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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

#741

Post by koolba »

DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #567
solardev wrote: post #120

I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upb…

That's what the University of Michigan used to do, it was ruled unconstitutional in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003. It was never really clear (imho) how affirmative action (as actually practiced) could be implemented; discrimination based on race has been explicitly illegal since 1964 but somehow the courts ruled that some discrimination was legal (in Bakke v. California) but the courts can't actually provide a workable…

> … but the courts can't actually provide a workable solution, they can just shoot down what people try.

And they do it because reverse racism is just racism.

The way you truly eliminate racism from society is by eliminating all its forms. And that includes “well intentioned” racism.

If there’s any metric outside of academic competence that will be a deciding factor in an admittance process, the only acceptable choices are wealth and income. Though even those have their contrarian arguments.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#742

Post by az226 »

freeAgent wrote: post #709
az226 wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Egypt is in Africa, though. It’s literally African.

Elon Musk is African American.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#743

Post by gnicholas »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #271
endisneigh wrote: post #19

I’ll need to read the opinion but why not eliminate consideration using all protected statuses (race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information)? Affirmative action is not just about race. It doesn’t make sense that you can discriminate on any protected status to begin with. In any case I doubt this will c…

It is already illegial to consider all of the characteristics you mentioned. Historically, there was a specific legal exemption 14th ammendementment allowing racial discrimination. This ruling closes the exemption for racial consideration. Discrimination based on other protected statuses remain closed >Any exceptions to the Equal Protection Clause’s guarantee must survive a daunting two-step examination known as “str…

The tests for discrimination based on race and sex are different, and the bar is lower for sex-based discrimination.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#744

Post by lolinder »

kylerush wrote: post #735
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…

This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated topic.

While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial.

This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#745

Post by da39a3ee »

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…

The answer is basically: America has managed to make race and socioeconomic status incredibly highly correlated, especially in its large coastal cities where basically all poor people are non-white. It's nothing like, for example, Northern European cities with large white working class populations.

Obviously there are a huge number of poor white people in America. Mostly in the vast countryside with its small towns. And you're right that they're forgotten about a bit in this debate; certainly no one expects them ever to send their children to Harvard.

I think the reason they are forgotten about in this debate is that the white educated classes feel very guilty about the terrible race-wealth correlation.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#746

Post by ix-ix »

tester756 wrote: post #693
BobbyJo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population. There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather…

Why would it take hundreds of years instead of e.g 80?

Generational wealth.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#747

Post by gnicholas »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #486
ricardoplouis wrote: post #62

Worth noting that while affirmative action has been banned, we still have proxies for race (aka legacy admissions) which overwhelmingly favor rich and white students. And given the historical discrimination of elite universities, this ban on affirmative action without addressing legacy admissions or historical harm will only increase the number of white students at universities. We can't pretend that eliminating race…

This ruling will overwhelmingly help Asians and only marginally help white people

It will be especially helpful for Asian people who don't have Asian-sounding last names. I suspect that schools will continue to discriminate against Asians, and last names are one easy way to do so.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#748

Post by peter422 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #224
ummonk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.

Indeed, but the goal of affirmative action as actually practiced is not to help people who are unlucky in terms of where they are born and are growing up, but to literally just achieve desired racial balance. It is pure racism, it’s all about skin color. This is why, for example, children of African immigrants are something like half of black Harvard students, despite being a minuscule fraction of population: they wa…

You don't believe there are 300 multi-generation American black students per year that wouldn't be utterly out of place at Harvard?

Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#749

Post by ix-ix »

danabrams wrote: post #526
arbuge wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people Do you have any sources for that?

Do I have any sources that systemic racism is real? I mean, there's a large body of evidence (I personally like the economics methodology of this study, which has been repeated many times: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0203hrn... ). But just like many will never be convinced that vaccines are safe and the earth is round, many will never be convinced that racism in the US is real, I suppose.

I once failed an undergraduate student because they argued that racism ended in 1965 and that racism did not exist after that. It's like they didn't pay attention in class at all.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#750

Post by solardev »

Balgair wrote: post #397
AlwaysRock wrote: post #325

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…

Yeah, that's a good point :/
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