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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

#951

Post by tijl »

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 podcast of the WSJ might answer this for you (episode of june 29 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-r... ) They say, some states already banned affirmative action. Universities in those states have tried to still recruit minority students, by going to schools with large group of minority students, and actively recruit there. The problem is, those tend to be schools with poor students. Students who cannot pay their university fee. Universities end up subsidizing those students, which is expensive. With affirmative action, they could more easily attract rich minority students.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#952

Post by sh34r »

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…

Up until 1945, Asian Americans were held in concentration camps after being stripped of all their property. Affirmative action made sense in 1971. Things change. Now it’s just discriminating against another group that’s historically been the victim of white supremacy. A crabs in a bucket situation.

And how do we make any sense of these racist laws when there’s more and more mixed race kids applying to college anyway? Our first “black” President is half white. Our first “black” Vice President is half-Asian. If this chicanery went on for a couple more generations, every kid’s gonna be like Liz Warren, looking for any trace of victim in their DNA…

Race is a social construct. These remnants of apartheid are completely illogical. The rules are made up and don’t matter. There is only one objective race: the human race. It’s about time we started deconstructing it if you ask me.

Sinophobia is getting extremely out of hand at the moment. We need to condemn systemic racism against Asian people and reject the model minority myth, before we repeat some of the ugliest chapters of US history… both parties are way too eager for war in Greater China.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#953

Post by achenet »

adventured wrote: post #550
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…

> but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead. The KKK has nothing to do with it fundamentally. Matters of racism and similar (it doesn't just have to be about race, this is a problem of collectivism, of which racism is a subset) will dominate the politics of any highly diverse nation (diverse not necessarily…

uh... as a Frenchman, I've noticed a lot of riots, but it's generally white people/native Frenchies doing the whole "fuck the government" thing.

It's probably important to understand that protesting is to France what baseball is to America - the national pastime.

I'd say most immigrants I know, including the largest groups from North Africa, follow an integration pattern similar to east Asians I met whilst living in the US.

Furthermore, I believe that actually political views dominate race when it comes to tribalism:

from https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

> Okay, fine, but we know race has real world consequences. Like, there have been several studies where people sent out a bunch of identical resumes except sometimes with a black person’s photo and other times with a white person’s photo, and it was noticed that employers were much more likely to invite the fictional white candidates for interviews. So just some stupid Implicit Association Test results can’t compare to that, right?

Iyengar and Westwood also decided to do the resume test for parties. They asked subjects to decide which of several candidates should get a scholarship (subjects were told this was a genuine decision for the university the researchers were affiliated with). Some resumes had photos of black people, others of white people. And some students listed their experience in Young Democrats of America, others in Young Republicans of America.

> Once again, discrimination on the basis of party was much stronger than discrimination on the basis of race. The size of the race effect for white people was only 56-44 (and in the reverse of the expected direction); the size of the party effect was about 80-20 for Democrats and 69-31 for Republicans.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#954

Post by nailer »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #325
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…

The who is more privileged game is not a fun one to play. Watched a white male friend and a white passing Hispanic female friend get into this argument before. He grew up poor in a rural area, only one parent worked a low paying job and the other was the care giver. She grew up middle class in a city, parents were college professors. There are a ton of other factors but even at those basics it got complicated. Is a m…

‘Non males’ are called females or, if they’re adults, women.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#955

Post by achenet »

dcow wrote: post #460
spacephysics wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome…

This is fundamentally the only thing that bothers me about the entire post-modern left narrative. If the goal posts were “equality of opportunity” (as they historically have been) then I’d have no problem continuing to fight until opportunity is provably equal. But if you move the goal posts to “equality of outcome” (what people mean when they say “racial equity”) and say “look we’re still a racist society” I just ca…

the problem with chasing "equality of opportunity" is that it's basically impossible to quantify.

And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome.

Example: assume that a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born and b) how rich your parents are affect your opportunities for success.

These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them.

In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation.

More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline.

Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich.

See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard.

Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities.

In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity.

I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#956

Post by nailer »

rendang wrote: post #635
givemeethekeys wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ashkenazi Jews are an ethnic group originating in the Near East, but with some admixture from Europeans. At least the plurality if not majority of American Jews are nonreligious, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews#Religious_belief...

Originating in Israel/Judea with some admixture from eastern Europe.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#957

Post by bombcar »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #938
bombcar wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t. And arguing that someone is not the race they claim is extremely taboo.

So why doesn't everyone fill in whatever gives them the highest chance of getting into college?

Because by and large most people are basically honest.

Same reason everyone doesn’t just walk out of restaurants without paying.

But there have been high profile cases where it has come to light later and people have endured some social shame.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#958

Post by TradingPlaces »

az226 wrote: post #845
TradingPlaces wrote: post #248

1. The largest beneficiaries of admissions policies at elite institutions are legacy admissions of wealth alumni’s kids. If SCOTUS wants to interfere with the admissions policies of private institutions based on the equal protections clause, maybe that’s a better place to start. 2. The vast majority of students attend colleges that accept almost everyone.

Patently incorrect. Minority preference is ~20x times larger than legacy preference at Harvard. 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…

That’s a strange reading of that study, and at odds with the abstract.

>The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an un- precedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, lega- cies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three-quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as typical white applicants. Removing preferences for athletes and legacies would significantly alter the racial distribution of admitted students, with the share of white admits falling and all other groups rising or remaining unchanged.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#960

Post by erenyeager »

rkagerer wrote: post #805

When I grew up one of the values instilled in me (moreso by society and personal interactions rather than passed on by my parents) was to see human beings as human beings, without cognitive overhead to their race. i.e. To me it was akin to hair color - neat, but not something by which I'd make judgements. Theoretically a world which doesn't distinguish, seems most equitable (and sane, at least to me). I'm genuinely t…

This is some naive approach in my opinion. Nobody sees human beings as “human beings” in their day to day life, it is all about statuses, circumstances, etc AND also the individual. Distinction is an incredibly important feature between groups of people.

For example, someone may bring a lot of your cultural assumptions into how the country should be run, but a different group of people may see things completely differently. So when the majority group of people imposes their culture and influence on the less powerful groups, how is this fair and just to say everyone is equal & we don’t need to see distinctions?

To give you a silly example something like bathroom design is heavily influenced by culture. In places where water was important and cleanliness, they had bidets. But in places like the US and Canada, there really isn’t this present in many places, as a result we lose many benefits of bidets from imposing the current cultural standard for bathrooms.

People talk about tests, well standardized tests are also rooted in gate keeping undesirable groups of people, and by setting requirements that are “equal” they actually discriminate against people who were actively hurt by unjust social policies and circumstances. For example if one group is more illiterate because of historical injustice against them, if you make a test requiring literacy and then nothing is done to address the injustice, you are just perpetuating an excuse to continue discrimination under the guise of being equal.

Does that make more sense?

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