Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
I wouldn't bother. He clearly isn't interested in engaging the topic on the same level as the rest of the thread (if, indeed, he's even read it, which I doubt he has). He's set up a strawman - since nobody's even talking about the fantastical situation he's describing - and I wouldn't dignify it with a response.
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
Mmm, black culture's gratification of violence, material goods, disrespect/disregard to authority and conformity to such (not "acting white") combined with the "good intentions" of white liberals and outright apathy and malice of white conservatives?
Edit: Not to mention the culture of victimization pushed by black "leadership" (Al Sharpton et al) so that said leadership stays relevant?
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
Mmm, black culture's gratification of violence, material goods, disrespect/disregard to authority and conformity to such (not "acting white") combined with the "good intentions" of white liberals and outright apathy and malice of white conservatives?
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
You sir, are one honest guy.
8-)
Honestly stupid, amirite?
Anyway, I could give a shit if you feel guilty or not. Your moral and logical failures and general bitch-moaning about not having 100% of the pie aside, so long as mechanisms to even the playing field remain in place, you're welcome to indulge in your fantasies of being downtrodden.
So, um, do we have many actual examples of Affirmative Action to even discuss here?
We've got the blind resume submission thing, and I've mentioned the aggressive recruiting of women into engineering. Modern Man says that blacks and hispanics get top pick of firms coming out of top-tier law school (which, if true - and I'm not about to call MM a liar - still means that they are graduates of top-tier law schools, which is no small feat no matter your melanin count).
We have Slider who thinks he's got it just as hard as anyone else because he's unemployed, but has yet to respond to my citations showing otherwise.
Then we have tinwhiskers and legionofone who seem to think that illiterate troglodytes are getting college degrees on white folks' dime just because they're black, but I have yet to see any citations or reports about this, nor do I know any member of my entirely black extended family who has seen this happen. (Maybe they're too literate to have heard about the freebies.)
Can we get some documentation up in here? Or are citations full of white guilt?
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
Mmm, black culture's gratification of violence, material goods, disrespect/disregard to authority and conformity to such (not "acting white") combined with the "good intentions" of white liberals and outright apathy and malice of white conservatives?
The wrongness in this is impressive.
You forgot to mention racism.
That's right, I'm calling him racist because he disagrees with me, not because he's saying obviously racist bullshit.
Sorry guys not going to feel guilty about the past based on some bullshit abstract theory of guilt that its my fault Shwandaria Brown had 4 kids by the time she's 17 and dropped out of high school.
Edit: Ooo, ironic posting. This place becomes more and more like Something Awful's D&D board everyday.
Do you at least understand that there are external factors at work that helped cause that to happen to her and not you or one of your female family members?
Mmm, black culture's gratification of violence, material goods, disrespect/disregard to authority and conformity to such (not "acting white") combined with the "good intentions" of white liberals and outright apathy and malice of white conservatives?
The wrongness in this is impressive.
Incoming post about the Noble Black Urban Youth and why its my fault he raped that girl in 5 4 3 2...
Look let's just admit neither of us is going to see the other's side nd I'll let you guys get back to your breast beating about what a shame it is you're white.
Here's a suggestion though. Instead of wasting that oxygen moaning about something you can't change, why don't you use that privilege to do something good for the world and live up to your potential to effect positive change?
Its funny because you're like the first person in every thread wailing for citations and independent studies while refusing to provide any of your own and demanding we prove your negative.
If you would read a thing I said instead of strawmanning (and then whining about people strawmanning), you'd realise that I didn't say a thing you claimed. The fact of the matter is the problem isn't that other people than whites are getting the scholarships, its that by and large there's no drive in the black community to even try for those scholarships.
Before discussing “male privilege” it is first important to define what privilege means in an anti-oppression setting. Privilege, at its core, is the advantages that people benefit from based solely on their social status. It is a status that is conferred by society to certain groups, not seized by individuals, which is why it can be difficult sometimes to see one’s own privilege.
In a nutshell: Privilege is: About how society accommodates you. It’s about advantages you have that you think are normal. It’s about you being normal, and others being the deviation from normal. It’s about fate dealing from the bottom of the deck on your behalf.
[Betty, A primer on privilege.]
Since social status is conferred in many different ways — everything from race to geography to class — all people are both privileged and non-privileged in certain aspects of their life. Furthermore, since dynamics of social status are highly dependent on situation, a person can benefit from privilege in one situation while not benefiting from it in another. It is also possible to have a situation in which a person simultaneously is the beneficiary of privilege while also being the recipient of discrimination in an area which they do not benefit from privilege.
Male privilege is a set of privileges that are given to men as a class due to their institutional power in relation to women as a class. While every man experiences privilege differently due to his own individual position in the social hierarchy, every man, by virtue of being read as male by society, benefits from male privilege.
This applies equally well to race or religion or anything. The bolded part is especially important to remember. Priveledge is not something an individual does or takes, it is something that happens to an individual.
As for the anti-AA types, I mentioned this in the thread this topic almost derailed:
One of the big things alot of people don't like about AA (in any of it's forms) is it is based on the complete falseness of a core implicit parts of many peoples word views:
The idea that where you are is solely due to YOU and what YOU have done.
Affirmative Action is the explicit acknowledgment that the society around you and the place where you started out in the society has a huge effect on you and your ability to succeed.
