7 ms·

Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class. Instead of using race as a factor, they can just use family income as a factor. Is "race" (and its manifestations

• renonn 4y ago
  “Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip” It’s more that they are terrified to talk about it because they risk being fired from their job and losing everything for talking about it. And they’re also not allowed to talk about how they are not allowed to talk about it. So this is the way it comes out.
  • secondcoming 4y ago
    Yup, keep your head down. Accept everything you're told even if you agree with it or not. There is nothing to be gained by asking questions.
    • MichaelCollins 4y ago
      This frightens me because it sounds like the setup for a preference cascade, where everybody realizes that they aren't alone, that everybody else thinks as they do. Suddenly the familiar order inverts almost overnight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification#Generating_surprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification#Gener...
      • int_19h 4y ago
        To some extent, you see the real preferences when it comes to single-issue referendums (since the vote is secret, and there are no secondary "tactical voting" considerations there that might skew the preference). Some examples: https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-1000_Affirmative_Action_Measure_(2019) https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-... https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020) https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
        • MichaelCollins 4y ago
          This is a valuable upside to referendums I hadn't considered before, thank you.
    • thrwawy20221030 4y ago
      I am a white person in San Francisco and I do experience a lot of casual racism from POC. Just things like “there are too many white people here”, “that’s white washed”, etc as well as mild harassment on public transit. I am often the only white person in any group, so comments like these among acquaintances get tiring, and I have nobody to talk about it with, partly because, according to a lot of these people, I am privileged despite me growing up in a far poorer neighborhood and single mother household.
  • jonahx 4y ago
    While you are not wrong at all, neither is OP: In many cases, the cowardice is served with a side of genuinely internalized guilt.
    • trident5000 4y ago
      Its served with a healthy portion of irrationality.
  • threatofrain 4y ago
    Who are liberal white people afraid of? What group has power and what is their game?
    • homeland221 4y ago
      They themselves. Some liberal whites are at the sebior level will exact the whip to get them in same group thinking...pretty much like Dems that always act in unisons as compare to Rep for decades.
    • tb_technical 4y ago
      Lawyers and HR people
• s1k3 4y ago
  Targeting poverty/income as oppose to race seems like such a no brainer to me. It still solves the same problem, except that it wouldn’t ever discriminate and if there was equal equity in poverty you’d expect equal equity in targeting it.
  • trident5000 4y ago
    You know theres a shit ton of poor white people right? Its like people dont know that or something.
    • annexrichmond 4y ago
      The DEI org at my company sent a mail out a few months ago saying how much the wage gap was between blacks and whites are, which is funny given that now Asian women have average higher wage than white men
      • trident5000 4y ago
        The average wage gap is driven by billionaires. Poor blacks and whites are all....poor. And theres no need to measure the tallest midget even if theres a slight difference after you net out the .1% who drag up the averages for whites.
        • smugma 4y ago
          That’s not how medians work
          • trident5000 4y ago
            Im well aware of how medians work (1 type of average). The gaps are often calculated by the mean.
    • the_lonely_road 4y ago
      Specifically a lot more poor white people than spots available in these schools. Asians are a “problem” taking up too many spots and are doing this from a position of only being 6% of the United States. Whites make up 57% of the United States. This means you can easily fill these schools 100% with white students if you use only income as the proxy. I personally believe the only fair course of action is admission by merit and then attack anyone racial disparities seem in each years admission at a different place in the pipeline.
• nerdponx 4y ago
  I think the problem is that advocates do not believe that race is a just proxy for socioeconomic status. There also seems to be a common belief now that justice for past wrongs means equity of outcome, not only equality of opportunity. I'm not going to try to defend or argue against these beliefs, but I think a big difficulty in these discussions is that people aren't even understanding each other's arguments and worldviews. Of course, looking at and staying focused on actual data and research would be nice, but frankly that's not easy because social science data tends to be messy and social science research is extremely difficult to do correctly. You also have to be able to at least define and agree on operational goals/outcomes, which might be a challenge in and of itself.
• Izkata 4y ago
  > Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says. It's listed explicitly in the Civil Rights act of 1964, except I don't think it mentions something that applies to this situation - the phrase "affirmative action" was created just to get around it. I guess this will be about whether it applies/should apply here in addition to the rest.
