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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

#891

Post by leonidasv »

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?

Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4].

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black...

[1] https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/two-american-experiences-ra...

[2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/10/pobre-preto-t... (article in Portuguese)

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/world/americas/brazil-ena...

[4] https://nacla.org/affirmative-action-brazil

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#892

Post by monocasa »

mcv wrote: post #255
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…

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,…

> not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that.

And to put this in real terms, the number of racial justice who have 'killed themselves' via methods like 'hanging themselves from a tree outside their house with sheets their family haven't seen before' makes you think that this really isn't a whole thing that we've gotten past. It's not like lynchings were legal in the 1950s; the perpetrators simply structurally didn't face justice for their crimes.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#893

Post by hcurtiss »

leonidasv wrote: post #891
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? Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4]. [0]…

But why is that? Wouldn’t the right answer be to identify and root out any systematic racism benefitting whites rather than implement explicitly race-based (one might even say “racist”) counter-measures?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#894

Post by bluecalm »

Sanity prevailed. The different reads like a political manifesto rather than a legal opinion.

You need a mental gymnastics of the highest order to justify racist policies like the ones employed by Harvard. Sometimes people get so deep into ideology that they can't think straight anymore. Ask someone detaches from American political discourse to read the Constitution and then ask them how adding points for race plays with that.

Coming from a former communist country where "social class points" where the thing we were so happy to get over I can't see how affirmative action isn't just a worse, more blatant and unjust version of that.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#895

Post by raincom »

imperio59 wrote: post #293

Harvard and UNC are well intentioned but they are trying to fix inequities which start much earlier. They sit at the end of 12 years of schooling for applicants, where the quality of that schooling and the level of funding for extra curricular activities will have been vastly different based on where that student lived and which school they attended. Trying to fix this problem at the college admissions level creates…

Equality of opportunity at the n-th step totally depends on Equality of outcome at the n-1 th step. It id better to focus on earlier steps where it doesn’t appear to be a zero-sun game.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#896

Post by sneed_chucker »

mahdi7d1 wrote: post #403

I never understood why are people against standardized testing. I would rather fail test than be judged by someone then deemed not worthy.

Because average performance in standardized testing (SAT, ACT, and so on) is highly variable between racial/ethnic groups.

People with all different kinds of motivations and agendas have various explanations for why that is, but ignoring all that the fact of the matter is that a strict "meritocracy" of that sort ends up with certain groups overrepresented and others underrepresented.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#897

Post by cperciva »

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…

(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!)

Not to diminish the injustice of the slavery from which Haitians freed themselves, but I think there might have been a solution short of genocide. In particular, the systematic torture and execution of children was probably not necessary.

(Incidentally, the compensation in question was paid for lost property. The French government apparently considered that to be more important than the lives which were lost!)

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#898

Post by blindriver »

az226 wrote: post #850
az226 wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy is always brought up in these discussions. The amount of students who get into Harvard because of the boost from their race outnumbers the number of legacy students who get boosted from their status 20 to 1. Basically a race and legacy blind policy would reject 20 times more minorities than legacy applicants and then if the policy is race and legacy discriminatory.

A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants. http://public.…

450 spots to less deserving students would go to 450 more deserving students?

That seems pretty fair to me. Unless you want to focus on the color of the skin of students and not the content of their character.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#899

Post by leonidasv »

hcurtiss wrote: post #893
leonidasv wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4]. [0]…

But why is that? Wouldn’t the right answer be to identify and root out any systematic racism benefitting whites rather than implement explicitly race-based (one might even say “racist”) counter-measures?

The "root" is probably in the police, war on drugs, racist people on positions of power, neglected neighbourhoods, etc. The World has been trying to solve racism for decades now, if it was so easy, we wouldn't be talking about this right now.

Affirmative action makes sense because it's a policy that's simple, cheap and fast to implement to counterbalance this. And let's not forget that, in the past, the State legally discriminated against those people and no historical reparation has ever been given to them.

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