That life is not a fair level playing field. That people aren't born into equal circumstances. That not everyone gets the same shot. It's the acknowledgment that your life is not all under your control and that you can succeed or fail based on factors outside of your control.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
A) Have you actually read the other posts in this thread discussing various forms of Affirmative Action? Does the scenario you describe actually exist outside of the nightmares of white men? Citation, please.
A) Yes, but theres really not much to discuss on randomizing applicant names. It removes a vector of discrimination, A+ implement it.
Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003)[1], was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions policy. In a 6–3 decision announced on June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court ruled the university's point system (which automatically awarded points to underrepresented ethnic groups) was too mechanistic in its use of race as a factor in admissions, and was therefore unconstitutional.
Basically you got X points for an SAT score Y Points for your GPA and Z points for you skin color/gender, and were admitted on the number of point you had in the end. Granted it was ruled unconstitutional, but really all that did was force schools into a more abstract way to implement it, I think mine called it "holistic evaluations"
More generally:
Admission etc are a zero sum game, if you give the slot to A, you can't give it to B too. Therefore, any case where AA caused someone to get a slot they wouldn't have gotten without AA, causes exactly 1 person to not get a slot they would have gotten were AA not in existence. I'm sure the number of people who believe they were affected by AA is> than the number who actually were, but creating a discriminatory program is nothing if not a good way to cause resentment.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
A) Have you actually read the other posts in this thread discussing various forms of Affirmative Action? Does the scenario you describe actually exist outside of the nightmares of white men? Citation, please.
A) Yes, but theres really not much to discuss on randomizing applicant names. It removes a vector of discrimination, A+ implement it.
Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003)[1], was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions policy. In a 6–3 decision announced on June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court ruled the university's point system (which automatically awarded points to underrepresented ethnic groups) was too mechanistic in its use of race as a factor in admissions, and was therefore unconstitutional.
Basically you got X points for an SAT score Y Points for your GPA and Z points for you skin color/gender, and were admitted on the number of point you had in the end. Granted it was ruled unconstitutional, but really all that did was force schools into a more abstract way to implement it, I think mine called it "holistic evaluations"
More generally:
Admission etc are a zero sum game, if you give the slot to A, you can't give it to B too. Therefore, any case where AA caused someone to get a slot they wouldn't have gotten without AA, causes exactly 1 person to not get a slot they would have gotten were AA not in existence. I'm sure the number of people who believe they were affected by AA is> than the number who actually were, but creating a discriminatory program is nothing if not a good way to cause resentment.
Of course, I got points because my father and grandfather went to Michigan and I went to one of the best high schools in the state where there were exactly two black kids in my graduating class.
Legacy AA is far greater bullshit than race based.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
A) Have you actually read the other posts in this thread discussing various forms of Affirmative Action? Does the scenario you describe actually exist outside of the nightmares of white men? Citation, please.
A) Yes, but theres really not much to discuss on randomizing applicant names. It removes a vector of discrimination, A+ implement it.
Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003)[1], was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions policy. In a 6–3 decision announced on June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court ruled the university's point system (which automatically awarded points to underrepresented ethnic groups) was too mechanistic in its use of race as a factor in admissions, and was therefore unconstitutional.
Basically you got X points for an SAT score Y Points for your GPA and Z points for you skin color/gender, and were admitted on the number of point you had in the end. Granted it was ruled unconstitutional, but really all that did was force schools into a more abstract way to implement it, I think mine called it "holistic evaluations"
More generally:
Admission etc are a zero sum game, if you give the slot to A, you can't give it to B too. Therefore, any case where AA caused someone to get a slot they wouldn't have gotten without AA, causes exactly 1 person to not get a slot they would have gotten were AA not in existence. I'm sure the number of people who believe they were affected by AA is> than the number who actually were, but creating a discriminatory program is nothing if not a good way to cause resentment.
A) THANK YOU JESUS for providing a citation.
2) So it was ruled unconstitutional in 2003, then? And only existed in Michigan? Excellent, let the wheels of justice turn.
Look let's just admit neither of us is going to see the other's side nd I'll let you guys get back to your breast beating about what a shame it is you're white.
Here's a suggestion though. Instead of wasting that oxygen moaning about something you can't change, why don't you use that privilege to do something good for the world and live up to your potential to effect positive change?
Its funny because you're like the first person in every thread wailing for citations and independent studies while refusing to provide any of your own and demanding we prove your negative.
If you would read a thing I said instead of strawmanning (and then whining about people strawmanning), you'd realise that I didn't say a thing you claimed. The fact of the matter is the problem isn't that other people than whites are getting the scholarships, its that by and large there's no drive in the black community to even try for those scholarships.
Listen you worthless goose.
I'm 27. I've already spent 5 years of my life actively working to make the world better. I've worked on textbook pricing, internet access, poverty, human trafficking, college admission standards, hunger, homelessness, etc. I've been working 60 hours a week since I graduated from college to fix the things that people like you keep making worse, so spare me the lecture on how I spend my time.
Seems to me the main impediments to affirmative action are:
1. Nobody really agrees on what it is. To people at large, affirmative action means quotas, because that was the main system for a while, and the term 'affirmative action' is vague enough to not really mean anything else. Even in this thread, nobody's really defined it completely yet. There's lots of suggestions on what it could be, should be, but no consensus.
