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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

#781

Post by oceanplexian »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #538
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…

Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender. Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender? Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (hi…

> But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around.

What makes you think that affirmative action for women was successful?

I don't see a lot of women garbage collectors. There certainly aren't a lot of women working on oil fields. 5% of Firefighters are women. Whenever I hear about AA it sounds like the plan isn't "equality" but "construct an ideal racial society". Sounds a lot like the bad ideas leading up to WWII, which eventually led to the most horrific crimes against humanity in the history of the world.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#782

Post by goatlover »

danabrams wrote: post #478
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…

For 350 years of US history africans and their descendants were enslaved. Native Americans were ripped from their land and relocated, often with genocidal levels of casualties. After that, these two groups were substantially discriminated against in law, and other races were added to the mix to be given less rights than others. Today, there are huge disparities between outcomes for different races in large part due t…

> I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people.

Then why are the white people equally poor? And does it matter where they live? For example in a major city compared to a dying small town where industry has left? That's a really broad claim to make. Would it hold true in Appalachia, for example?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#783

Post by wlonkly »

ThatGeoGuy wrote: post #429
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,…

> 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! Well, that might be a bit disingenuous. The "last chattel slave" was only freed around September 1942. I've seen this reference in several places, but the most direct one is a footnote on a wikipedia page [0]. Regardless, it is probably not worth putting a time limit on…

The part you quoted was a rhetorical device, hence "start out". The poster went on to explain Jim Crow laws and other systemic discrimination against Black people up to at least 1971.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#784

Post by Racing0461 »

danielrhodes wrote: post #636
newacct3 wrote: post #110

Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that the…

Companies are not allowed to discriminate in their hiring. In other words, it is not legal to have affirmative action in a hiring decision (e.g. only hiring female candidates or only hiring black candidates). To get around this, companies do a couple things to increase the likelihood of hiring an underrepresented person into a role: 1) They will quietly try to fill up their candidate pipelines with people who match t…

> 2) They will apply the "Rooney Rule" which says at least one person from an underrepresented minority group must be interviewed for a position before a hiring decision can be made.

They already do.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#785

Post by alephnerd »

seanw444 wrote: post #392

This comment section is a frightening wake-up call to how peoples' mindsets are nowadays. I choose to believe that it's over-represented on HN because most people that exercise interest in the topics HN is made for, are the stereotypical liberal types.

A lot of us are Asian American as well, just saying...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#788

Post by bombcar »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #724
rawgabbit wrote: post #646

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 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…

An important slave-holding state for the North was Maryland. They did not secede or get kicked out or even made to become slave-free until they changed their state constitution after the Emancipation.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#789

Post by tkenjoyer »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #571

> In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. You... can't. Even if you want to only consider the individual experience, race is deeply tied up with the individual experience. If you only considered race, that would be even more crazy. But you cannot just ignore race, as much as you want to.

[dead]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#790

Post by bombcar »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #689
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…

A tangent question I have, and have asked here before without any satisfactory answer: How does it even work? I can proof I'm poor with for example tax returns, but how does someone proof they are of a certain "race"?

You don’t. And arguing that someone is not the race they claim is extremely taboo.
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