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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

#901

Post by reilly3000 »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#902

Post by foogazi »

commandlinefan wrote: post #215
ummonk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using parental income as well as parental education level in admissions would have helped GP's father just fine without any need for race-based affirmative action.

> parental income as well as parental education level in admissions But that leads to the same fundamental problem - somebody who was "unfortunate" enough to be born into decent circumstances but _who was actually more qualified_ than the diversity admit gets rejected.

What’s wrong with some randomness in the system?

If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#903

Post by foogazi »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #275
azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

Do we need race based affirmative action though? Couldn't we have needs based discrimination? What makes a poor hispanic immigrant more deserving of a hand up than a poor ukranian immigrant?

You could have that too

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#904

Post by foogazi »

jlawson wrote: post #174
azinman2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If affirmative action is what enabled your father to become a doctor, then it almost certainly sounds like the success story that motivates the action. I don’t know percent of the time a similar story is required to justify the means, but it sounds like you should embrace the path that your family’s life has taken. The alternative, presumably, would be effectively unfair knowing what could and then did become.

It's worth bearing in mind that if affirmative action helped his father become a doctor, it also prevented someone else's father from becoming a doctor. I wonder what that person could have achieved.

Yes - due to scarcity we get zero sum outcomes

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#905

Post by [deleted] »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #369

The only way affirmative action makes 'logical' sense to me is if people believe in biological differences of intelligence between races. Not saying I believe this, but it's the only way I could think of to logically allow for AA. Because now you have "Race A" paying the same tax rates for public university as "Race B", yet their children could be biologically limited (on average) in comparison.

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#906

Post by foogazi »

Maxion wrote: post #220
jlawson wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth bearing in mind that if affirmative action helped his father become a doctor, it also prevented someone else's father from becoming a doctor. I wonder what that person could have achieved.

As someone not from the US, this whole Affirmative Actions seems to just be reversed racism. I.e. in the end more-or-less still unfair. Better to just remove race all together, and e.g. require college admissions by law to be judged without knowing the applicants name or ethnicity. To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race. Race really does not matter, and no matter how much the US claims to be rac…

Race gets brought up every time

Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”

Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#907

Post by sacnoradhq »

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…

Redlining and racist real estate deed clauses did exist.

The KKK embodies American white supremacy. In 1925 and 1926, 50k white hoods marched down Pennsylvania Ave. 4% (5 million) of Americans were Klan members. There were numerous mass lynchings and murder during the 1919 Red Summer. This was the surfacing of simmering racism because of an influx of Jewish and Catholic refugees from WW I and the increasing household wealth of black people. Somehow, black people, Jews, and Catholics were responsible for all of the ills, lack of wealth, and loss of privilege for the average American white Christian male. Henry Ford was Hitler's hero and wrote antisemitic editorials and books.

In 2023, it's still the case that some social clubs, private preschools, universities, apartment co-ops, and more require photographs with applications because it provides an easy way to discriminate without being openly honest about it. Blackballing (secret ballot cast by colored rocks) is also used to deny people arbitrarily.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#908

Post by [deleted] »

solardev wrote: post #120

I often wished universities (and other organizations) would use a scoresheet-like "matrix of oppression" to determine someone's background difficulties. Like okay, you get X points if you're this race, Y points for that. Z points if your parents were poor. Or if you grew up in these bad zip codes. Or if your dad was gone and mom was an addict. Whatever. As an Asian American of relatively privileged (middle class) upb…

[deleted]

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#909

Post by wyager »

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?

"Poor people" aren't a unified political coalition in the US.

For various reasons, you can't do political favors for poor people and expect them to reliably vote for you.

Black people are a unified political coalition in the US.

I recommend reading about Bueno de Mesquita's model of selectorate theory for understanding how stable political patronage networks operate; the model is very insightful for cases like this.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#910

Post by wyager »

aredox wrote: post #760
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…

Because the US uses race as a trigger to keep the poor fighting amongst themselves. That's why.

Or, more parsimoniously (no pun intended), because poverty isn't as strong of a unifying factor as you think.
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