbel wrote: post #162

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…

Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#534

Post by [deleted] »

cdmcmahon wrote: post #427
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#535

Post by RajT88 »

naasking wrote: post #490
mcv wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 financi…

> 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.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#536

Post by dionidium »

animal_spirits wrote: post #529
dionidium wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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.…

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.

Again, I would submit that nobody really believes this. Look at your own family. Do you all live in the same neighborhood with strong neighborhood-supported familial bonds? Probably not. Even when I lived back home my mom lived in one neighborhood, my brother another, my friends in different local munis. Today I live in another state to be near my wife's family, but the closest family member is a 20-minute drive from where we bought our house!

Modern people are spread out all over the regions they occupy.

It really seems like on this one topic people accept arguments on behalf of other people that they know with perfect clarity make zero sense when they try to apply them to their own lives.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#537

Post by 1024core »

losvedir wrote: post #41

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 back…

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.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#538

Post by ZeroGravitas »

skrebbel wrote: post #162

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…

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.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#540

Post by 1024core »

azinman2 wrote: post #93
losvedir wrote: post #41

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 back…

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.

> 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?

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