42 ms·

The concept of affirmative action is foreign to me (quite literally so). I only know it from American media, and I've come understand it to mean "positively dis

• acjohnson55 3y ago
  We do have policies to benefit the economically disadvantaged. The amount we spend on this front is vastly, vastly more than any race-based interventions. I would argue we should do much more on that front. But, people can and do suffer from racism without being poor. Controlling socioeconomic status, Black people (I'm going to focus here) statistically have worse opportunities and outcomes. This is why race-based policy is important in addition to purely financial considerations. There is no perfect implementation of affirmative action to address the root of the problem, but on the whole, I think it's extremely important that institutions are able to try. The older people in my parents' generation were often prevented from having a full education, often even up to the high school level. My mom was born in the North, instead of the South as her older siblings were, because her family fled the Klan. These are just a couple examples of how the history of de jure and de facto racial oppression are still very much with us. If not for reforms and affirmative action, I probably would not have had the opportunity to be raised in a financially stable household in an area of bountiful opportunity. It's heartbreaking to me that the policies that allowed my family to go from oppressed sharecropping to earning our way into the middle class are being revoked. The truth is, affirmative action was never enough, and it is unlikely to be replaced with anything any more sufficient.
• kneebonian 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? This is what I will never understand, why don't we focus on just helping the poor instead of based on race. If people of a certain race are proportionally more poor than people of another race than they will be helped more and it helps out the people of a specific race. However in my more conpsiracy minded moments I can't help but wonder if the focus on race is designed to keep the power and the middle class fighting each other over things like that rather than fighting against the people that have the power. But seriously why can't we just focus our help and aid around people who are poor and needs based rather than all this faffing about with race? EDIT: Well the votes on this comment are going up and down faster than an "Essex birds drawers" as the BOFH would say.
  • swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
    Dr. Martin Luther King said he dreams that one day his children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Here we are 60 years later still focused on the color of people’s skin.
    • Timon3 3y ago
      Do you think that Dr. King would argue that, aside from affirmative action, we live in such a world today?
      • JKCalhoun 3y ago
        Yeah, arguing with my dad some time back he says, "Minorities have unfair rights over whites: affirmative action." "Name another," was my response.
        • ahtihn 3y ago
          Name a single unfair right that whites have over others, today?
• JohnMakin 3y ago
  > Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program? In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In many large states, such as california, they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. And, IMO, california has done a pretty good job of having fairly diverse schools, and they do precisely what you say - they focus their efforts on lifting up those who come from poor socioeconomic situations, which tends to capture a lot of the same people affirmative action was trying to do.
  • 0xcafefood 3y ago
    > In a lot of ways, affirmative action is a boogeyman that doesn't exist in the way many people think. In that case, can you explain why two schools would've fought for the explicit use of race in deciding school admissions all the way to the Supreme Court?
    • prpl 3y ago
      Laziness? It’s cheap and it gives them a lever they wanted.
    • arcticbull 3y ago
      I expect part of this was just retaining their right to do so as they are losing a degree of flexibility in admissions here.
    • jvanderbot 3y ago
      California has been trying to overturn it's race-blind policy for some time. The original policy was instituted about the same time as everyone else's. The intent of overturning it, of course, is to then go further and institute a policy more like the one seen in this case. It has been overturned at the referendum level every time.
  • Georgelemental 3y ago
    > [In California], they already for a long time do not consider race as a factor in admissions, as per law. They do to an extent, they just try to hide it as "holistic review" or such, make it hard to prove.
• BobbyJo 3y ago
  The intent is to factor in some unknown "racism" value. Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average, so if you naively stratified by income, you'd still wind up with a mostly white and Asian student population. There are a lot of reasons Black and Hispanic kids underperform, and it's just easier for the school to short circuit all that and choose based on race rather than incorporate all those other factors. It might not even be viable to incorporate all those other factors. We really only have two choices: 1) Wait out the effects of racism, historic and contemporary, which will take hundreds of years. 2) Sacrifice some of our "individual determination above all else" principles to reach some palpable level of racial equality. I think both are flawed in their own ways, but the world is always imperfect, so pick your side.
  • purpleblue 3y ago
    Except it's not mostly poor, hardworking ADOS (African descendents of slavery) students that benefit. It's rich, Black students that are benefiting, especially those from outside the US and no lineage from slavery. The problem with affirmative action is that everyone is only looking literally at skin color, which is the opposite of what we should be doing.
