My parents were alive and in schools when segregation in education was ending. Decades of Jim Crow laws holding people down isn’t simply remedied by saying “We’re all equal now.” and doing nothing to redress the damage inflicted through the abuse of governmental power. Especially not when “We’re all equal now.” is largely lip service and systemic racism is still prevalent.
That’s probably true, and for that matter, even if you imagine a truly colorblind society exists for the next 100 years, it seems likely that inherited wealth and privilege would still be passed down.
Having said that, AA was not a very good remedy. It laser focused on only one thing, sometimes disregarding a clear reality. In an extreme example, if you took someone like David Steward’s kids, they would benefit from affirmative action despite being born to a billionaire.
Keep in mind, colleges and universities can still provide all the advantages they want based on other signals. Good ones might be family income and first-generation college students.
Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.
Piling on more systemic racism makes things worse, not better. We should focus our efforts on addressing systemic racism in the areas where it still exists, not on compensating for it elsewhere. Provide better funding for schools in low income areas. Support economic development to pull those areas out of poverty, etc.
You’re not wrong, but the goal of AA was to create that by proxy. Give students better education to help them get better jobs and help their communities. That and forcing institutions hands so they don’t come up with other bullshit reasons why they’re only accepting white students.
If I only work out my right arm for 2 years straight and then suddenly say “oh I’m going to now start doing the same, equal work out on my left” they don’t just suddenly become the same. You’d have to put more time and focus into the left for it to become equal to the right.
However if your honestly claiming that affirmative action = “doing the same thing again to a different race”, no analogy in the world is going to help you. Your ignorance is untreatable I’m afraid.
It’s the same level of understanding the solution as spez thinking editing the karma DB values makes him look good.
If the fix didn’t start at the ground, then it wasn’t a fix
We can’t solve the hiring/acceptance discrimination by forcing it, they first need to be at a competitive disadvantage by doing it, and then we target the discrimination that exists after that.
With the way it is right now it’s encouraging the stereotypes of minorities being lesser/incompetent because it expects them to compete with people who received much better training and practice. It’s downright cruel to expect them to succeed in that situation.
But why is the goal to get each arm to be the same? To untie that analogy, we’re saying that we want the cumulative experience of each racial group to be the same. Like, taken to the extreme, that means that the ultimate fairness would be to now enslave the other group to make sure it’s even.
What? No, that’s not what we want. Right?
What we want is for each individual, regardless of their group, to have the same access to opportunity. Right?
To use your analogy again, the future we want is not to change our workouts to benefit the other arm preferentially so that we can have two arms be the same. Why? Because there’s new people coming to our workout classes all the time! If we now preferentially prefer the other arm, those new people are being unfairly treated.
Let’s say you have two infinitely large pitchers, and an infinite amount of water to pour into them.
Every day, you pour some water into the pitchers: one gallon into the left pitcher, and one ounce into the right pitcher. After doing this every day for over a hundred years, there’s quite a discrepancy in the amount of water in these pitchers.
Then, one day, you decide you’re no longer going to pour different amounts. From now on, you’ll pour one gallon into each pitcher every day. Exactly equal and perfectly fair, right?
Except, if your goal is to get the same amount of water into each pitcher, you’re never going to accomplish that this way. And then someone points out that the right pitcher is still a hundred years behind the left pitcher, and you reply with “well what do you want me to do about it? I’m pouring the same amount into both now.”
to call it a cycle is wildly disingenuous. on the one hand, black people were enslaved, separated from their familes, prevented from building wealth, murdered, and then enslaved again through targeted laws. but for black people to get preferential admission to college (and still be underrepresented), that’s comparable to doing all of the above to white people?
It’s about undoing the damage that has been done by the cruel policies of the past that led to the systematic differences we see today. Disadvantaged groups need help to be able to catch up to the rest. Affirmative action is a temporary measure to bridge the gap. Because these things change very slowly and over generational time frames it will be a long time this is needed, however.
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
AA had done more harm than good
Now, i do wish we had better solutions that actually address the issues of individuals and communities suffering from poverty and discrimination, but AA does not solve that.
I’d much rather we provide an actual solution, than one that looks like while still being racist and in many ways making the situation worse, in particular by being a target to point to when talking about real solutions as “we already addressed that”
Would love to see a source on this, especially after I left a mod comment explicitly asking for people to be cautious about jumping in with a simplistic take of ‘AA bad’.
Literature is extremely mixed on this topic because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s almost impossible to control for all factors and implementation of AA varies so greatly (explicit diversity goals vs. some kind of equity boost vs. mandatory spots, etc.).
