this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
109 points (96.6% liked)

World News

39096 readers
2415 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Exactly, can't solve discrimination with more discrimination.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.

This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a good example

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think it’s important to look at the broader scope of affirmative action policies on a case by case basis. One the one hand sometimes it’s just random chance. In theory any given workplace should represent the local demographics, but if you get too granular(workplace, department, specific job title, etc.) then it can become impossible to represent everybody, or just one or two employees can skew the whole demographic.

Where they are a good idea is when you have a group that’s been marginalized over generations that often leads to standards with inherent bias. We could say that college admissions based solely on grades are fair, but that assumes that the process of achieving those grades was fair. In reality, you get situations where people of generational wealth have better access to educational resources, and people from communities that aren’t marginalized find it easier to get higher paying jobs which lets them live in higher income areas with more well funded schools.

That said, there are some inherent biases that are more difficult to overcome. Women are generally less physically capable than men, native English speakers will always have an advantage in some fields over people who have English as a second language. There’s a fine line between unreasonably lowering standards to support minority groups, and taking steps to overcome unfair biases present in those standards.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to "solve discrimination", it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they're in without additional opportunity.

Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people's livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they're directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that's discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination.

Agreed, seems like the intentions were good but the desired effects were not realised.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You can't correct discrimination with discrimination since that just maintains the whole foundation of categorising people and seeing them as inherently different from others, purelly because they were worn born with differences in a handful of genes with highly visible expression and which are totally irrelevant for who they are as persons.

In this I always go back to what I learned when it came to the treatment of homosexuals in The Netherlands: when people treat something as normal there is no descrimination - when homosexuality is "just another sexuality", homophobia is as senseless as discriminating against people for having blue eyes or thicker eyebrows.