2. I think at least partly because of this, and partly for other reasons, this issue really draws out the asshole in everyone, on both sides. Blacks feel like they're owed for such shitty conditions, whites feel like they're being punished for something beyond their control, and since both have different ideas about what's going on, they can't even agree on what the argument is.
Honestly, at this point I feel like the term should be dropped and we should use 'Equal Opportunity', which is much more descriptive, doesn't have all the baggage that affirmative action does, and is much more indicative of the actual goals.
@ shryke - By who's definition? What are your metrics for this decision?
If you create a culture where its easy to embrace being the victim with all the benefits of such, then you're pretty much looking at a never ending loop of victimization because 100 years down the line someone will say that the 2000's were "such a racial time in America" and here we are again.
Its hard dude, ain't going to lie. You have to create more opportunities other than sports and music in the black community, but to have those opportunities you have to have the society to support it, and to have the society you have to have the right values. Its what Bill Cosby has been going off about, and getting shouted down by those with an entrenched interest in keeping black people where they are, who are often black people who made it to the top of the pile.
Start with single parent households and offer some sort of incentive to keep the family together, or to have birth control until someone is married or in a committed relationship. Its the smallest unit of society, and its fucked to shit. How are you going to build a stable culture if your foundation is broken? Its a bit extreme, but the malice & handwringing polices of con/lib admins aren't doing us anything than kicking the can down the road.
Zed: "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Most of the rapes occur in native communities, so OH WOW WHAT DID I DO THERE. I think I just torpedoed your entire theory.
"The state has been doing a pretty good job of addressing sexual assault and domestic violence issues in the more urban areas, but we haven’t had the resources—and I don’t expect we’re ever going to have the resources—to properly address the problems in what we call ‘Bush Alaska.'"
Bush Alaska refers to the rural areas that are mainly inhabited by native Alaskan populations. Not only are these remote communities difficult to travel to, they also experience harsh weather conditions that make them unsafe to leave. Within the villages, resources for domestic violence victims are practically nonexistent.
I'm going to say pretty solidly that a woman is safer walking alone in downtown Anchorage than downtown Detroit, champ.
Its funny because you're like the first person in every thread wailing for citations and independent studies while refusing to provide any of your own and demanding we prove your negative.
If you would read a thing I said instead of strawmanning (and then whining about people strawmanning), you'd realise that I didn't say a thing you claimed. The fact of the matter is the problem isn't that other people than whites are getting the scholarships, its that by and large there's no drive in the black community to even try for those scholarships.
I didn't strawman; I paraphrased you. You haven't even presented one single aspect of AA currently being discussed in this thread, and if YOU had actually read the thread instead of leaping in all "white guilt arglebargle" you would know that. You don't even have the integrity to try to discuss "what" black culture or even address that AA for blacks is not the only thing being discussed in the thread.
Why, legionofone, if on Page 1 of this thread, we were discussing teaching CS courses in a functional language, or recruiting of females into engineering, would white guilt be the prevalent content?
I keep erroring out when I try to re-post the citations I provided 2 pages back, which you would have - get this - seen if you had read the thread. So read it.
Its hard dude, ain't going to lie. You have to create more opportunities other than sports and music in the black community, but to have those opportunities you have to have the society to support it, and to have the society you have to have the right values. Its what Bill Cosby has been going off about, and getting shouted down by those with an entrenched interest in keeping black people where they are, who are often black people who made it to the top of the pile.
Start with single parent households and offer some sort of incentive to keep the family together, or to have birth control until someone is married or in a committed relationship. Its the smallest unit of society, and its fucked to shit. How are you going to build a stable culture if your foundation is broken? Its a bit extreme, but the malice & handwringing polices of con/lib admins aren't doing us anything than kicking the can down the road.
This is hardly a satisfactory answer to "how do you fix these programs". All it is some opining about the loss of the nuclear family.
Ok, so I'm gonna try to get started on some actual productive postin'. Let's start from the beginning.
Since we have the scientific studies linked to on the last couple pages showing that discrimination (at least for job interviews) is still alive and well, let's try to figure out what the goal is, and a method of achieving it.
1. Is the goal to stamp out discrimination and bias? This has more to do with changing people's perceptions rather than an actual quantifiable goal, and would require a very different tack. The best way to achieve this is to just keep publicizing the studies that show bias still exists. I'm betting one of the reasons most people think discrimination is going away is because they themselves don't, or at least try not to, discriminate. We just need to keep it in the press that it's not gone away just yet.
Also part of this, and the harder part, is more open discussion on the causes of the types of disparities that legionofone is referring to. If people can point to statistics that show more blacks and hispanics in prison than whites, it gives them a tangible reason, however misguided, to discriminate. But this is still just education, and not a quantifiable goal.
2. Is the goal to create a legal and societal framework where all races/genders/whatevers have equal opportunity, protection, etc.? Because I think you could make a good argument that this is pretty close to what we have now. It's illegal to blatantly discriminate, as well as looked down upon in open society (what people do behind closed doors notwithstanding). Things like forcing companies to blank out names is only going to work for large companies, and things like forcing random job selection isn't going to fly, I don't think. What else could be done that doesn't involve changing people's hearts and minds, or specifically empowering certain groups?