Ok, but if a solution can be found that has the same effect without codifying a groups race into law, isn’t that better?
And a lot of my experience comes from friends who qualify for these systems telling me it feeds quite a bit of imposter syndrome and distrust, because whenever something happens they ask themselves “did i earn this, or is this because of how i look?” and i don’t find that to be a helpful condition to be dumping on people who will likely already be behind coming in, due to the issues the AA was meant so solve in the first place.
I’m really not against solving the problem’s AA was meant to solve, but the AA solution looks like a racist go ahold of the project and made it cause more of the problem it’s meant to address.
first of all, white women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group. are your female white friends experiencing that same imposter syndrome and distrust? did you even know that that was the case? did they? most POC snap back at the white people that question their credentials, not take our hurt feelings out on one of the most effective social justice policies in American history.
second of all, as an actual person of color who was one of 5 POC out of 478 people to get their masters degree in my program, i’d love to learn more about how AA caused more of the problem it’s meant to address. hard to get imposter syndrome when you’re still too disadvantaged to get actual opportunities, lmfao.
also I’m not gonna lie, you saying “blacks” makes me highly doubt you have friends of color regardless. if you do I’m surprised they haven’t told you that using that as a term is uh. I’m gonna go with “eyebrow-raising”
It was an example mean to illustrate the flippancy of the implementation, it applies to all affirmative action targets
Edit: and to answer your comment about calling blacks black, even though i certainly don’t have to answer, it’s because that’s what my black friends told me to call them, and not use african american. So back the fuck off that one maybe?
my point is more where are you hanging out that it’s routine to refer to black people as “blacks” like this, and it’s a little concerning you didn’t pick up on that point
Do you want every to be given the exact same resources at the start? Or do you want everyone to be able to reach the same outcome?
The state legislated racism - kneecapped a swathe of the population’s ability to access education and prosper. So how could the state possibly provide restitution for this without addressing the population it did this to?
Because available spots in colleges are limited in order to give to one group you have to take away from another, it’s a zero sum game. I don’t know what the right answer is but I know that treating asian kids worse because they are asian isn’t one. I also don’t belive that kids should suffer for the sins of their grandparents.
Like I said I don’t know what the right answer is but I think offering scholarships to talented, hardworking kids who can’t afford to pay for school, regardless of race is a better solution than race based preferential treatment.
You have to take a step back and look at it on a bigger scale. The state caused generational harm. Kids are in worse positions because of what the state stole from their grandparents. I can’t look up stats on my phone, but it is a thing that is measurable.
I definitely believe the poor need more resources, but it’s a different discussion from affirmative action.
If kids shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their grandparents then why should other kids suffer for the sins committed against their grandparents?
You can’t starve one man while feeding another for years, then give them both equal food for a few months and assume they’ll be even. You by necessity have to give the starving man more, and regardless of the fed man’s complaints it isn’t unfair for him to get less - he’s literally been getting more the whole time and is perfectly healthy.
nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice
Sounds like schools can still look at specific circumstances of a person’s life; just can’t make a blanket assumption that because they look a certain way they must have had things hard or easy.
If the goal is to provide restitution to people who have been impacted by government policies, evaluating whether or not they were actually affected, and to what extent, seems reasonable to me.
The issue here is exactly the issue affirmative action aims to help resolve - if you leave it so universities can if they so choose look at how someone’s experience of race has impacted on them, many of them won’t, because of structural racism and how ingrained it is. This decision is not requiring universities to consider their admission practices and what barriers might be in place - and many won’t.
It’d be great if they did, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need requirements like this because universities and other organisations would proactively consider how their processes and decisions might be creating or removing barriers for all their students. Currently, that isn’t happening.
This reply will almost certainly be lost, but I do understand where you’re coming from since it is literally true, but fails to account for context. Consider a marathon in which half the participants were given 10 pound weights on each leg. Halfway through the race, the judges ruled those participants shouldn’t have weights on. Is the race now fair, since everyone is being treated equally? Of course not - they were immensely disadvantaged from the outset, so the only way to try to approach some level of fairness is to give them advantages to make up for their initial handicap. In theory, AA is meant to be corrective action to restore equity, at which point it can be dropped because it’s no longer necessary, but a simple glance at census data demonstrates we’re nowhere near that point.
Incidentally, this is also why “race blindness” is considered a bad thing in social justice. In theory it would be ideal that you don’t treat people differently, but in practice it means ignoring their disadvantages.
Sad, but expected. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just another casualty in Conservatives’ war on equality.