• bradleyjg 4y ago
  Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says. If so technically you're not supposed to use it, because the 14th amendment (which is what AA is based on) mandates "equal protection." This is somewhat confused. The equal protection clause limits what state governments can do. There’s a doctrine interpreting it called suspect classifications, and race is the most important of these. (Gender is quasi-suspect.) There’s also a series of federal and state civil rights laws that regulate the private sector. These laws create protected classes, of which race is one.
• zozbot234 4y ago
  > First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF? Not only that, but the way that "Whiteness" is obsessively referenced in so-called "liberal" discourse as some kind of master oppressor status is outright disgusting and can only be fairly compared to the very worst kinds of Nazi propaganda. There are significant amounts of white people in the U.S. today whose ancestors were serfs kept in bondage, and this state of things persisted even longer historically than the enslavement of people of African descent in the U.S. and Caribbean.
  • scarmig 4y ago
    That goes a bit too far in the other direction. Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage. That includes slaves brought to the US and the Caribbean; slavery was rampant in Africa as well.
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      > Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage. True, but serfdom persisted in some Eurasian countries well into the 1860s. This makes it plausibly quite relevant to present times, in a way that other forms of bondage might not be.
      • scarmig 4y ago
        My point is not that white people don't have oppression in recent memory, but more that everyone has oppression in recent memory. And if you dig back further and further, you just find heaps and heaps of more oppression, and it ends up impossibly messy to do an accounting of historic wrongs and try to right them in the present day (which doesn't even touch on the question of how giving privileges to people now somehow rights the wrongs done to their ancestors).
      • nathanaldensr 4y ago
        Why?
  • 4y ago
• argonaut 4y ago
  My understanding is that income based affirmative action would actually have little effect on racial demographics. Hence why this isn't really discussed by these top colleges. In other words, top colleges would just be full of poor whites and asians (instead of middle-to-upper class whites and asians, without affirmative action).
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• rayiner 4y ago
  > As a POC, I'm always amazed at how well advocates manipulate everyone to get what they want. Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. I don’t think you’re giving liberal white people enough credit. They’re playing a smart game. If it wasn’t for conservative and moderate POC going along with them, white liberals would be a political minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-about-black-democrats https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo... They turn up the dial on racial conflict to keep that coalition together. Who put Joy Reid on MSNBC to call half the country racists every day? White liberals use POC the same way they used “blue wall” Midwestern voters. They don’t care what any of those groups thinks—which becomes apparent whenever the dominant view within one of those groups contradicts white liberals, whether on social issues or even on affirmative action. They’re objects of white liberal benevolence.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  “ Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class.” This doesn’t seem to be a case in the top universities, which usually fulfill their diversity requirements by pulling from the elite class. There is very little class diversity in our institutions and that is ripping the country apart.
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• happytoexplain 4y ago
  I mostly agree, but: >Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. It's pathetic. More than anything, I wish people could speak/write about social/political issues without the spittle directed at whatever the highest level group is that their "enemy" group is a subset of (liberal, conservative, black, white, men, women, etc).
  • rayiner 4y ago
    I think the law should treat people in a race blind manner. But race is also a component and proxy for culture and economic and social position. It’s fair game (and important) to talk about white liberals. What they believe, what their motivations are, where their interests lie, etc.
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• thelock85 4y ago
  > First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF? I don’t follow your first assertion. Pretty sure that an “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” aka the original Virginia slave codes first introduced “race” by way of limiting length and terms of indentured servitude for “white Christian” indentured servants. Under these terms, the acts then categorized “servants important and brought… who were not Christians in their native land” as slaves unless they converted to Christianity. If that’s not explicit enough, the acts pretty distinctly name conditions for “negroes”, “Jews”, “Moors”, “mulattoes”, “Mahometans” and “Christian whites”. Technically you are right that there was no such thing as race in American politics. But it was literally created by elites to divide working class former indentured servants, natives and Black freedman, ostensibly in response to Bacon’s rebellion where these groups found their common enemy in elites. So really it’s not that weird that things are as they are today in our political system.
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• jwarden 4y ago
  There is some confusion about the definition of "affirmative action". The original definition from Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 requires that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin". What the supreme court is poised to do would in a sense reaffirm the original principle of affirmative action.