671–680 of 1001 posts
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…
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…
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. 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…
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.
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'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 b…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Yes, exactly: it's a policy decision. Congress could pass a law altering what affirmative action is allowed if they wanted a different policy.
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.
> 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?
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.
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…
What does this mean in practice?
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.
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 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…
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.