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[Affirmative Action] Perspectives and solutions
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But if you've figured out how to qualify people without bias...why do you need a hat?
Did one of your parents go to Yale? Then yes, Yale was practicing segregation against "your type". Why is that perfectly OK when the segregation is "did one of your parents fuck a Yalie" but not OK when it's "are you from a minority group that's historically been discriminated against, overtly and covertly, in college admissions"?
Yes, when people justify or ignore legacy admissions, they very much are condoning the bad old days when Jews weren't supposed to go to Yale or blacks weren't supposed to go to Duke. That's why they invented legacy admissions in the first place. Same reason that Jim Crow laws included 'grandfather' clauses where, literally, you couldn't vote unless your grandfather did. Now that Jewish, Catholic and black college students have been around for a while, they do a better job of operating as affirmative action for rich people.
As for SAT scores, the idea that those are purely measures of aptittude is silly. Mr. Mythago made good pocket money for a while as an SAT tutor for a private firm, where the point was to get your kid's score raised by hundreds of points. I assure you that Joe Sixpack and Jane Pinkcollar couldn't afford the hourly fees for this company. But the parents who could essentially bought their kids an edge over "more qualified" students who, absent the tutoring, would have had lower test scores.
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Nothing's guaranteed. 'Names in a hat' is a terrible and obviously flawed idea but it will get us where we're going faster. After the level playing field is achieved through chance - applicable at all pay grades from lowly mail room clerk to highest executive - the hat will be burned and HR can go back to hiring any way they want. If diversity fades away, well, no one can say the opportunity wasn't once there. A fair shot, no guarantees of a workplace utopia.
The idea is that no one can actually tell who is the best, especially when the difference between qualified candidates is extremely small. That's where prejudices come in. It's fantasy to imagine that just because someone has, say, 2% more experience, they're going to be a better employee. If you're qualified, that probably means you're good enough to do the job, and that's all you need.
The problem with "names of qualified people in a hat" is how do you fire people? That's where discrimination comes into play.
If you're a bigot, you'll fire all the whomevers you're biggoted against. So now we need some sort of control on that (last hired, first fired?). But if you're not a biggot then all the sudden you've lost a great tool for making your company effecient and competitive; laying-off unproductive employees.
The real/best solution is to not have people be biggots. I don't see a way that the government can force this that doesn't lead to problems.
But then fatty keeps being fired.
I do live in one of the most PC places in one of the most PC states in the country though (San Francisco), and I've been on jobs with a couple of vastly under qualified people where I'm not sure how they made the cut if not by race/sex.
One of them was an Asian woman, she was working an IT job with me and she didn't know how to unplug a computer.
Another was an older Asian male, when he was told to remove a hard drive he tried to disassemble the hard drive after removing it from the computer.
Neither of them had a language barrier, they were both fluent English speakers.
If there is that kind of an edge granted to females and minorities seeking careers in IT, it's extremely frustrating to me as a white male who grew up in poverty. I worked damn hard to get where I am, did internships during school to strengthen my skills and employability, only to have the recession shit on me midway through my education.
Discrimination is an awful thing, but I feel like false equality is almost as bad, especially if it leads to people being admitted to schools or hired to jobs based on their race instead of their merit. I also worry about a future where this is less of a problem, but the AA laws are all still in place.
IT particularly seems to be a field with little quality control.
My wife's firm was just strongly reprimanded by their contracting company due to their refusal to fire a helpdesk employee who had a 5-year history of basically being a horrible person: refusing to address issues that were clearly his responsibility, passing solvable problems to other departments, and (no shit) yelling slurs and profanity at clients over the phone.
As for my experience, the last company I worked for had a systems controller who was fired for harassing non-IT staff during off-hours and accusing them of manipulating systems software and hardware, and getting actually somewhat violent and threatening with it.
IT just seems to draw mentally unstable people.
Yeah, that.... really doesn't sound like a case of AA hiring. But I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong.
Do you know what 'confirmation bias' means?
I assure you, I've worked with some really stupid white guys. I've also worked in places where the white guy didn't get fired because he was buddy-buddy with the white guy boss, so he got away with crap that would not have been tolerated from somebody who the boss wasn't comfortable with.
I've also worked in places (and I'm sure you have too) where less-qualified people of whatever configuration got the job because they had a personal 'in' with management - like being college classmates, or belonging to the same social club, or having a relative who owed somebody a favor.