    • earthboundkid 3y ago
      Yeah, the point should always have been explicitly to be reparations for slavery/Jim Crow and the Native American genocide. But that was never really explicit, and there was a lot of mission drift over the last fifty years.
      • prpl 3y ago
        and redlining, and other formal, informal, intentional and unintentional institutional (particularly governmental and financial) policies that limited people’s access to success based on their race.
        • pessimizer 3y ago
• pjc50 3y ago
  > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? I mean, I can get behind that. But then why the entire detour with race? Up until about 1971 (possibly later, but that's the date of Loving vs Virginia), the US had formal, legal discrimination against black people. On finally removing that, there was at various times discussion of whether people who had been legally discriminated against all their lives should be compensated, as if they had been wronged in a tort sense. This would obviously be extremely expensive, and anyway impossible to quantify, so it never happened. Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status. Since black people were under-represented in this category, people came up with the idea of putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission. Can it balance exactly against the disadvantages of discrimination? No. > I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program? America is not in the least social-democratic, but racism and anti-racism have been there since the beginning and will probably dominate US politics until the last person who remembers the KKK is dead. (It could be worse: Haitians who had freed themselves from slavery by the mass murder of their oppressors were made to pay a huge amount of compensation to them!)
  • nailer 3y ago
    Loving vs Virginia was decided in 1967 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395 https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395
  • MaokaiLin 3y ago
    Stop treating all minorities like they are in a single category. The ones that are hurt most in the cases are asian americans. They do not have advantage in "legacy" admissions over other minorities, and they are also discriminated over a century. Why are they paying the price for reparations?
  • mcv 3y ago
    Yeah, every time the discussion comes up about, for example, reparations for the descendants of slaves, I start out thinking: it's been 150 years! Some of those descendants are very successful now and some descendants of slave owners are probably very poor now. And some people are descendants of both. And then I learn about the Jim Crow period, and then you hear that even the GI bill explicitly excluded black people, and lynchings into the 1950s, and the extremely hard fight the civil rights movement had, and even legal discrimination up to 1971, not to mention tons of possibly illegal but still very real discrimination after that. And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right. Have things been made right by now? I have no idea. I do know plenty of black people still live in fear of the police, and that when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot. Not to mention that many universities also have affirmative action for children of alumni, who are still predominantly white and rich, partially because of the legal discrimination uo to 1971, and partially because universities are ridiculously expensive. Has that affirmative action also been struck down? > America is not in the least social-democratic, It used to be, though. The New Deal and many of the social policies of the 1940s and 1950s were very social democratic. Well, except that they tended to exclude black people.
• crooked-v 3y ago
  Racial discrimination in the US significant enough that, for example, merely having a "Black" name leads to worse results from job applications, regardless of other factors [1]. Merely focusing on wealth levels won't counteract that kind of effect. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distinctively-black-names-still-get-fewer-callbacks-for-job-applications/articleshow/84910595.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/policy/economy/news/distincti...
  • treis 3y ago
    They never run these experiments right and this one looks to be no different. What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. You never see them use names like Cletus or Billy Bob or other names associated with lower class whites.
    • Volundr 3y ago
      > What they choose as "Black" names are those associated with lower class blacks but they do not do the same with "White" names. In this case, they use names like Latonya for blacks and Heather for whites. Is Latonya associated with lower class the way Cletus is? I honestly don't know, and I'd be surprised if most of the people hiring did. What are some "black" names not associated with lower class? My sneaking suspicion (without evidence) is that "black" names in general are more likely to be associated with lower class and to escape those connotations one would have to avoid the more ethnic names, but I'm open to being educated on this point.
      • treis 3y ago
        Traditional African/Arabic names. Jamaal, Aisha, Hakeem, etc.
      • UncleMeat 3y ago
        If black-coded names are more strongly associated with being lower class in spite of data demonstrating that they actually have the same class distributions as white-coded names then that is racism.
• VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • CrazyStat 3y ago
    > Create and support plebian race-based factions and pit them against one another so they can't fight the elites. So pretty much the opposite of class warfare? Class warfare would be warfare between classes. What you're describing is racial warfare intentionally engineered to avoid class warfare.
