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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

#821

Post by semilattice »

concordDance wrote: post #594
mcv wrote: 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…

> Groups of people don't have guilt or automatic responsibility, only individuals do.

I think the question here is who is entitled to have the 'revenge' or the reparation or the 'affirmative action'

People who were persecuted or opressed? or their offspring?

For example German government agreed to pay reparation to Jews in (some?) Eastern European countries and Russia, that were alive at the time of WWII and lived on the territories that the Germany attacked.

The reparation from what I know were 2,000 or 4,000 USD one time payment.

--

So in that model a) the person receiving the reparation had to be alive at the time of the crime. b) had to be on the territory where the crime was committed c) I do not think the person needed to prove that they were directly affected by the crime

from what I know the reparation was selective. It did not cover Gypsys, did not cover non-Jews

--

I do not know what the right model is.

Can a nation be responsible for the crimes their government has committed? For how long?

If the answer to the above is 'yes' (that the nation is responsible) -- wouldn't that justify terrorism? wouldn't that justify blood-revenge practice?

But that revenge can go for generations, and at some point will be reversed -- that means, in turn, endless wars.

--

May be the correct answer is to limit the action of 'righting the wrongs' to the people who were the victims and alive at the time of the crime ?

But that does not seem to be fair to the victims either

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#822

Post by bloppe »

mcv wrote: post #255
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…

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,…

Of course thing's haven't been "made right" (reparations?). They never will be. You simply cannot correct such a large and complex past injustice. By the time you're done sorting through all the details to a reasonable standard, everyone who was around when the reparations process started would have already passed away, and doing this kind of thing sloppily is a recipe for disaster.

The only way forward is to correct current injustices and level the playing field on which people compete today (i.e. the rationale behind affirmative action). I do think the focus should be on class rather than race; the two are highly correlated but not the same. Nothing in the SCOTUS decision seems to prohibit affirmative action based on class, so I actually think this ruling could turn out less impactful than many seem to fear or hope.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#823

Post by LudwigNagasena »

jensensbutton wrote: post #543
tomp wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, […] Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. This is a nice story, but actually not true. If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. Maybe they weren’t as oppressed…

> If it were true, Harvard etc wouldn’t also discriminate against Asians. This logic makes absolutely no sense. Why can't they have a legacy admits AND discriminate against Asians? Are you seriously trying to claim Ivy League schools don't have legacy admits?

You missed this part:

> putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#824

Post by xdennis »

dudul wrote: post #244
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…

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People ne…

> EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies.

Depends on the country. As usual, Romania isn't really a EU country. We have reserved places for Gypsies in universities as a means of integration... not that it's ever worked.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#825

Post by athenaRising »

surement wrote: post #243
losvedir wrote: post #41

As 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, and to this day I wonder how much checking "Hispanic" helped me there and if I "deserved" to go. the problem with aa is not about people getting in that didn't "deserve" it, it's people getting in who don't have the means to succeed; elite colleges brag about their diverse admissions but don't talk about people who go on to fail when they could've succeeded at less prestigious schools if you succeede…

If MIT rejected applicants with better profiles because of the URM checkbox, in some sense they didn't deserve to get in.

I'm technically 1/4 Hispanic, but not at all Hispanic in any real sense. I forgot to check the box when applying to top schools. My odds would've had a large boost just for claiming an identity that's had no relevance to any area of my life. I'd call that "undeserved."

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#826

Post by sandworm101 »

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.

That's actually where you have missed the point. This isn't about disadvantaged people. This is only about race. In the US, racial discrimination is evil and is generally disallowed. But you are 100% allowed to discriminate against poor people. That is capitalism. If someone said Disneyland was discriminating against poor people because they charged an entrance fee, the vast majority of Americans would laugh at the concept of even calling that discrimination. Everyone who sells something for a price, including schools that sell access to education, are allowed to discriminate against those who cannot afford to pay. So "disadvantaged" isn't enough. To get protection or some sort of leg-up your disadvantage must arise from race/sex/religion ... basically anything other than lack of money.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#827

Post by xdennis »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #464
dudul wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People ne…

[flagged]

The attitudes to race are different because of the different situations. The US is multicultural and founded on stolen land, whereas European countries (at least in the east) are nation states with a single dominant culture.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#828

Post by vacuity »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #345
ahtihn wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average Why is that the case? For Asians, I don't see what systemic privilege they could have that would need to be compensated away?

The 'systemic privilege' you're looking for is culture . Unfortunately, the treatment is even more complicated than the diagnosis is simple.

Unpopular to hear, but it needs to be said more. While I believe that the US still has a ways to go to truly achieve equality of opportunity (and then equality of outcome really would be based on culture, I would think), culture is such an important factor in peoples' personalities and therefore an important factor in peoples' outcomes. I can't speak to other life forms, but culture (nurture) is a powerful force in humans that can rival genetic dispositions (nature).

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#829

Post by stcroixx »

prottog wrote: post #686
stcroixx wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Treating everyone the same way doesn’t need to terrify anyone.

Re: Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions

#830

Post by onos »

User23 wrote: post #780
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…

Basically the problem is that poor Whites and Asians significantly outperform even affluent Blacks and non-White Hispanics. So simply going based on income would lead to a wildly unrepresentative low proportion of Black and Hispanic students.

It’s really simple: if black s and Hispanics want to go to Harvard let them study as much as the asians. I’m confident they can do it.
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