this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Affirmative action is racist. Two wrongs don't make a right.
No context is needed.
Affirmation action mandates a historically and currently racist society to demonstrate commitment to end subversive racist policies.
Declaring everyone equal under the law doesn't begin to put forth the required effort to actually make the country a more equitable place.
Maybe, but with some amount of collateral damage that will never be truly avoidable, because it’s still a system explicitly based on race. Society can never fully heal under a system like that. It can make some progress, but that progress has arguably already been largely achieved and somewhat plateaued; continuing an upward trajectory now requires different tactics.
That was true at one point, but a lot has changed since that time.
If you think a few decades of asking some institutions to diversify their population based on some criteria other than test scores has run its course and we're in a position to move on to some other policy, you're going to not only need to describe that policy going forward but you'll also have to explain exactly what makes you think racism in this country is sufficiently dead enough to justify that position.
Because from where I sit, racism and bigotry are very much alive and well in this country, and I have no reason to believe that things won't revert to pre-civil rights sentiment. In a lot of places, it already has. In others, that never went away.
Like what? They stopped stacking black people like cordwood into boats and selling them like property? They stopped lynching black kids for looking at a white woman on the street? They stopped writing language into land deals that keeps black people out of the suburbs? They stopped dumping crack into black neighborhoods to keep them incarcerated? They stopped denying black people loans to build equity and wealth? They stopped unofficial policies about hiring whites over blacks? They stopped demonizing black culture? They stopped shooting black kids for being in the wrong neighborhood?
Please, do tell me that all these things are in the distant past, no longer relevant, and shouldn't be in the smallest way considered when admissions looks at thousands of perfect test scores and says "we can't fit them all in, so let's try to have a diverse group here to represent us and provide some much-needed opportunity for a historically oppressed people, in whatever small way we can."
Please, tell me that we are past affirmative action, and why.
What "progress" are you talking about, exactly? Quantify your claim, please.
If I suppressed your people's ability to create generational wealth for hundreds of years and suddenly stopped, would that be enough? Is everything better now? Or should you be compensated in some way?
Compensated at the expense of whom though?
The taxpayers? Sure, there's an argument for reparations and pumping money into forcing systemic change.
College students competing for a limited number of slots to schools? I'm less convinced of this, it's a zero-sum game where if you're admitting one person you're denying others from that slot.
IMO there's probably better ways you could incentivize colleges to aim for a diverse student body that would be more equitable. The goal should equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.
Affirmative action is an opportunity, the opportunity to go to a prestigious college.
It's not equality outcomes.
Equality of outcomes would look like UBI.
@EffectivelyHidden UBI just puts a floor on how far one can financially fall, it improves the minimum possible outcome. It does not provide equality of outcomes. Some UBI recipients will have higher incomes and more wealth than others.
Certainly a better starting place than what we have now.
•AA benefitted white women more than all other groups COMBINED—plaintiffs never complained about that
•43% of white Harvard students are legacy or athlete students, of which 75% would not be admitted otherwise—plaintiffs never complained about that
•Asians are 6% of the population & 26% of Harvard admissions—plaintiffs never complained about that
Of course not. The plaintiffs' goal was to hurt Black and Hispanic students. That's all.
How would you address the systematic under-representation of certain ethnicities in higher education?
Certainly affirmative action is a blunt instrument. What are your preferred solutions?
Correct.
But you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally.
The people who are already at an advantage will just continue to grow that advantage, while the people at a disadvantage will fall farther and farther behind.
That's why, despite being found repeatedly to be a form of racial discrimination, affirmative action was previously found to meet the standard of Strict Scrutiny on dozens of occasions. The Supreme Court backtracked on decades of rulings today.
You only don't like context because it, like so many things, is inconvenient to your ideology. Cant' have things like facts and nuance, no sir.
I, too, used to think like this. When I was 19, in college as a privileged cishet white male.