    • JenrHywy 3y ago
      I think the implication is that it's race warfare is a tool used by the "ruling" class to wage class warfare on the poor.
      • CrazyStat 3y ago
        Ah, fair enough.
• mcpackieh 3y ago
  > I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. More or less, but not precisely. How do you define a "minority race"? Universities in America discriminate against Asian Americans despite them being a minority of the American population generally, ostensibly because they're over-represented in universities.
  • chimeracoder 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • VirusNewbie 3y ago
      [flagged]
    • mcpackieh 3y ago
      > it's been debunked countless times Change my mind then, and debunk it. Refuting isn't debunking.
    • JamesBarney 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • chimeracoder 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • prepend 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • mrguyorama 3y ago
            [flagged]
• cogman10 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Mostly it was a justice thing. The US spent decades disadvantaging people based on race and this was a step to try and reverse some of that. I agree that changing it from race to economic class is probably the right move at this point. That being said, I don't like that the SC is legislating from the bench. They are striking this down for purely political reasons.
  • thereisnospork 3y ago
    > They are striking this down for purely political reasons. On its face affirmative action is pretty blatantly a violation of the 14th amendment: Which to a trivial reading would come out as 'All persons [black, white, rainbow] shall have equal rights to attend [state funded school], and as such a right to a fair and impartial admissions process'. Affirmative action adds the clause: "except those whose skin color we do not like today, those shall have to score higher on tests. Those whose skin color we do like today, those shall not have to score as high. Those whose skin color we do not care about can score the same as before."
    • djur 3y ago
      I don't think it's accurate to say that affirmative action programs are driven by racial animus. What's your evidence for saying so?
    • cogman10 3y ago
      No, it isn't. From a strict textual reading, the 14th says > No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Admittance to a school is not a deprivation of life, liberty, or property. Nor is this "equal protection of the laws". Where in the 14th does it say anything about school attendance? When did school attendance become a right? Which amendment does that come from? Seems like a pretty liberal reading of the 14th to come to the conclusion that prestigious school attendance is somehow a right for white people. Oh, and this ruling also said that "private schools are allow to discriminate on race if they so choose, this only strikes down the federal law tailored to roll back institutional racism." But hey, if you want to make the argument that higher education should be a right funded by the public I probably could get behind that. I just don't think there's constitutional or historical backing for that conclusion.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dudul 3y ago
  European naturalized American here and yes I do agree with you. In the few EU countries where I lived before settling in the US it would be unthinkable to include race in these policies. Just help poor people and that's it. I'll put on my tin foil hat here, but I genuinely believe that "race" (and now "gender") is being weaponized by the American elites/politicians to form nice clear camps/teams for voters. People need to focus on race otherwise they would start to pay attention to the enormous social/financial disparity between the top and the bottom of the pyramid. And we really do not want that.
  • scohesc 3y ago
    I've heard people make references to the Occupy Wall Street protests a decade+ back being the catalyst for corporations and governments to start using "diversity" as a wedge issue to distract and divide people into groups to keep people from organizing. (Further down the conspiracy rabbit-hole, the CIA has been known to work with entertainment and critical industries to push opinions and ideas to sway the populace) It really does feel like people weren't at each others throats as much 10 years ago as they seem to be now. It's almost like it's being used as a wedge to divide and distract from more important issues.
    • TurkishPoptart 3y ago
      That's because it is.
      • trompetenaccoun 3y ago
        But the identity and diversity stuff was a thing long before that time. Don't get me wrong, politicians and elites are absolutely using identity to play the populace against each other. But this is less part of a grand conspiracy and more the oldest trick in the book of politics, there's evidence of it going back all the way to classic antiquity.
    • mrguyorama 3y ago
      Or maybe you just weren't as aware of the problems black people face in america? The amount of times my conservative family members tell me "Such and such wasn't a problem when I was a kid" while completely ignoring the problems proves it isn't a genuine concern.
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" Is that true? I have heard that white males benefit most from admission rules to colleges (perhaps primarily in California?). But maybe that's "quota rules" and not affirmative action. Regardless, it appears as though the while male is probably going to take a hit if all admissions become strictly academically based.