3. Is the goal to temporarily aid certain disadvantaged groups until they are no longer disadvantaged? This is the stereotypical idea of AA, and has its plusses and minuses, many of which have been discussed. Choosing which groups are disadvantaged is troublesome. We know that rich white males are privileged, but this is a pretty small group, take away any one of those and it gets much more hazy. What's an objective criteria for deciding which groups are the most disadvantaged, and most in need of help? What's an objective criteria for deciding when they are no longer disadvantaged, and no longer need assistance? We need objective criteria if we're planning on making any kind of policy to actually accomplish anything, and I think that setting an end criteria is a necessity for getting anything of this kind passed. Think the endangered species list.
Personally, I think the biggest issue is just the income disparity. It's gotten harder for the poor of any race or whatever to pull themselves out, and the wealth is getting more and more concentrated.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
1) Electing a black president will engender lots of resentment from middle class white people, who will cry "reverse discrimination" and "affirmation action president" even when there is none. Therefore, we should make a rule that we should not elect black presidents, in order to prevent white people from getting upset.
2) Affirmative action applies only in the case of a tie. i.e., the black kid only gets in if the school was willing to consider a white person of the same qualifications. In other words, the white kid who loses his spot to the black kid is no more "qualified" than the black kid who got in.
Here's the inherent bias in this argument. Any black kid who gets into college not only has to be qualified, but they also need to be more qualified than any white kid who got rejected. White kids who get in are not held to this same standard. No one ever compares George Bush to the people who applied to Yale and failed to get in.
Personally, I think the biggest issue is just the income disparity. It's gotten harder for the poor of any race or whatever to pull themselves out, and the wealth is getting more and more concentrated.
If the concern is creating opportunity for poor kids in general, rather than seeing AA mostly being a boon to middle class black kids, then university systems should adopt the Texas approach. After the last Supreme Court decision on using race for admissions purposes, Texas adopted a system where if you score in the top 10% in your high school class, you are automatically admitted to the U of T school of your choice.
I personally don't have a problem with this because it treats every high school kid in Texas the same while opening doors to kids from poorer areas.
On a side note, I go off for like 5 minutes to make stroganoff and the thread falls apart (shakes head disappointedly)
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
1) Electing a black president will engender lots of resentment from middle class white people, who will cry "reverse discrimination" and "affirmation action president" even when there is none. Therefore, we should make a rule that we should not elect black presidents, in order to prevent white people from getting upset.
2) Affirmative action applies only in the case of a tie. i.e., the black kid only gets in if the school was willing to consider a white person of the same qualifications. In other words, the white kid who loses his spot to the black kid is no more "qualified" than the black kid who got in.
Here's the inherent bias in this argument. Any black kid who gets into college not only has to be qualified, but they also need to be more qualified than any white kid who got rejected. White kids who get in are not held to this same standard. No one ever compares George Bush to the people who applied to Yale and failed to get in.
1) really when you look at the breakdown 'middle class white people' elected Obama, just like they elect most national politicians, cause there are a lot of them. So policies that alienate them from your side on an issue are generally bad things, especially if the policies don't fix the problems(poverty & crime) you are trying to address.
2) Bull shit, in the Michigan case it was clearly not a 'tie breaker'. The college I attended hid the entire process behind 'holistic' and 'well-rounded' evaluation, along with a bunch of other statements that don't actually tell you whats going on.
True. Veterans, adult students, students with disabilities, children of alumni, some athletes, some minority students, some exceptional musicians, and students who are the first in their families to go to college all get some special consideration.
If an applicant in one of these groups is clearly admissible, or clearly not admissible, nothing unusual happens; a counselor simply makes a decision and follows the normal process. But in borderline cases, counselors are instructed to give students in these groups some extra consideration when they feel a decision could go either way. “It’s one more penny on the scale,” says associate admissions director Reason. “It’s not a pound on the scale. It’s nowhere near as important as academics. But it’s a penny in their favor.”
Is as clearly as they'll state it, so they consider it, but only a little, but not in any quantifiable way-so you can't sue them. And remember they are reviewing thousands of transcripts so its not a head to head, there is no tie. They are basically drawing the minority line lower, which pushes the non-minority line up.
2b) All admitted students should be more qualified than rejected studets, thats the whole idea behind a merit based admittance. Beyond that legacy isn't a protected class, race is? So while I can't stop a $chool from admitting its legacy piggy bank, racial discrimination is illegal. AA falls under the whole 2 wrongs don't make a right column, legacy just brings the count to 3.
2) Bull shit, in the Michigan case it was clearly not a 'tie breaker'. The college I attended hid the entire process behind 'holistic' and 'well-rounded' evaluation, along with a bunch of other statements that don't actually tell you whats going on.
The Michigan case was a godsend for anti-AA groups because the disparity in the treatment of non-Asian minority applicants on the one hand and white and Asian applicants on the other was so glaring.
U of M had no leg to stand on if they wanted to argue that AA was just one factor in determining who got accepted- in a significant number of cases, it was the only reason certain black and hispanic applicants were admitted.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
Specifically, as I recall, being black was just as valuable as being a scholarship athlete.
I'm generally pro-AA (though I was less so at the time, being a very, very white senior in high school applying to Michigan) but they went a tad overboard.
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
What solutions are fair to "even this out." Why do we say wealth from parents is an unfair advantage, but good genes isnt?
For the most part. Good genes only matter if you're rich. The poorer you are the less your actual intelligence correlates with your parents intelligence. The richer you are, the more.
