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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

#721

Post by UncleMeat »

Volundr wrote: post #375
treis wrote: post #313

Earlier 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…

If black-coded names are more strongly associated with being lower class in spite of data demonstrating that they actually have the same class distributions as white-coded names then that is racism.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#722

Post by ProllyInfamous »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #685

For people who are against affirmative action, what is your preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that exist in academia? I see three options: 1) say that these disparities are inevitable 2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own 3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative

3) e.g. See how Texas uses "Top 7% Rule" as a color-blind method of increasing diversity through meritocracy. When I was applying, it was a "Top 10% Rule."

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#723

Post by [deleted] »

0xcafefood wrote: post #343
JKCalhoun wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57... Why would White students choose to claim non-White ancestry at these levels if it's going to disadvantage them?

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#724

Post by MisterBastahrd »

rawgabbit wrote: post #646
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…

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

The US Civil War wasn't even fought to end slavery. That's a jingoistic talking point that "patriots" like to tell themselves that has absolutely no basis in reality. But "discrimination?" That's pure, unadulterated idiocy.

The war was fought to put down a rebellion by Southern states who refused to modernize because they used slavery to maintain their representational numbers in Congress. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't even enacted until year three of the US Civil War, but the Southern states saw the writing on the wall and decided to act while they believed they still had time to do so.

The rebellion was the important thing to the North.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#725

Post by azinman2 »

blagie wrote: post #353
mtklein wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We…

I had no impostor syndrome. Many of my peers didn't either; it's certainly not the case that almost everyone feels it. There seemed to be little correlation between ability and impostor syndrome too, so it's not a question of ability. But I digress. Decades out, and understanding university admissions in-and-out: 1) At least an order of magnitude more people "belong" at MIT than there's space for. Elitist universitie…

I would disagree with your larger point. While I didn’t go to GATech (although I did get in), I did go to MIT and a UC as well as a state school and community college. I’ve also worked for a couple of FAANGS, startups, etc. So I’ve seen a diversity of environments and the people in them. MIT by far had the highest concentration of top talent of anywhere I’ve been. It also had _culturally_ the most ambition which pushed people into excellence, even if they didn’t know they were capable of it. I was in an honors society at my UC, and there were very bright people who went onto top graduate schools, but overall the percentage of them was lower in the school (which was already hard to get into), and the ambition level was much less despite (for this group) raw talent being similar.

Of course there are more people who deserve to be there than there is room. But keeping it small allows it to achieve something special that being bigger wouldn’t allow. Those that do make it in are by and large absolutely top talent.

So it’s not just education and network that matters. I’d argue culture is one of the most important under-appreciated aspects. And MIT culture is top notch.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#726

Post by ProllyInfamous »

duped wrote: post #158

I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).

From majority opinion:

"The universities' main response to these criticisms is 'trust us' ... Universities may define their missions as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours."

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#727

Post by selimthegrim »

akiselev wrote: post #437
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier 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…

Pasadena, a decent sized city in Los Angeles County that houses Caltech of all places, was forced to officially desegregate in the 1970s but they've still got tons of policies left over that discriminate in housing [1]. South Pasadena real estate agents unofficial redlined the neighborhoods well into the 1980s and possibly even the 1990s. Schools, especially in Altadena, were still highly segregated when I went to el…

Caltech itself famously had more black students in the 1970s than it did in the following three decades

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#728

Post by Izikiel43 »

caditinpiscinam wrote: post #692
Izikiel43 wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4) which race you are doesn’t matter, it’s your skills that matter and what should be judged on

How do you measure skill? And if your measure of skill over/under-represents races, does that mean that your metrics are flawed, or that skill is distributed unevenly across races?

From a non US perspective, your questions don't make sense and are flawed, and the whole race discussion is racist (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racist definition a).

Why is race important at all when discussing academia?

The merits are what matter, not your race.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#729

Post by frankfrankfrank »

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…

I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted and abused into in orders to support it.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#730

Post by Misdicorl »

concordDance wrote: post #594
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. 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…

"you can't simply draw a boundary... Https if people don't have responsibility... Only individuals do"

I think this is specious reasoning. We accept this just fine in other tort circumstances e.g

1) lawsuits against a city after miscarriage of justice

2) lawsuits against corporations when X happens.

Often individual responsibility will be a portion of the trial but to my understanding it is

1) a secondary or even tertiary concern

2) used to deflect blame from the group

I think in general not allowing blame to be allocated to individuals will lead to poor results. We need methods to call systems bad and curtail them in addition to individuals

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