  • 0xcafefood 3y ago
    https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/577722-more-than-a-third-of-white-students-lie-about-their https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57... Why would White students choose to claim non-White ancestry at these levels if it's going to disadvantage them?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • az226 3y ago
    Patently false
    • etchalon 3y ago
      Not "patently false", but, complicated: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-benefits-from-affirmative-action-white-men/2017/08/11/4b56907e-7eab-11e7-a669-b400c5c7e1cc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-benefits-from-af... The central argument, and what Zimmerman backs with data, is that affirmative action benefited white men because it disadvantaged Asians and women, both of whom, statistically, will be more-likely to have higher academic scores.
      • az226 3y ago
        A typical class at Harvard has 2,500 student admits. Of those, 700 are black or Hispanic. If Harvard did away with legacy admissions, 25 additional Hispanic or black applicants would be admitted, so 725. However, if they did away with affirmative action, 450 would not be admitted, so you would be down to 275. Most of these 425 spots would go to Asian applicants and a chunk would go to white applicants. http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf
• EatingWithForks 3y ago
  One of the things of "why not class only" is because in America race matters a lot. I mean it quite literally: studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less qualification. In some cases black people with a college degree have job prospects similar to a white person with a felony record.
  • 0xcafefood 3y ago
    > studies have shown simply having a black-sounding name makes you equivalent to a white-sounding name of an order of magnitude less qualification. Can you link to a study showing this? How did this study define what an "order of magnitude less qualification" means?
    • EatingWithForks 3y ago
      http://thecrimereport.s3.amazonaws.com/2/fb/e/2362/criminal_stigma_race_crime_and_unemployment.pdf http://thecrimereport.s3.amazonaws.com/2/fb/e/2362/criminal_... Here's a PDF. White people with a criminal record are received more positively than noncriminal black-sounding people. "Employment discrimination against people with criminal records, especially in entry-level positions, is rampant, as demonstrated by a 2005 report produced by the Commission called “Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market” written by Drs. Devah Pager and Bruce Western. [1] The report relied on results from matched pairs of testers of young white, Latino, and African-American men who applied for 1470 entry-level jobs throughout New York City. Not only were whites more likely to get a callback or job offer than Latinos or African-Americans, African-Americans were nearly half as likely to be considered as whites.[2] When white testers presented with a recent felony record, they were as likely as Latinos and much more likely than African-Americans to receive a callback or job offer.[3] Overall, people with criminal records are only half as likely to get a call back than those without; for African-American applicants, the likelihood is reduced to one-third.[4]" from https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/testimony-in-support-of-testing-programs-for-employment-and-housing-discrim https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/testimony-in-support-of-tes...
• whatgoodisaroad 3y ago
  To preface: I don’t really have an opinion on affirmative action per se: That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education. They’re “ivy leagues” for preserving class inequality having been marketed as schools. To the extent that race is a distraction from class, the fact that counteracting racial bias in admissions has failed to uplift the poor just puts too fine a point on this arrangement.
  • stu2b50 3y ago
    I'm not sure I'd lump UNC in there. It's a fairly elite public school, but still a public school, with 20k students and a 20% admission rate.
• Balgair 3y ago
  I'm going to assume positive intent on this and that it's not a troll comment. Race in the US is horribly complicated and tied into so many parts of life here in the US. Full Stop. HN comment sections aren't really the place to go into the very fine details, especially just one comment like mine. and the fine details do matter. Ok, all that out of the way, now to the questions here. Let's take a small micro-example and explore a bit: You are an African-American woman experiencing preeclampsia at 30 weeks gestation. Preeclampsia is a very serious medical condition and can cause death to you and your baby. You go into the hospital not knowing what is wrong with you, but you know something is wrong. Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that African-Americans don't feel pain like other people do. Like it or not, many medical professionals still believe that women over-react to pain [0]. Like it or not, many medical professionals do not believe the above if they are African-American women. So, as a worried mother-to-be, you get a doctor assigned to you, likely at random. If your MD is not of the same race or sex as you are, then your experience is likely to be less positive than if they were. From what I have heard from African-American women whom I am able to talk with about medical care, the experience is highly likely to be a negative one unless they get someone of their own race or are lucky. So, having more people that are of diverse backgrounds in the medical field leads to more positive outcomes for patients of every race and sex. Meaning that you have to get more diversity into the med schools to begin with. Which means that you have to get more diversity into colleges. Which means you have to get more diversity into Secondary education, and in primary education. Which means you have to get more diversity in pedagogical training. And round we go. Yes, we could solve this by untying med school from college. Yes, we could open up the med schools to more than just the select few we already have. Yes, we could have more nurses and RNs that accompany MDs. Yes we could make medical care a single payer system and try to solve this from there. Yes, there are a million other ways to fix this. Hopefully you begin to see what a complex mess racial issues are in the US and how at each and every level, race is a contributing factor that affects everyone. I haven't even come close to any of the real issues here, and there are so many spider webs that tie into each sub-issue. Look at this Supreme Court Decision itself, the first black supreme court justice, a Harvard Grad, voted to end it. Thing get really really squirrely. [0] I have personally experienced this with my SO during labor, BTW. The attending OB-GYN, a man, remarked to me 'How can you stand the screaming all the time'. I threw him out of the room. No joke, this really did happen.
