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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

#831

Post by mannykannot »

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…

Ethnic and cultural discrimination (in the US and elsewhere) is not just a form of discrimination against the poor; in fact, it is a causative factor (in the US and elsewhere) in relative and absolute poverty. Trying to squeeze the issues into a one-dimensioned worldview misses what is really going on.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#832

Post by xdennis »

losvedir wrote: post #41

As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…

> checked "White" for race and then "Hispanic" for ethnicity

I've always found it weird how Americans can just declare something without having to provide proof.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#833

Post by twilightzone »

"In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder."

Elsewhere: "Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people."

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slav...

This is only politicians, doesn't include former and present business leaders. Wealth may have disappeared at certain points, but the social networks remained and wealth was rebuilt. It's a fascinating read - Barack Obama's ancestors were part of that club!

I understand that many think this was a good decision because logic, but let's hope the same enthusiasm goes into figuring out a way to deal with the disparities that were born back then, at both ends of the spectrum.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#834

Post by tynpeddler »

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…

> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.

This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the sheer size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#835

Post by somewhereoutth »

lolinder wrote: post #744
kylerush wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However, for the class in question - African-Americans - is it not the case that they have been in America for generations, and so these cultural 'characteristics' would have been far more influenced by their experience in America (at the hands of the ruling white population) than anything that they might have brought with them over the Atlantic?

Unless you think the 'characteristics' have a strong genetic component, and so we are back to racism.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#836

Post by usaar333 »

slt2021 wrote: post #796
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…

Affirmative Action is not about social-democratic "lets help poor black people". Nobody is gonna help poor people in America. Poor people are always told to "pull themselves by the bootstraps (sic!)" The beneficiaries of AA are: 1. Kids of rich black people (like children of OBAMA) 2. Rich international students from African continent (Nigeria, Ghana etc) 3. Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based…

> Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender)

Very few colleges prefer women. Of those that do, it's pretty much just the engineering focused ones and thus would pick up nearly as many Asian women as white women.

Generally, (weak) male preferences are more common given the general male underrepresentation in higher ed.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#837

Post by austin-cheney »

tecoholic wrote: post #820
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 th…

> Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money.

That sounds backwards on both points. Poverty impacts how people perceive and interact with the world from building relationships to the use and conservation of assets. For example people in poverty are less likely to save for the future because institutions necessary to safely preserve assets into the future are distant therefore resulting in behaviors motivated towards immediate consumption. That is not something fixed by just throwing money at it.

At the same time social systemic unfair treatment can be fixed with money as it allows an otherwise well positioned person to alter their relationship with the constraints imposing such unfair conditions.

> 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.

That imposes a bunch of unstated assumptions that may or may not apply. Most all my neighbors are black families of different economic statuses who moved into a predominately white neighborhood and did just fine regarding social capital.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#839

Post by [deleted] »

twilightzone wrote: post #833

"In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people. Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members…

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#840

Post by [deleted] »

earthboundkid wrote: post #658
zo1 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in any fair way. We are just making more victims that future generations will look down on us for. I want to leave a fair world to my children, not one filled with hate and systemic racial discrimination.

> There is no way to untangle any of that from the past in any fair way. Agreed. At some point you do have to shrug and say we tried our best and move on with a moral bankruptcy. But we're not really close to that point yet. Bankruptcy comes after you've exhausted extraordinary measures. I would say realistically you need maybe 100 or 150 years of positive effort before you shrug and give up, and we're barely even at…

[deleted]
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