651–660 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, be…
Guessing UT Austin?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
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 mon…
They also "move" to a worse zip code for the same reason.
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…
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, an…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.
Who's we and how do you delineate those groups?
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. :-)
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,…
“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 vi…
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.
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guessing UT Austin?
Yeah, great experience
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?).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
> 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.
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.”