Edit: What this means is basically that rich people get the majority of their brains from their parents. They have the nurture more or less taken care of. Poor people, its the other way around, they do not have the nurture taken care of and so the people who do get smart get so because they have hard working parents to ensure their kids are raised properly.
I'm not quite sure where I fall in the AA debate. I used to absolutely hate it. I still don't much like it, but I'm torn on whether it's justified in the sense of "we are hiring you because you are a minority".
I get the argument in favor of using to right the large-scale issue of the effects of institutionalized racism. It's not about the white guy and the black guy wrestling for a single position; it's about the data blip that one black guy represents. The White Guy, not as a person but as an archetype, had better opportunities for education. He was in a better school district. He had a wealthier family that allowed him chances to be in clubs and engage in all manner of extracurricular activities. He was purchased a tutor which bought him an extra 200 points on his SAT. He had more time to do his homework and study for exams, getting him an extra 0.5 points in his GPA. This helped him get into a better college, which allowed him to get a better job right out of college.
The Black Guy, though - again, as an archetype - had a poor family. He went to a lousier school. He had to work to help his family get by, and had less time for extracurricular activities. He didn't have the opportunity to buy a couple hundred SAT points and only had an A- GPA instead of an A. He didn't get into the excellent college, and his first job wasn't as awesome as a result.
Maybe all of these circumstances, on aggregate, result in 10% fewer black folks being the Best Qualified Fellow for any given job opportunity. So maybe, then, it's not that unwarranted to hire 10% more black folks to tweak the karmic balance just a bit.
Of course, the end-game in all of this is a fair and just society where the effects of historical (and current) racism are statistically negligible. And if the current system isn't designed with that end-game in mind, then the current system is broken and needs an overhaul. But if it is designed with that in mind, then we must acknowledge that, at some point in the future, we're going to need to scrap the system entirely and let folks sort out there own problems. Because racial tensions are significant, and one incontrovertible fact is that AA programs contribute to that. A white guy who is measurably better qualified than the black guy who gets the job has every right to be pissed off. The system may be "fair" in some large-scale sense, but it is grossly unfair to the guy who didn't get the job. And that will cause resentment. And that resentment will, at some point, take us to a point where it's impossible for the wounds of racism to heal themselves any further.
At some point, even if we admit AA is the greatest thing ever, we need to just rip off the band-aid and let things work themselves out. When is that point? Is it now? In some places, AA probably doesn't do a whole lot of net good. And in some places, it's probably incredibly helpful. There's a healthy conversation about where that point is, and how to get there the fastest, and how to deal with regional variations in social justice, and yadda yadda.
And the upshot of all this is... I don't know. As I said - not quite sure where I fall. But I can sympathize with folks on either side. Not all of the folks, of course - some of them are opportunistic assholes or racist fuckwads. But a good number.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
I feel this deserves a more direct response.
I can think of essentially two reasons why someone would drop out of school, at any level. The first is that for whatever reason, they are incapable of completing the requirements of their education, either due to lack of ability or circumstances in the rest of their life. Affirmative Action does nothing to deal with this, true.
The second reason why someone would drop out of school is that they do not feel that getting a degree would benefit them. In the case of minorities, they often expect that they will be discriminated against, and will be locked out of the jobs that they actually want, leaving all the effort that they would have to put into their education wasted. THAT's what Affirmative Action is partially meant to deal with, to make sure that minorities actually have the opportunity to take advantage of their skills and experience.
AA is a clumsy band-aid 'fix'. GJ you helped a black kid get into a college they are under qualified for versus a less prestigious one or going to community college.
While 1/2 his peers failed to graduate high school
Problem Solved!
edit:
While at the same time hurting lower-class whites, and engendering resentment among middle class whites(and their friends/acquaintances/family) who were more qualified for said school and perceive to have lost their spot based on AA.
I feel this deserves a more direct response.
I can think of essentially two reasons why someone would drop out of school, at any level. The first is that for whatever reason, they are incapable of completing the requirements of their education, either due to lack of ability or circumstances in the rest of their life. Affirmative Action does nothing to deal with this, true.
The second reason why someone would drop out of school is that they do not feel that getting a degree would benefit them. In the case of minorities, they often expect that they will be discriminated against, and will be locked out of the jobs that they actually want, leaving all the effort that they would have to put into their education wasted. THAT's what Affirmative Action is partially meant to deal with, to make sure that minorities actually have the opportunity to take advantage of their skills and experience.
With respect to trying to remedy reason 2, it seems likely that you'd run into situations where applicants would be hired purely because of their race. And if I were a minority, I would be pretty offended if I was only hired because of my race. It's like saying, "Yeah, we had more qualified applicants, but because you were the only brown one among more qualified whites, we're legally compelled to hire you."
That, at face, appears racist to me, and, even though it's a silly straw-man and that kind of situation would almost never happen, there are enough shades of grey involved in the whole process of ameliorating race-representation-disparity in workforces to make it seem like a whole two wrongs don't make a right problem again.
I assume you could go the "the more qualified applicants have an easier time finding a job, so it's okay if they don't get this one" route, but I would still feel like a worthless human being for being hired largely because of my race. Actually, I think I'd be offended if my race had anything to do with the hiring process.
I think efforts to get minorities more qualified for jobs in the first place are the best sort of affirmative action possible, like pumping money into crappy school districts.
