It's strange that no one is talking about that if it weren't for Trump and the conservative nominees, we'd still be stuck with AA. The dissent was apalling and completely ideological.
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#942Can someone explain why the military academies were explicitly exempt from this ruling when their policies are similar to those of UNC and Harvard?
There are unique considerations related to military academies, which I believe were raised at oral arguments. The concern is that if the military academies do not enroll enough non-white students, then the officer population would be mostly white, and that could cause friction with a plurality/majority(?) group of enlisted soldiers. The majority wanted to make clear that they are not opining on the analysis that woul…
They might as well get rid of that too then. It doesn’t sound fair.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#943Earlier 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…
It's not about slavery; it's about what's going on in the U.S. right now. Study after study shows disadvantages to being black in America right now.
Those disadvantages include, as you point out, echoed effects from discrimination and disadvantage from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and further.
But they also include immediate effects going on today -- like discrimination based on skin color or hairstyle or choice of name or an imbalanced school system or you name it.
Affirmative action is a broad brush, as you say. But to demand that only people whose ancestors actually owned slaves be disadvantaged by affirmative action, and only those whose ancestors actually were slaves benefit from it, ignores the rest of the black experience in America, and is, frankly, offensive.
As a bonus, I'll mention that every time I learn something about black history in America, I find a new way to be disappointed in my (our?) ancestors. The most recent thing I learned is that as recently as the '50s and '60s, since hospitals were segregated, blacks often had much worse access to healthcare. As a result, when they needed immediate treatment and no black doctor was available, they would go to a veterinarian for help.
That's terrible, but the cherry on the shit sundae is that, if the veterinarian happened to be white, the care had to be rendered surreptitiously, because white people wouldn't take their pets to a vet who had served a black person.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#944The 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…
Income based help is the only non discriminatory way of admissions. Colleges dont like this because then the college would overwhelmingly reflect poor white people, and they would not be able to claim "diversity". No institution of wealth exists that does not play politics.
To demonstrate this fact you will overwhelmingly see black individuals from very white and non-poverty backgrounds graduating from unis. Most don't make it their first year, the costs are insane and the culture drinks its own Kool aid.
If blues legitimately cared about people the streets would back them - they do not. It's us vs gov.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#945Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. However in…
> But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race? (snip) If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never…
The solution to racism isn't more racism.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#946The 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’s some good discussion downthread already. I want to make a particular observation that your intuition is: - totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors - reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable - what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they wa…
There are a lot of other factors that influence advantages and disadvantages in every aspect of life. This is of course trivial. The point is that you cannot reach a better approximation of justice by a complex rule set determined by some king makers. No, racial discrimination will inevitably worsen the situation. Also, this is by definition the most prominent and straight forward example of structural discrimination as well. It becomes structurally unfair.
Likewise a better approach to social democracy is to look at disadvantages today. It is a common mistake to create false problems. This would not be the first time. And participation in society sadly has a lot to do with economic factors and I am sure that is something social democracy would like to address. Of course there are exceptions, but you have to be careful about the metrics you choose.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#947Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Glad you thought it was interesting, that makes me really happy to hear. Re. "not really affirmative action", I'm not like an AA expert, but my university went all the way to the Supreme Court to defend that very admission policy, in a lawsuit that attempted to repeal affirmative action.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...
I think in general the population is mostly against affirmative action because it seems racist, and they just substitute their own ideas of how those policies are implemented. It's the same thing where if you asked people if murderers should be let go over some kind of procedural technicality, then they'd probably say no because murder is bad. However, in practice those technicalities are stuff like how evidence is collected, which can lead to potentially innocent people being convicted, etc...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#948The 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…
> Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities.
Why does the student body need to replace part of its Whites and Asians with minorities to be "rich and diverse"? Can't it be rich and diverse by having different people which are each his own individual not defined by his race?
Also, aren't you worried about how getting denied admission to a college because of your race will have a very negative effect for "society"?
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#949Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sotomayor revealed in oral argument for this very case that she does not understand the difference between "de facto" and "de jure". There's plenty of other things to dislike her for beyond one liners in interviews.
Yeah. That was really weird. I don't know what to make of it, since it's hard to believe that she actually doesn't know the difference between the terms.
I just finished reading her dissent in this case, and I actually think she understands the legal difference, but because of her policy preferences (in this case, racism is actually okay but only for college admissions) she just forgot for a while.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#950Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like We would probably find that this doe…
No, we don’t need to be making community college free. Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids? All you’re doing is making it marginally easier for the people already sufficiently motivated to succeed in college to have a little easier time. Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certa…
>Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids?
Because the hot topic this past decade or 2 has been about the college bubble. And we conflate college with university. I think Community college is cheap enough that no one is worried about paying off debts for 20 years in CC, but there is certainly that problem with university. With almost zero alternatives.
And to be frank, it (university costs) is an easier problem to solve. there are (apparently) 1600 accredited universities. I'm not sure about free, but if we can price control tuition (and all those other "extra fees". I know your loopholes) for even 100 of those universities, that would create opportunity where none may exist now. elementary/secondary education... we're talking 10's of thousands of schools to take into account. And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.