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Yeah, I've seen that too. Most notably a dude who fucked up an entire rollout by not transferring over data properly, in addition to not leaving a VIP in the dark as to what was going on with her computer; but he was able to get away with fucking anything because he was the manager's smoking buddy. Fucking hated that guy.
Still she was the only woman on the team, and she straight up didn't know anything about computers. I have no idea how she got past the same hiring process I did, where they interviewed me, vetted the hell out of my professional references, etc.
I also have a story from a friend on the same job, who was black, who did have an in with a large heathcare provider, his friend from back in the day was their IT manager. He was in the process of hiring on for a position only to have it evaporate at the last minute. He called up his friend and asked him what the hell was going on, and his friend told him that at the last minute HR had informed him that they were only allowed to hire people of Indian descent for that position.
Again, I have little concrete legal knowledge of how AA in California actually works so if someone can come in and say all this is bullshit that'd be great, because if an African American with 20 years of IT experience can get dicked over by AA, it scares the hell out of me as a white male trying to start a career. I've tried looking up those policies in the past and had little luck because the topic is so vast.
It's not like white males have anyone looking out for their rights (because to do so would be sexist/racist), and the squeaky wheel always gets the grease.
sad. face.
It depends what you think the purpose of AA is. If you think that it is a catch-all remedy to social inequality, then yes, it should catch economic status in its net. If you think, however, that it should have a more narrowly tailored purpose (which I do) then that's not necessarily so.
Bolded because, yes, indeed: you DON'T know that she got a job she was unqualified for because she was female. Maybe she got the job because she lied on her resume. Maybe her mom went to school with the hiring manager. Maybe your company discriminates against women and thought she might be a useful token: see, we try and hire females and they're just incompetent, boo hoo. But you don't look at Asshole White Guy and think 'if he were Hispanic and a flaming queen, no way would he be Jerk Boss Guy's smoking buddy'; you look at the smoking. But you see a female and figure it must be her gender.
As for your friend, if you're in IT in San Francisco, then you know 'of Indian descent' was probably code for 'we want to hire somebody with an H1B visa, because they're cheaper and they'll be terrified of quitting or making waves'.
And the idea that white males have nobody looking out for them would be fucking hilarious if you weren't so serious about it. You're in IT, right? Is your company run by the Coalition of Black Lesbians? If so, Silicon Valley changed from the last time I was looking at it. It's not sexist and racist, oh no; it's just the "2 a.m. rule." You know, would you be comfortable working with this person on a death march project at 2 a.m.? Funny thing about that test, a lot of people aren't 'comfortable' with those who are unlike them. So, gosh, it's not that we don't hire certain groups, we just haven't had the right ones apply.
(Yes, I agree with you that there is a lot of discrimination based on socioeconomic class; I'm sure I don't have to tell you that your average IT company is going to be a lot happier hiring the upper-middle-class liberal guy who went to Berkeley than Joe-Bob who grew up in Georgia, loves country-western and clawed his way up to being an excellent senior QA analyst.)
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Have you ever hired anyone? There are a lot of mutants out there that can put together a decent looking resume.
Besides that, in California at least, White people are almost even with Hispanics at this point (per the 2009 census); and it's been my experience that minorities are more racist towards white people in situations where they're the majority because they haven't had it hammered into their head from an early age that they should be guilty for the injustices they inflicted on other races.
What happens when white people become the minority in California? It's going to happen eventually, probably within the next 50 years. Will affirmative action step in to protect them too?
Numbers don't equal power. If they did, the poor people wouldn't be the ones that needed help.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
There are a tons of things that we take for granted on a daily basis that simply aren't the reality for others. Simple stuff. Like walking down the street without being judged based on your skin color.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I find it ridiculous that the local recycling program doesn't have a provision for the endangered bald eagle, even though both things are forms of environmental problems.
Sure they do.
Given that blacks are massively disproportionately poor, they would benefit disproportionately from affirmative action that just dealt with, say, poverty or level of parents education.
As far as I can tell, the long term purpose of AA is to level the playing field for the next generation - and I don't see how picking a factor that is closer to the reasons that black children disproportionately tend to struggle would be a bad thing. It drops the whole issue of race while simultaneously, in practice, helping the black population much more than the white.
Yeah, I have actually, because my car was a piece of shit and didn't belong. I've also been pulled over in a bad neighborhood because the car was full of white kids and obviously the only reason they'd go to that neighborhood was to score drugs, no way they have friends there. I've also been the minority in a school predominantly filled with Hispanic and Black kids and oh man was that some kind of hell.
So obviously I am some Stormfront posting White Supremacist because I see more social inequality than racial inequality in CA. Jesus.