Posts
You sir, are one classy guy.
8-)
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I wouldn't bother. He clearly isn't interested in engaging the topic on the same level as the rest of the thread (if, indeed, he's even read it, which I doubt he has). He's set up a strawman - since nobody's even talking about the fantastical situation he's describing - and I wouldn't dignify it with a response.
Mmm, black culture's gratification of violence, material goods, disrespect/disregard to authority and conformity to such (not "acting white") combined with the "good intentions" of white liberals and outright apathy and malice of white conservatives?
Edit: Not to mention the culture of victimization pushed by black "leadership" (Al Sharpton et al) so that said leadership stays relevant?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Honestly stupid, amirite?
Anyway, I could give a shit if you feel guilty or not. Your moral and logical failures and general bitch-moaning about not having 100% of the pie aside, so long as mechanisms to even the playing field remain in place, you're welcome to indulge in your fantasies of being downtrodden.
We've got the blind resume submission thing, and I've mentioned the aggressive recruiting of women into engineering. Modern Man says that blacks and hispanics get top pick of firms coming out of top-tier law school (which, if true - and I'm not about to call MM a liar - still means that they are graduates of top-tier law schools, which is no small feat no matter your melanin count).
We have Slider who thinks he's got it just as hard as anyone else because he's unemployed, but has yet to respond to my citations showing otherwise.
Then we have tinwhiskers and legionofone who seem to think that illiterate troglodytes are getting college degrees on white folks' dime just because they're black, but I have yet to see any citations or reports about this, nor do I know any member of my entirely black extended family who has seen this happen. (Maybe they're too literate to have heard about the freebies.)
Can we get some documentation up in here? Or are citations full of white guilt?
You forgot to mention racism.
That's right, I'm calling him racist because he disagrees with me, not because he's saying obviously racist bullshit.
Incoming post about the Noble Black Urban Youth and why its my fault he raped that girl in 5 4 3 2...
Look let's just admit neither of us is going to see the other's side nd I'll let you guys get back to your breast beating about what a shame it is you're white.
Here's a suggestion though. Instead of wasting that oxygen moaning about something you can't change, why don't you use that privilege to do something good for the world and live up to your potential to effect positive change?
Its funny because you're like the first person in every thread wailing for citations and independent studies while refusing to provide any of your own and demanding we prove your negative.
If you would read a thing I said instead of strawmanning (and then whining about people strawmanning), you'd realise that I didn't say a thing you claimed. The fact of the matter is the problem isn't that other people than whites are getting the scholarships, its that by and large there's no drive in the black community to even try for those scholarships.
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/
This applies equally well to race or religion or anything. The bolded part is especially important to remember. Priveledge is not something an individual does or takes, it is something that happens to an individual.
One of the big things alot of people don't like about AA (in any of it's forms) is it is based on the complete falseness of a core implicit parts of many peoples word views:
The idea that where you are is solely due to YOU and what YOU have done.
Affirmative Action is the explicit acknowledgment that the society around you and the place where you started out in the society has a huge effect on you and your ability to succeed.
That life is not a fair level playing field. That people aren't born into equal circumstances. That not everyone gets the same shot. It's the acknowledgment that your life is not all under your control and that you can succeed or fail based on factors outside of your control.
More generally:
Admission etc are a zero sum game, if you give the slot to A, you can't give it to B too. Therefore, any case where AA caused someone to get a slot they wouldn't have gotten without AA, causes exactly 1 person to not get a slot they would have gotten were AA not in existence. I'm sure the number of people who believe they were affected by AA is> than the number who actually were, but creating a discriminatory program is nothing if not a good way to cause resentment.
legionofone, what specifically would you propose as a solution to the problems AA attempts to solve?
At the point where those events stop effecting people today.
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Every time I try to quote previous quotes (with citations, no less), this is what I'm getting, and I don't have the time to follow up on it from work.
Of course, I got points because my father and grandfather went to Michigan and I went to one of the best high schools in the state where there were exactly two black kids in my graduating class.
Legacy AA is far greater bullshit than race based.
Though I suppose it's also Class-based too.
Legacy Admissions == AA for WASPs
A) THANK YOU JESUS for providing a citation.
2) So it was ruled unconstitutional in 2003, then? And only existed in Michigan? Excellent, let the wheels of justice turn.
It's also got one of the highest rates of rape in the nation.
I don't think it's the black people who need defending here.
Listen you worthless goose.
I'm 27. I've already spent 5 years of my life actively working to make the world better. I've worked on textbook pricing, internet access, poverty, human trafficking, college admission standards, hunger, homelessness, etc. I've been working 60 hours a week since I graduated from college to fix the things that people like you keep making worse, so spare me the lecture on how I spend my time.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
1. Nobody really agrees on what it is. To people at large, affirmative action means quotas, because that was the main system for a while, and the term 'affirmative action' is vague enough to not really mean anything else. Even in this thread, nobody's really defined it completely yet. There's lots of suggestions on what it could be, should be, but no consensus.
2. I think at least partly because of this, and partly for other reasons, this issue really draws out the asshole in everyone, on both sides. Blacks feel like they're owed for such shitty conditions, whites feel like they're being punished for something beyond their control, and since both have different ideas about what's going on, they can't even agree on what the argument is.
Honestly, at this point I feel like the term should be dropped and we should use 'Equal Opportunity', which is much more descriptive, doesn't have all the baggage that affirmative action does, and is much more indicative of the actual goals.
