371–380 of 888 posts
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Couldn't you just give poor people money?
The kids which most need free lunch often come from families so dysfunctional that any money received would not be spent on feeding the kids.
It’s not ‘society’ that’s focused on race, it’s advantage-seeking politicians and journalists who live in a bubble that are. Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…
And yet it seems it does in upper class enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan... It's an interesting and perhaps telling correlation: the college-educated, privileged elite who believe they are doing the right thing by zeroing in on race as the foundational problem of America.
How naive and perhaps blissful to to be so ignorant at how unjust the world is overall, there are so many perhaps urgent issues with suffering people, and we're worried whether companies with average salaries in the multi-hundred-thousand dollar range are diverse enough.
In a microcosm within a big country where the average savings and health and medical insecurity are very serious.
The focus on race, even if race is on a checklist of problems to resolve, borders on scandalous.
The scandal is the list of people whose lives are ruined because they're poor and either experience an absence of medical care or crippling debt. But it's a class issue and that topic is verboten, perhaps because it's non-existent to the groups mentioned in the first sentence above.
Looking at health inequity should be a priority over who is on the board room or what groups occupy what percentages of things. It would make for a more just society in a big way.
I've always loved how succinctly LBJ put it: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
I like how you edited the actual words
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People were accusing people of being "diversity hires", or having "slept their way to top", or similar dismissive nonsense long before AA was in wide use.
I recently went down a bit of a rabbit hole and learned about "pre-code" Hollywood. There's actually a 1933 movie called "Baby Face" that features a woman who does basically sleep her way to the top of a company (despite being pre-code, it's still quite chaste by modern standards and much is left to implication, but it's not subtle). So the trope does indeed have some history.
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
But every generation finds some excuse that their prejudices are "rational".
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And, it'll be awesome. In the short term, the few black kids and women who end up in engineering will get respect for making it into the program. And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.
> they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires Only racist losers assume I'm a diversity hire. And I'd actually rather they seethe at the "diversity hire" who just happens to somehow magically drive high-impact projects at every company he's ever worked at culminating in a career that's seen him work on everything from some of the most used apps in the world to self-driving cars. For that particular brand of los…
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Oh, certainly. A few years is all black kids and women need to overcome racial and gender prejudices in this country. Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now , and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin or the number of their X chromosomes?
This comment is a perfect microcosm of the title. Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives: > Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know,…
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Unfortunately, parental income can be a terrible proxy. High income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers. Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital g…
Parental income is a terrible proxy? The abilities of ones guardians growing up is a huge factor in what opportunities someone is offered and a lot of that is dictated by how much money is available for the child. Other aspects like the intelligence, love, care, wit of the parents and child may be larger factors, but that's not something one can quantify on a form.
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> While I believe there is belief that Harvard is accepting C-students over asians A+ students I think the reality is much closer; they are rejecting students with perfect scores and accepting students who scored in the 98th percentile. You don't need to speculate, the gap is more like 99th vs 93rd percentile: "Asian-Americans admitted to Harvard earned an average SAT score of 767 across all sections. ... African-Ame…
Point being racial discrimination is acceptable so long as there is some plausible deniability
I think the ~1300 Asian students that didn’t get into Harvard from 2010-2015 that scored above white students that were admitted really suffered as a result of Harvards policies.
I am not convinced the new system is going to be any better for society in the long run. But Asian applicants to Harvard will likely be less victimized.
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On the flipside, it's unclear to me why the penniless should care what the best outcome is for "the public," as nebulous of a concept that is.
I think people generally care about the public interest because of their shared humanity. People generally identify with their society and want to see it prosper. They should also care that their society remains well structured because it increases the probability that their own situation improves over the course of their life, and that their children/grandkids will be wealthy. They gain nothing from believing in the…
Are you calling USA "well structured"? Socialist European nations have much more income mobility than USA has. Few are threatened with penury, most employers pay a living wage, and many more people who have a great idea and the will to build it, do so.