Good - lets do the workplace next.
Please God, please end the DEI Industrial Complex
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
281–290 of 1001 posts
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#282The 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'm going to assume positive intent on this and that it's not a troll comment.
Race in the US is horribly complicated and tied into so many parts of life here in the US. Full Stop.
HN comment sections aren't really the place to go into the very fine details, especially just one comment like mine. and the fine details do matter. Ok, all that out of the way, now to the questions here.
Let's take a small micro-example and explore a bit:
You are an African-American woman experiencing preeclampsia at 30 weeks gestation. Preeclampsia is a very serious medical condition and can cause death to you and your baby. You go into the hospital not knowing what is wrong with you, but you know something is wrong.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that African-Americans don't feel pain like other people do.
Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that women over-react to pain [0].
Like it or not, many medical professionals do not believe the above if they are African-American women.
So, as a worried mother-to-be, you get a doctor assigned to you, likely at random. If your MD is not of the same race or sex as you are, then your experience is likely to be less positive than if they were. From what I have heard from African-American women whom I am able to talk with about medical care, the experience is highly likely to be a negative one unless they get someone of their own race or are lucky.
So, having more people that are of diverse backgrounds in the medical field leads to more positive outcomes for patients of every race and sex.
Meaning that you have to get more diversity into the med schools to begin with. Which means that you have to get more diversity into colleges. Which means you have to get more diversity into Secondary education, and in primary education. Which means you have to get more diversity in pedagogical training. And round we go.
Yes, we could solve this by untying med school from college. Yes, we could open up the med schools to more than just the select few we already have. Yes, we could have more nurses and RNs that accompany MDs. Yes we could make medical care a single payer system and try to solve this from there. Yes, there are a million other ways to fix this.
Hopefully you begin to see what a complex mess racial issues are in the US and how at each and every level, race is a contributing factor that affects everyone. I haven't even come close to any of the real issues here, and there are so many spider webs that tie into each sub-issue. Look at this Supreme Court Decision itself, the first black supreme court justice, a Harvard Grad, voted to end it. Thing get really really squirrely.
[0] I have personally experienced this with my SO during labor, BTW. The attending OB-GYN, a man, remarked to me 'How can you stand the screaming all the time'. I threw him out of the room. No joke, this really did happen.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#283The 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.
I don't know about this. Like about 1000 undergraduate students are admitted to Harvard each year, Harvard being named in this suit. Affirmative action at Harvard being necessary to help anyone seems like a stretch. Is Harvard really the only way to help people? It's an elite school so I think the stakes are different than helping people because the applicant pool is very elite already.
I think in reality the US is embroiled in ethnic conflict and people are fighting over spots at elite schools for their children and a lot of this is political. There are other countries where affirmative action is used and a similar thing happens. Like in India for example, the child of a billionaire from the OBC designation has a much higher chance of getting into IIT than the child of poor Brahmins. The OBC designation has expanded over time for political reasons to form coalitions, as I understand it.
> Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too?
Ironically the SFFA case argued that specifically white kids were being backdoored into Harvard at the expense of Asian students[1]. So yes, the goal would not be met. Although I need to read this case closely because the official decision mentions more about Black and Latino affirmative action.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#284I admittedly skimmed the opinion, but is this the first case that establishes a private entity like Harvard University is bound by the Equal Protections Clause? I thought existing law and precedent only had it applied to state/state actors (and a few cases where private businesses acted like governments, eg company towns).
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Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#285As 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…
Hey dude, I was in your class, and I can say firsthand that you deserved to be there like any of us. Almost everyone at a place like MIT feels some impostor syndrome, and I think maybe even for good bogus-mathematical-theorem reasons: if a place like MIT tries to select from the top few percent of a normal distribution, that new distribution after selection will look bottom-heavy (and feel that way around campus). We…
"It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." — Major Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell)
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#286Yep.
You cannot solve racism through racism.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#287Considering the failure and timing of prop 16 and overall makeup of the California electorate compared to rest of country, official discrimination on the basis of race likely won't return in higher ed. Also consider that prop 16 failed by double digits with the pro-discrimination crowd outspending the opposition 19x What I'm curious about is this: the Harvard decision is wrt a private entity, the court ruled that the…
The decision affects private entities that accept some form of federal financial assistance (this is language from Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), not private entities writ large. Granted, that is still a big bucket.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#288As 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 was interviewing a person and in post interview meeting with HR and managers, HR made a comment like "this would be the first hire from country X"
After the meeting I noticed that I am the first person that was hired from my country. I am still wondering if a similar comment was made about me as well
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#289Earlier 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.
Poverty has a huge impact on childhood accomplishment. If someone is a regular A student while dodging bullets with a mother on crack, they are probably a much stronger human than someone who comes from an upper middle class family and gets valedictorian, is class president, does volunteer work and won a teen writing award or some-such.
Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
#290The 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…
> But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first?
Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.