If you create a culture where its easy to embrace being the victim with all the benefits of such, then you're pretty much looking at a never ending loop of victimization because 100 years down the line someone will say that the 2000's were "such a racial time in America" and here we are again.
@SS
Its hard dude, ain't going to lie. You have to create more opportunities other than sports and music in the black community, but to have those opportunities you have to have the society to support it, and to have the society you have to have the right values. Its what Bill Cosby has been going off about, and getting shouted down by those with an entrenched interest in keeping black people where they are, who are often black people who made it to the top of the pile.
Start with single parent households and offer some sort of incentive to keep the family together, or to have birth control until someone is married or in a committed relationship. Its the smallest unit of society, and its fucked to shit. How are you going to build a stable culture if your foundation is broken? Its a bit extreme, but the malice & handwringing polices of con/lib admins aren't doing us anything than kicking the can down the road.
Zed: "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." Most of the rapes occur in native communities, so OH WOW WHAT DID I DO THERE. I think I just torpedoed your entire theory.
I'm going to say pretty solidly that a woman is safer walking alone in downtown Anchorage than downtown Detroit, champ.
I didn't strawman; I paraphrased you. You haven't even presented one single aspect of AA currently being discussed in this thread, and if YOU had actually read the thread instead of leaping in all "white guilt arglebargle" you would know that. You don't even have the integrity to try to discuss "what" black culture or even address that AA for blacks is not the only thing being discussed in the thread.
Why, legionofone, if on Page 1 of this thread, we were discussing teaching CS courses in a functional language, or recruiting of females into engineering, would white guilt be the prevalent content?
I keep erroring out when I try to re-post the citations I provided 2 pages back, which you would have - get this - seen if you had read the thread. So read it.
This is hardly a satisfactory answer to "how do you fix these programs". All it is some opining about the loss of the nuclear family.
Since we have the scientific studies linked to on the last couple pages showing that discrimination (at least for job interviews) is still alive and well, let's try to figure out what the goal is, and a method of achieving it.
1. Is the goal to stamp out discrimination and bias? This has more to do with changing people's perceptions rather than an actual quantifiable goal, and would require a very different tack. The best way to achieve this is to just keep publicizing the studies that show bias still exists. I'm betting one of the reasons most people think discrimination is going away is because they themselves don't, or at least try not to, discriminate. We just need to keep it in the press that it's not gone away just yet.
Also part of this, and the harder part, is more open discussion on the causes of the types of disparities that legionofone is referring to. If people can point to statistics that show more blacks and hispanics in prison than whites, it gives them a tangible reason, however misguided, to discriminate. But this is still just education, and not a quantifiable goal.
2. Is the goal to create a legal and societal framework where all races/genders/whatevers have equal opportunity, protection, etc.? Because I think you could make a good argument that this is pretty close to what we have now. It's illegal to blatantly discriminate, as well as looked down upon in open society (what people do behind closed doors notwithstanding). Things like forcing companies to blank out names is only going to work for large companies, and things like forcing random job selection isn't going to fly, I don't think. What else could be done that doesn't involve changing people's hearts and minds, or specifically empowering certain groups?
3. Is the goal to temporarily aid certain disadvantaged groups until they are no longer disadvantaged? This is the stereotypical idea of AA, and has its plusses and minuses, many of which have been discussed. Choosing which groups are disadvantaged is troublesome. We know that rich white males are privileged, but this is a pretty small group, take away any one of those and it gets much more hazy. What's an objective criteria for deciding which groups are the most disadvantaged, and most in need of help? What's an objective criteria for deciding when they are no longer disadvantaged, and no longer need assistance? We need objective criteria if we're planning on making any kind of policy to actually accomplish anything, and I think that setting an end criteria is a necessity for getting anything of this kind passed. Think the endangered species list.
Personally, I think the biggest issue is just the income disparity. It's gotten harder for the poor of any race or whatever to pull themselves out, and the wealth is getting more and more concentrated.
Well, yeah, I suppose "explicitly race-based" would have been more accurate. Point still stands though.
1) Electing a black president will engender lots of resentment from middle class white people, who will cry "reverse discrimination" and "affirmation action president" even when there is none. Therefore, we should make a rule that we should not elect black presidents, in order to prevent white people from getting upset.
2) Affirmative action applies only in the case of a tie. i.e., the black kid only gets in if the school was willing to consider a white person of the same qualifications. In other words, the white kid who loses his spot to the black kid is no more "qualified" than the black kid who got in.
Here's the inherent bias in this argument. Any black kid who gets into college not only has to be qualified, but they also need to be more qualified than any white kid who got rejected. White kids who get in are not held to this same standard. No one ever compares George Bush to the people who applied to Yale and failed to get in.
I personally don't have a problem with this because it treats every high school kid in Texas the same while opening doors to kids from poorer areas.
On a side note, I go off for like 5 minutes to make stroganoff and the thread falls apart (shakes head disappointedly)
Rigorous Scholarship
1) really when you look at the breakdown 'middle class white people' elected Obama, just like they elect most national politicians, cause there are a lot of them. So policies that alienate them from your side on an issue are generally bad things, especially if the policies don't fix the problems(poverty & crime) you are trying to address.
