Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#811

Post by vacuity »

prepend wrote: post #569
purpleblue wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's not mostly poor, hardworking ADOS (African descendents of slavery) students that benefit. It's rich, Black students that are benefiting, especially those from outside the US and no lineage from slavery. The problem with affirmative action is that everyone is only looking literally at skin color, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.

I think ADOS stands for “American Descendants of Slavery” [0] as it is used in terms of US populations and, by definition, Americans aren’t African. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...

You're technically right, but you and parent (GP?) seem to ultimately be referring to the same group of people. Apologies if you picked up on that; I can't tell.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#812

Post by chasd00 »

goatlover wrote: post #782
danabrams wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

White rural poor is the absolute lowest class in the US. Late night show hosts openly joke about fantasizing their death so it’s one less vote for the other guy. It’s probably the only class in the US where the rest of US society relishes their suffering.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#813

Post by moufestaphio »

givemeethekeys wrote: post #628
flowerlad wrote: post #47

It is important to note that Harward’s admission policy that is the subject of this case was designed to favor White students over Jewish ones [1]. Today it is being used to discriminate against Asian Americans. Colleges are already prepared for this ruling. Many, such as the University of Washington have abandoned standardized tests because such tests compell universities to admit the kinds of students universities…

[flagged]

Definitely considered an Ethnicity.

I think Wikipedia does a decent job of breaking it down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#814

Post by somewhereoutth »

dcow wrote: post #460
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just ca…

If, at population level, you don't have equality of outcome, then either you don't have equality of opportunity or 'there is something fundamentally wrong' with whichever population is failing - which I'm sure we can agree is not the case.

We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#815

Post by MrOwnPut »

flowerlad wrote: post #632
givemeethekeys wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Good question. There is no consensus on who is considered white. Nazis considered Jews to be a separate and inferior race. At one point in the US, Italians were not considered white. Irish, Greeks and Poles were not considered white at some point, and were discriminated against in the US. “No Irish need apply” (NINA) signs were common at one point in history.

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#816

Post by somewhereoutth »

dahwolf wrote: post #687
influx wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?

No, doesn't count for men. They're just broken and need to "step up".

Or perhaps, once shorn of the advantage of being physically stronger, it turns out that they are a bit rubbish really.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#817

Post by pohl »

WalterBright wrote: post #801
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,…

> many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni I suspect that's strongly correlated to whether those alumni made contributions to the university or not. I know several children of alumni that were rejected - and their parents hadn't made donations, either.

So affirmative action for children of wealthy alumni, then.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#818

Post by bagels »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
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 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…

They could, gasp, not have legacy admissions, but that'd cut in to their firehose of money.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#819

Post by 13of40 »

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.

The US government's definition of "white" basically says anyone descended from people in the middle east, europe, or northern africa is white.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#820

Post by tecoholic »

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…

There are a lot of replies here and anything that talks about "economic" conditions probably doesn't understand AA.

AA is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a social justice program.

Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. For example, despite owning homes in the same neighbourhood, the appraisal of homes of black people ends up lower than white folks[1], there are more traffic stops and searches for black folks than white[2]..etc., you get the drift.

So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. Now there aren't many ways to suddenly make this go away. So, AA is an attempt at making this go away by saying, put more of the people from the underrepresented community in places where they are underrepresented, starting with the high echelons of education. By that the society hopes to the laws we create, systems we build as a result will have the perspective of people from those community. It's not a silver bullet, not a magical solution, but one amongst many things to try.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-ho... [2] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1

Post reply on HN