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Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

latimes.com

681–690 of 1001 posts

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equality has fallen out of vogue, the new hot term is equity.

Because the focused has shifted to outcome over equal opportunity or treatment in the present. Some of us think that's misguided and the equal opportunity approach was working.

The equity approach is so blatantly racist / classist that I can’t believe it has taken root in left leaning states like California.

Equality based: Fund the schools, and use evidence based educational reforms, with the result that California schools were top ten in the US.

Equity based: Not everyone can do math and stem, so defund science and art programs (already done) and try to discontinue funding for calculus (almost happened this year). Schools are now 43rd in country, but rich districts can have parents fund the missing programs via donations, and are some of the best in the country. Further fuck with things by forcing UC admissions to be based on standing within each school’s graduating class, so illiterate minority kids end up being admitted to the top schools, and need to be weeded out.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#682
post #618
post #255

Earlier 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,…

Germany went through a similar phase after 1945 with a lot of guilt and reparations towards fixing all the problem cause during the war. It was very noticeable in behavior and attitude, through around 2000s it seems that the past is being put behind them. We should not forget that world war 2 happens, but it also doesn't make much sense for Germans to continue self-flagellation forever. If anything, the lessons learn…

Germany paid reparations.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#683

I applied to university as African American/Black because I'm 1/4 Egyptian. I am very white. Some people may guess I'm Jewish (I'm not) but no one guesses African American. I got into a nice school and I was enrolled in the "minority engineering excellence program". The program was like 25% white kids with "1/16 native American" or "1/8 Spanish". We got free tutoring and we all took an exclusive class just for the pr…

In America middle eastern counts as white, not black. But nobody is enforcing these things and now they won’t matter because racially discriminating on admissions is illegal.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#684
post #255

Earlier 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…

I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group.

Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#685
For people who are against affirmative action, what is your preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that exist in academia? I see three options:

1) say that these disparities are inevitable

2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own

3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#686

Considering 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…

Oh yeah, it surely will. Time to say goodbye to DIE statements when applying to jobs and forced indoctrination in the workplace. This junk is on borrowed time.

Very dystopian, and reminiscent of countless other "social revolutions" that happened in the not-so-distant history, all with terrifying results.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#687
post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender. Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender? Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (hi…

This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?

No, doesn't count for men. They're just broken and need to "step up".

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#688

For people who are against affirmative action, what is your preferred course of action, given the racial disparities that exist in academia? I see three options: 1) say that these disparities are inevitable 2) wait for the disparities disappear on their own 3) address the disparities through some other policy or initiative

4) which race you are doesn’t matter, it’s your skills that matter and what should be judged on

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#689

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…

A tangent question I have, and have asked here before without any satisfactory answer:

How does it even work? I can proof I'm poor with for example tax returns, but how does someone proof they are of a certain "race"?

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#690

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…

In favor of affirmative action, one argument that doesn't even require comparing "equality of outcome/opportunity" between individuals, is that the university should have some say in the makeup of its incoming class, and should have a right to minimize its homogeneity. You might argue that race is not an attribute upon which homogeneity can legally be measured, but that won't change the fact that it's a proxy for lif…

"the university should have some say in the makeup of its incoming class, and should have a right to minimize its homogeneity." If they don't take federal funding, I could understand that. Both Universities involved in this case do, so are subject to the Constitution of the United States.
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