2) Bull shit, in the Michigan case it was clearly not a 'tie breaker'. The college I attended hid the entire process behind 'holistic' and 'well-rounded' evaluation, along with a bunch of other statements that don't actually tell you whats going on. Is as clearly as they'll state it, so they consider it, but only a little, but not in any quantifiable way-so you can't sue them. And remember they are reviewing thousands of transcripts so its not a head to head, there is no tie. They are basically drawing the minority line lower, which pushes the non-minority line up.
2b) All admitted students should be more qualified than rejected studets, thats the whole idea behind a merit based admittance. Beyond that legacy isn't a protected class, race is? So while I can't stop a $chool from admitting its legacy piggy bank, racial discrimination is illegal. AA falls under the whole 2 wrongs don't make a right column, legacy just brings the count to 3.
U of M had no leg to stand on if they wanted to argue that AA was just one factor in determining who got accepted- in a significant number of cases, it was the only reason certain black and hispanic applicants were admitted.
Rigorous Scholarship
I'm generally pro-AA (though I was less so at the time, being a very, very white senior in high school applying to Michigan) but they went a tad overboard.
For the most part. Good genes only matter if you're rich. The poorer you are the less your actual intelligence correlates with your parents intelligence. The richer you are, the more.
Edit: What this means is basically that rich people get the majority of their brains from their parents. They have the nurture more or less taken care of. Poor people, its the other way around, they do not have the nurture taken care of and so the people who do get smart get so because they have hard working parents to ensure their kids are raised properly.
I get the argument in favor of using to right the large-scale issue of the effects of institutionalized racism. It's not about the white guy and the black guy wrestling for a single position; it's about the data blip that one black guy represents. The White Guy, not as a person but as an archetype, had better opportunities for education. He was in a better school district. He had a wealthier family that allowed him chances to be in clubs and engage in all manner of extracurricular activities. He was purchased a tutor which bought him an extra 200 points on his SAT. He had more time to do his homework and study for exams, getting him an extra 0.5 points in his GPA. This helped him get into a better college, which allowed him to get a better job right out of college.
The Black Guy, though - again, as an archetype - had a poor family. He went to a lousier school. He had to work to help his family get by, and had less time for extracurricular activities. He didn't have the opportunity to buy a couple hundred SAT points and only had an A- GPA instead of an A. He didn't get into the excellent college, and his first job wasn't as awesome as a result.
Maybe all of these circumstances, on aggregate, result in 10% fewer black folks being the Best Qualified Fellow for any given job opportunity. So maybe, then, it's not that unwarranted to hire 10% more black folks to tweak the karmic balance just a bit.
Of course, the end-game in all of this is a fair and just society where the effects of historical (and current) racism are statistically negligible. And if the current system isn't designed with that end-game in mind, then the current system is broken and needs an overhaul. But if it is designed with that in mind, then we must acknowledge that, at some point in the future, we're going to need to scrap the system entirely and let folks sort out there own problems. Because racial tensions are significant, and one incontrovertible fact is that AA programs contribute to that. A white guy who is measurably better qualified than the black guy who gets the job has every right to be pissed off. The system may be "fair" in some large-scale sense, but it is grossly unfair to the guy who didn't get the job. And that will cause resentment. And that resentment will, at some point, take us to a point where it's impossible for the wounds of racism to heal themselves any further.
At some point, even if we admit AA is the greatest thing ever, we need to just rip off the band-aid and let things work themselves out. When is that point? Is it now? In some places, AA probably doesn't do a whole lot of net good. And in some places, it's probably incredibly helpful. There's a healthy conversation about where that point is, and how to get there the fastest, and how to deal with regional variations in social justice, and yadda yadda.
And the upshot of all this is... I don't know. As I said - not quite sure where I fall. But I can sympathize with folks on either side. Not all of the folks, of course - some of them are opportunistic assholes or racist fuckwads. But a good number.
I feel this deserves a more direct response.
I can think of essentially two reasons why someone would drop out of school, at any level. The first is that for whatever reason, they are incapable of completing the requirements of their education, either due to lack of ability or circumstances in the rest of their life. Affirmative Action does nothing to deal with this, true.
The second reason why someone would drop out of school is that they do not feel that getting a degree would benefit them. In the case of minorities, they often expect that they will be discriminated against, and will be locked out of the jobs that they actually want, leaving all the effort that they would have to put into their education wasted. THAT's what Affirmative Action is partially meant to deal with, to make sure that minorities actually have the opportunity to take advantage of their skills and experience.
With respect to trying to remedy reason 2, it seems likely that you'd run into situations where applicants would be hired purely because of their race. And if I were a minority, I would be pretty offended if I was only hired because of my race. It's like saying, "Yeah, we had more qualified applicants, but because you were the only brown one among more qualified whites, we're legally compelled to hire you."
That, at face, appears racist to me, and, even though it's a silly straw-man and that kind of situation would almost never happen, there are enough shades of grey involved in the whole process of ameliorating race-representation-disparity in workforces to make it seem like a whole two wrongs don't make a right problem again.
I assume you could go the "the more qualified applicants have an easier time finding a job, so it's okay if they don't get this one" route, but I would still feel like a worthless human being for being hired largely because of my race. Actually, I think I'd be offended if my race had anything to do with the hiring process.
I think efforts to get minorities more qualified for jobs in the first place are the best sort of affirmative action possible, like pumping money into crappy school districts.