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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

#731

Post by bandrami »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#732

Post by dahwolf »

xyzelement wrote: post #166
psychphysic wrote: post #135

Good. I'd be sickened to hear I got a lucrative opportunity because of the colour of my skin (which incidentally is not white and I'm not oriental so I'd guess I'd have benefitted from affirmative action if it was present where I grew up).

If you read some of the comments here, you'd see that colleges have been discriminating against Asians. As a group asian Americans have had no trouble being over represented in colleges based on purely merit.

Which weakens the systemic racism thesis, hence we don't talk about it.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#734

Post by dahwolf »

HeavenFox wrote: post #384

One thing I never understood is why colleges themselves fight so hard for affirmative action? Wouldn't admitting the most qualified students, regardless of race, be in their own interest? If they are afraid of the political pushback for having too few Black and Hispanics, doesn't this decision give them cover?

Thousands of very well paid administrators depend on this problem persisting, hence it's not supposed to be ever solved.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#735

Post by kylerush »

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…

Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people (or “model minorities” like Asian race) are not disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it’s the opposite.

You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.

Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.

If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#736

Post by tomohawk »

Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion begins on page 49. He pulls no punches, and its worth a read.

His concluding 3 paragraphs:

> The great failure of this country was slavery and its progeny. And, the tragic failure of this Court was its misinterpretation of the Reconstruction Amendments, as Justice Harlan predicted in Plessy. We should not repeat this mistake merely because we think, as our predecessors thought, that the present arrangements are superior to the Constitution.

> The Court’s opinion rightly makes clear that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled. And, it sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes. Those policies fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution and our Nation’s equality ideal. In short, they are plainly—and boldly—unconstitutional. See Brown II, 349 U. S., at 298 (noting that the Brown case one year earlier had “declare[d] the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional”).

> While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#737

Post by crackercrews »

roody15 wrote: post #677

The issue has changed in my lifetime. Originally affirmative action was used to help people who had been systematically discriminated against get into higher learning institutions in an attempt to make up for some of these wrongs. 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,…

> There is a belief that any group, race, subset of people should have the same outcomes everywhere.

Of course we need to be more specific than just "percent of population". For example, the average age of whites is older than for minorities. So we shouldn't expect the total population percentage for whites college students to line up with their percent enrollment in college, not in the total adult population.

But considering age is just one factor. Of course we need to consider others in order to be equitable. If Harvard admits students with 1500+ SATs, then shouldn't we be looking at that population? It turns out that population is 43% Asian and 45% white. [1]

Interestingly this lines up with Caltech's percentages almost exactly. UC Berkeley, where affirmative action is banned, has roughly the same percentage of Asian students, but many fewer white students.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-an...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#738

Post by selimthegrim »

az226 wrote: post #683
LargeTomato wrote: post #413

I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses African American. I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the pr…

In America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But nobody is enforcing these things and now they won’t matter because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.

They just broke it out on the census (protip: that was a relic from the time Middle Eastern immigration was mostly Christian)

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#739

Post by dahwolf »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #369

The only way affirmative action makes 'logical' sense to me is if people believe in biological differences of intelligence between races. Not saying I believe this, but it's the only way I could think of to logically allow for AA. Because now you have "Race A" paying the same tax rates for public university as "Race B", yet their children could be biologically limited (on average) in comparison.

We'll never know because it's a taboo topic. So we'll just pretend that almost every aspect of our body has racial differences due to populations being exposed to different environments/conditions and evolving to adapt, yet magically this one organ, the brain, is perfectly steady across time and location.

Regardless, it's probably a "close enough" call and culture might be a larger factor. Which one can also only selectively talk about.

For example, everybody knows why Asians outperform whites: performance culture and work ethic.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#740

Post by dahwolf »

subpixel wrote: post #553

I'd rather live in a society that made it an imperative to have more students from more ethnicities be eligible for the best universities every year. That requires addressing inequality earlier, and more thoroughly, and across more axes, than an approach that is, in the final analysis, about setting quotas based on ethnicity. Affirmative action can do everything it was designed to do while having essentially zero imp…

Even more so because all these discussions evolve around elite institutes only. Which doesn't help 99.999999% of people.
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