I guess being treated better/worse because of the color of your skin is equality.
My parents were alive and in schools when segregation in education was ending. Decades of Jim Crow laws holding people down isn’t simply remedied by saying “We’re all equal now.” and doing nothing to redress the damage inflicted through the abuse of governmental power. Especially not when “We’re all equal now.” is largely lip service and systemic racism is still prevalent.
That’s probably true, and for that matter, even if you imagine a truly colorblind society exists for the next 100 years, it seems likely that inherited wealth and privilege would still be passed down.
Having said that, AA was not a very good remedy. It laser focused on only one thing, sometimes disregarding a clear reality. In an extreme example, if you took someone like David Steward’s kids, they would benefit from affirmative action despite being born to a billionaire.
Keep in mind, colleges and universities can still provide all the advantages they want based on other signals. Good ones might be family income and first-generation college students.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.
Piling on more systemic racism makes things worse, not better. We should focus our efforts on addressing systemic racism in the areas where it still exists, not on compensating for it elsewhere. Provide better funding for schools in low income areas. Support economic development to pull those areas out of poverty, etc.
You’re not wrong, but the goal of AA was to create that by proxy. Give students better education to help them get better jobs and help their communities. That and forcing institutions hands so they don’t come up with other bullshit reasons why they’re only accepting white students.
So why would you want to do the same thing again, just to a different race? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
If I only work out my right arm for 2 years straight and then suddenly say “oh I’m going to now start doing the same, equal work out on my left” they don’t just suddenly become the same. You’d have to put more time and focus into the left for it to become equal to the right.
However if your honestly claiming that affirmative action = “doing the same thing again to a different race”, no analogy in the world is going to help you. Your ignorance is untreatable I’m afraid.
It’s the same level of understanding the solution as spez thinking editing the karma DB values makes him look good.
If the fix didn’t start at the ground, then it wasn’t a fix
We can’t solve the hiring/acceptance discrimination by forcing it, they first need to be at a competitive disadvantage by doing it, and then we target the discrimination that exists after that.
With the way it is right now it’s encouraging the stereotypes of minorities being lesser/incompetent because it expects them to compete with people who received much better training and practice. It’s downright cruel to expect them to succeed in that situation.
Copying from my response here, which I had made earlier to a different commenter who made a similar analogy: https://programming.dev/comment/440090
Let’s say you have two infinitely large pitchers, and an infinite amount of water to pour into them.
Every day, you pour some water into the pitchers: one gallon into the left pitcher, and one ounce into the right pitcher. After doing this every day for over a hundred years, there’s quite a discrepancy in the amount of water in these pitchers.
Then, one day, you decide you’re no longer going to pour different amounts. From now on, you’ll pour one gallon into each pitcher every day. Exactly equal and perfectly fair, right?
Except, if your goal is to get the same amount of water into each pitcher, you’re never going to accomplish that this way. And then someone points out that the right pitcher is still a hundred years behind the left pitcher, and you reply with “well what do you want me to do about it? I’m pouring the same amount into both now.”
What an interesting excuse for racism
This is just going to be a fundamental disagreement here bud. What you call racism, many people call justifiable restitution.
Which then feeds the targeted groups claim of racial discrimination, continuing the cycle.
That these feel good “solutions” work for you is a large part of why the problem still exists.
to call it a cycle is wildly disingenuous. on the one hand, black people were enslaved, separated from their familes, prevented from building wealth, murdered, and then enslaved again through targeted laws. but for black people to get preferential admission to college (and still be underrepresented), that’s comparable to doing all of the above to white people?
It’s about undoing the damage that has been done by the cruel policies of the past that led to the systematic differences we see today. Disadvantaged groups need help to be able to catch up to the rest. Affirmative action is a temporary measure to bridge the gap. Because these things change very slowly and over generational time frames it will be a long time this is needed, however.
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
AA had done more harm than good
Now, i do wish we had better solutions that actually address the issues of individuals and communities suffering from poverty and discrimination, but AA does not solve that.
I’d much rather we provide an actual solution, than one that looks like while still being racist and in many ways making the situation worse, in particular by being a target to point to when talking about real solutions as “we already addressed that”
Would love to see a source on this, especially after I left a mod comment explicitly asking for people to be cautious about jumping in with a simplistic take of ‘AA bad’.
Literature is extremely mixed on this topic because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s almost impossible to control for all factors and implementation of AA varies so greatly (explicit diversity goals vs. some kind of equity boost vs. mandatory spots, etc.).
