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

871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#871

Post by vacuity »

oceanplexian wrote: post #781
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

I don't think that women are quite equal in terms of social perception and treatment, but I don't think the proportion of women garbage collectors or women firefighters is a good indicator of that. Rather, it's more subtle; women are more likely to be perceived as overly emotional and treated as submissive, and so on. I don't think there's a wage gap, but the lack of standardized maternal leave (though parents in general should be given paid leave) can greatly affect career opportunities. I agree that some people seem to prefer a bizarre "ideal [insert convenient demographic marker here] society", and I vehemently oppose such a notion.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#872

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Groxx wrote: post #865
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 tl;dr is: because there exists systemic disadvantage-ous-ness clearly caused by, and maintained along lines of race. It's not just The Past™ that was racist to damaging degrees, Now™ is too. All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get…

But with affirmative action it's about race and not being poor. It's not a measure that looks at household income, but a measure that looks at skin color. Poor white Bobby from a trailer park in alabama is financially fucked, and noone cares about him, because he's white.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#873

Post by skydhash »

thegaulofthem wrote: post #505
pjc50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> (It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!) At risk of starting a fun flame war, it’s more complicated than that. Outside of a contingent of Polish mercenaries, whom were deemed something to the effect of honorary blacks, the new former slave regime effectively genocided the whites of the island. M…

> I don’t know where the exact reasonable line is for revenge when you’ve been enslaved, but I’m certain they went well and unquestionably over it.

If so, pretty much every nation is guilty of genocide. The Spanish eliminated the natives in Hispaniola and Latin America. Saint Domingue was basically a meat grinder under the French. There were basically no international law, only allies. I don’t condemn genocide, but do you think if the rebellion failed, the French would have pardoned everyone? Dessalines was guilty of genocide, but most other nations have done worse (Napoleon and his wars).

N.B. Haiti is very small. And the white population was tiny at the time. People always going on about that because black slaves killed white slave owners 200 years ago.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#874

Post by ayakang31415 »

If you read Harvard's response to the rule, you will quickly realize that they can still decide who gets the admission based on race without ADMITTING THAT because even if there is no checkbox for race on the application, they can still figure what kind of race each applicant is and they can still evaluate how the race impacted the applicant's life for the consideration of admission.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#875

Post by DemeterFarm »

jldugger wrote: post #290
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…

> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.

[dead]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#876

Post by vacuity »

asimpletune wrote: post #452
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 think it's a mistake to think the intent is to benefit individuals of specific races. This has very much been something where the intended benefactor is American society in general. As an example, I went to a good public school that had a policy where the top 5% of high school students were automatically given admission to the university. While this was technically race blind, it was de facto affirmative action, be…

I wouldn't consider that affirmative action. In any case, I would support more universities with similar policies. Your point about the justice system is interesting. In principle, it sounds good to me, but I'll have to ponder it. Thanks for that food for thought!

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#877

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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…

So why even look at race at all (in college applications)?

I live in a small, now-EU, once a socialist country, and we calculate points based on grades and starndardized tests, and top X get accepted to college, without colleges even knowing who they are at all.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#878

Post by ajsnigrutin »

crooked-v wrote: post #230
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…

Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...

Here in my country, we calculate points based on grades and standardized test results, and top X students (based on points) get accepted to that college. Race and name doesn't matter at all, if you're above the cuttoff, you're in.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#879

Post by [deleted] »

onetimeusename wrote: post #650

I got an email about this from my university president expressing his disappointment with the ruling. He assured everyone the campus will continue to strive for more racial diversity and that this ruling is a hindrance to that goal because race based discrimination is a good thing for achieving diversity. The school is already about 25% white in a country that is ~60% white. Is that sufficiently diverse? What is the…

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#880

Post by ajsnigrutin »

cogman10 wrote: post #234
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…

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Mostly it was a justice thing. The US spent decades disadvantaging people based on race and this was a step to try and reverse some of that. I agree that changing it from race to economic class is probably the right move at this point. That being said, I don't like that the SC is legislating from the bench. They are striking this down for purely political reasons.

It also disadvantaged italians and irish people. Also, how does that help 18year old applicants, who are too young to do any disandvantaging.
Post reply on HN