Good: race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc should not be used as an advantage, or disadvantage in totally unrelated matters (education, work, etc)
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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#202As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…
Our world has foolish ideas with regard to class, and it is best to set them aside.
Be the person that you are. That person is no more or less worthy than any other.
The judgements of the world do seep into our subconscious, but with a clean view, you can put them where they belong, which is away.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#203The 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? 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…
Dr. Martin Luther King said he dreams that one day his children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of people’s skin.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#204As someone of Hispanic descent this is very interesting to me. Affirmative Action probably helped my father, whose father was a construction worker and mother a homemaker both of whom dropped out of high school, get into college and ultimately become a doctor. But because my father was a doctor, I had a fairly privileged upbringing. I'm a generation removed, but growing up in California always had to indicate my back…
> I went to MIT ... I was valedictorian [presumably in high school] and had a perfect score on the SATs > I've always wondered if being Hispanic helped me get into college or into jobs I've been on plenty of hiring committees for engineers and product owners. The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is. Good for you for your accomplishmen…
>The fact that you have stellar academics and went to MIT stands out well more than your name or whatever your skin color is.
But his dad did use it to their advantage. OP then gets to grow up in an upper-class city with a great school district.
Meanwhile some white or asian person gets bumped off, and instead of their kids growing up in that area, they grow up in a worse school district.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#205I 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…
I don’t think this is a bad idea conceptually, but I worry that the implementation would be a race to the bottom. Who gets to decide who’s been the “most oppressed?” It seems like nearly anyone could feel slighted by this.
It's not really about "who is the MOST oppressed" but rather that there are many oppressed peoples who are right now slipping through the cracks altogether.
Probably we need to support all of them, at the expense of people who could afford it (the upper middle class and up), not make them fight for scraps against each other.
I think the likely outcome of such a system (my hypothesis only, untested in reality) is that we'll find that yes, believe it or not, life is harder for Black people in general, especially in some areas, but that there are also rich Latinos, poor whites, cis men who've been abused, Asians who grew up in the hood, whatever.
Our society is too heterogeneous to neatly segregate us by any one line alone, whether that line is race or class or sex oe whatever. Our backgrounds are a complex mix of variables that each have an impact and shouldn't be ignored.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#206> Sotomayor, the court’s first Latina, has been the boldest defender of what she prefers to call “race-sensitive” admission policies and has referred to herself as the “perfect affirmative action child.” That will probably not do a lot to convince those happy with this outcome.
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.
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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#207Earlier 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.
No, it means it prevented someone else's father from attending that school. There are others. That's why you apply to more than one.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do "white" hispanics face the same issues as those of say Indian heritage?
I’m a white Latino and no, we don’t. Maybe on paper if someone assumes I’m mixed or Afrolatino, but I get all the privilege of being white passing. Not only that, if I’m hanging with brown Latinos they feel safer with me. I’ve often seen my friends stopped by police or given looks when alone but not with me. The whole Hispanic thing is a mess in the US. Not only due to color of skin but culture and class. I have frie…
I took a class in college that focused on Latino culture in the US. It was taught by a professor originally from Puerto Rico. For context, this class was taught in Los Angeles.
He said that even across central and south American cultures skin tones affected how people were perceived and treated as applied to class. The lighter the skin the better in most cases but not all. He wasn't proud of it or endorsing it, just stating it as a fact of life in many countries. And he'd been on the other side of that perception, too. He later intersected those prejudices with the interesting pride many take (or appropriate) from the art and symbols of indigenous and ancient civilizations (Aztec, Mayan, etc.) even if there were no direct biological ties. It's a very complicated topic with countless caveats and anecdotal experiences.
But the biases we witness and experience in the US are not unique by any means, that's for sure.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#209A good development but I think this won't stop the practice. Harvard lawyers are now hard at work finding new way to achieve the same effect.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#210[deleted]