Ok, but if a solution can be found that has the same effect without codifying a groups race into law, isn’t that better?
And a lot of my experience comes from friends who qualify for these systems telling me it feeds quite a bit of imposter syndrome and distrust, because whenever something happens they ask themselves “did i earn this, or is this because of how i look?” and i don’t find that to be a helpful condition to be dumping on people who will likely already be behind coming in, due to the issues the AA was meant so solve in the first place.
I’m really not against solving the problem’s AA was meant to solve, but the AA solution looks like a racist go ahold of the project and made it cause more of the problem it’s meant to address.
first of all, white women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group. are your female white friends experiencing that same imposter syndrome and distrust? did you even know that that was the case? did they? most POC snap back at the white people that question their credentials, not take our hurt feelings out on one of the most effective social justice policies in American history.
second of all, as an actual person of color who was one of 5 POC out of 478 people to get their masters degree in my program, i’d love to learn more about how AA caused more of the problem it’s meant to address. hard to get imposter syndrome when you’re still too disadvantaged to get actual opportunities, lmfao.
also I’m not gonna lie, you saying “blacks” makes me highly doubt you have friends of color regardless. if you do I’m surprised they haven’t told you that using that as a term is uh. I’m gonna go with “eyebrow-raising”
uh …come again?
It was an example mean to illustrate the flippancy of the implementation, it applies to all affirmative action targets
Edit: and to answer your comment about calling blacks black, even though i certainly don’t have to answer, it’s because that’s what my black friends told me to call them, and not use african american. So back the fuck off that one maybe?
my point is more where are you hanging out that it’s routine to refer to black people as “blacks” like this, and it’s a little concerning you didn’t pick up on that point
Equality v equity.
Do you want every to be given the exact same resources at the start? Or do you want everyone to be able to reach the same outcome?
The state legislated racism - kneecapped a swathe of the population’s ability to access education and prosper. So how could the state possibly provide restitution for this without addressing the population it did this to?
Because available spots in colleges are limited in order to give to one group you have to take away from another, it’s a zero sum game. I don’t know what the right answer is but I know that treating asian kids worse because they are asian isn’t one. I also don’t belive that kids should suffer for the sins of their grandparents.
Like I said I don’t know what the right answer is but I think offering scholarships to talented, hardworking kids who can’t afford to pay for school, regardless of race is a better solution than race based preferential treatment.
You have to take a step back and look at it on a bigger scale. The state caused generational harm. Kids are in worse positions because of what the state stole from their grandparents. I can’t look up stats on my phone, but it is a thing that is measurable.
I definitely believe the poor need more resources, but it’s a different discussion from affirmative action.
If kids shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their grandparents then why should other kids suffer for the sins committed against their grandparents?
You can’t starve one man while feeding another for years, then give them both equal food for a few months and assume they’ll be even. You by necessity have to give the starving man more, and regardless of the fed man’s complaints it isn’t unfair for him to get less - he’s literally been getting more the whole time and is perfectly healthy.
From the majority’s opinion
Sounds like schools can still look at specific circumstances of a person’s life; just can’t make a blanket assumption that because they look a certain way they must have had things hard or easy.
If the goal is to provide restitution to people who have been impacted by government policies, evaluating whether or not they were actually affected, and to what extent, seems reasonable to me.
The issue here is exactly the issue affirmative action aims to help resolve - if you leave it so universities can if they so choose look at how someone’s experience of race has impacted on them, many of them won’t, because of structural racism and how ingrained it is. This decision is not requiring universities to consider their admission practices and what barriers might be in place - and many won’t.
It’d be great if they did, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need requirements like this because universities and other organisations would proactively consider how their processes and decisions might be creating or removing barriers for all their students. Currently, that isn’t happening.
This reply will almost certainly be lost, but I do understand where you’re coming from since it is literally true, but fails to account for context. Consider a marathon in which half the participants were given 10 pound weights on each leg. Halfway through the race, the judges ruled those participants shouldn’t have weights on. Is the race now fair, since everyone is being treated equally? Of course not - they were immensely disadvantaged from the outset, so the only way to try to approach some level of fairness is to give them advantages to make up for their initial handicap. In theory, AA is meant to be corrective action to restore equity, at which point it can be dropped because it’s no longer necessary, but a simple glance at census data demonstrates we’re nowhere near that point.
Incidentally, this is also why “race blindness” is considered a bad thing in social justice. In theory it would be ideal that you don’t treat people differently, but in practice it means ignoring their disadvantages.
The Trump presidency was a near death sentence that we’ll have to reverse.
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