Ultimately I'm hoping we can all be done with affirmative action in like 20 years and then maybe focus on the root causes of class disparity.
Shit's changed a lot for the better in the past 40+ years.
Nobody is going to sit here and say that poor white people have it easy. But they do live in a society built for rich white people by rich white people, and there's a sort of "advantage bleed" that does go on.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Except that the majority of poor people are white.
Also, "poor" usually only takes income into account. A black person and a white person might make the same income at McDonalds, but the white person is more likely to benefit because his dad was able to take advantage of the GI Bill and so he grew up in a better house with better educated parents. White people have more accumulated wealth at the same income levels.
You're also ignoring the fact that poor black people still have it worse off than poor white people, and you're doing nothing to address that fact.
You act as though black people are poor by sheer coincidence, rather than being poor by design of society. Essentially, black people were economically punished for being black. Just like they were punished politically for being black. Being poor is a symptom, not the main disease.
See, and I would be 100% fine with that. What I'm worried about is you'll see a trend where white people become the minority, continue to get shouted down as racists any time they say anything about how maybe they're getting the short side of racial equality, and AA laws stick around forever because they're definitely not hurting anybody right?
Shit, the first couple parts of that scenario hare happening here in what I am assuming is probably a predominantly white, echo chamber of progressive thinking.
It really sucks that this is such a taboo topic that your only allies if you want to pursue it are an extremely small section of Caucasians that won't say anything publicly for fear of being racist, and white supremacists.
Also I'm always kind of amazed that white trash is an acceptable term, like it's their fault their ancestors were literally one notch above slaves back in the day (lol indentured servants) and their family lines have suffered systemic poverty as long as the US has been a nation. How much of a shit storm would there be if you referred to poor black people as "black trash."
Then you obviously pick a more appropriate metric. The fact that something can be done badly is not an argument against it.
Think of it this way.
The reason a poor black child will have disadvantages will be manifold, but:
a) they have nothing to do with their race affecting their mental faculties
b) the biggest factors now are not racism per se, but the results of previous racism (when it comes to school performance)
For example, level of parent's education, which I mentioned earlier and you reiterated, numbers of books in the house, what have you.
Now, one can obviously pick a spurious metric which ignores the things that poor white people have as advantages; but why would you? You are trying to produce a system that accounts for as much as possible (this is desirable both for universities and in a general sense)! And, assuming you have, it will already implicitly account for those past injustices.
I don't consider "white trash" to be an acceptable term. I grew up in an area that was basically completely composed of people who would fit that label, and I find its use to be simpliticly idiotic at best and offensive at worst.
Those kinds of obviously negative terms aren't the least bit helpful at all.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I also went to a private school for a while, and dated a girl in the North Bay even more recently. Honestly rich people have even more disdain for poor people than minorities do for white people.
But I do get what you're saying, and I realize it is still a huge problem in some areas. At the same time, it's been my experience that discrimination against minorities is on it's way out, at least in California.
I'm not arguing for affirmative action for the poor here. I don't like affirmative action. I don't think it does much to address the root causes of inequality and I would rather see redistribution of wealth through taxing the uber wealthy combined with increased public aid for those that struggle, and more scholarship programs for the underprivileged so they can better themselves if they choose to.
I want a world where people are judged by the merit of their abilities and ideas, rather than the color of their skin.
Just sayin'
But at the same time, nobody batted an eye at my previous use of the term until I pointed it out; and if you deny that it's a widely acceptable term, even when used by people that are not white, you must be living under a rock.
I only moved here recently, I'm from "Arkansas" California.
Just sayin'.
My point stands, California is incredibly progressive, and part of being progressive means that eventually (a decade later, two decades later) the rest of the country slowly follows suit.
I don't want to see a precedent set where the downtrodden minorities have plenty of options available to them to break from their economic class, where the downtrodden white people have no options.
The unfortunate thing is that there are tons of environmental and societal factors that restrict virtually everyone's ability to elevate themselves through their abilities and ideas that just aren't going away.
The goal with AA was to push one generation over that hump so that the next could springboard off and be more well integrated into the economy and society. I wouldn't argue against a similar need for everybody who grows up poor and has trouble getting access to college or trade school, either. But AA started specifically because we had an underclass of people who could be identified by their skin color who were 2 or 3 generations out from having been enslaved by the dominant power holders in this country, and they obviously needed a leg up.
But education reform and improving access to education is something that we absolutely need to work on in this country, regardless of the student's skin color.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Doesn't change the fact that it's a harmful stereotype.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.