• onetimeusename 3y ago
  > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. I don't know about this. Like about 1000 undergraduate students are admitted to Harvard each year, Harvard being named in this suit. Affirmative action at Harvard being necessary to help anyone seems like a stretch. Is Harvard really the only way to help people? It's an elite school so I think the stakes are different than helping people because the applicant pool is very elite already. I think in reality the US is embroiled in ethnic conflict and people are fighting over spots at elite schools for their children and a lot of this is political. There are other countries where affirmative action is used and a similar thing happens. Like in India for example, the child of a billionaire from the OBC designation has a much higher chance of getting into IIT than the child of poor Brahmins. The OBC designation has expanded over time for political reasons to form coalitions, as I understand it. > Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Ironically the SFFA case argued that specifically white kids were being backdoored into Harvard at the expense of Asian students[1]. So yes, the goal would not be met. Although I need to read this case closely because the official decision mentions more about Black and Latino affirmative action. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
• jldugger 3y ago
  > But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Because the state apparatus systematically oppressed people by race. If poor smart white kids succeed but smart black kids do not, this is a failure of the policy goal to repair the harms to black families, and black communities.
  • DemeterFarm 3y ago
    [dead]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• crackercrews 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Would the goal suddenly not be met if poor smart white kids get into good schools, too? Who loses in this case? Universities would do this instead of affirmative action if it would lead to the same result. But it wouldn't. It would help poor Asian students. And it would hurt the URMs who are not poor. They currently benefit from strong affirmative action programs but would fare much worse under a program like you describe.
• earthboundkid 3y ago
  Because we did harm to African Americans and Native Americans as groups, so the remedy has to be to them as groups.
  • 0xcafefood 3y ago
    Why did you harm these groups? What are you doing to fix what you have done?
  • charlieyu1 3y ago
    So what had Asian Americans done to deserve being treated worse?
  • goatlover 3y ago
    Who's we and how do you delineate those groups?
    • earthboundkid 3y ago
      The United States is a legal entity. It's the one responsible for the harms, and it's the one responsible for the reparations. Or we could just dissolve the country every 4 years and start over from scratch if you prefer. I don't see how that could go wrong. :-)
      • orangepurple 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • hersko 3y ago
          > that weren't Jewish What does this mean
          • CaptainNegative 3y ago
            There's a long-standing effort by Nation of Islam (the American hate group that is only nominally Islamic) to rewrite the history of slavery in the US as largely orchestrated by and for Jews. Nonetheless the actual numbers show that they "possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean" [1] though the reason why is still not well understood. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674370 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2674370
• zuminator 3y ago
  One of the issues with the US is not just that certain races are more likely to be poor but they are segregated as well, meaning that there are counties, neighborhoods, and school districts where minorities are concentrated, at levels sometimes approaching 90% or more. And as a result of that, historically the residents of those neighborhoods weren't just economically deprived, but cut off from power, and influence. People lived in dilapidated housing. They couldn't afford to repair because banks wouldn't issue loans. They couldn't afford good schools because schools are funded by county or district in the US and so a poor local population means underfunded schools. They couldn't get good jobs because they had a poor education. All of their friends, family and neighbors were similarly dirt poor. In other words there was a cycle of pervasive generational poverty which didn't exist in the mainstream culture. Even if they scrimped and saved to try to move to a better neighborhood, they were often either entirely excluded on the basis of race, or faced rampant and sometimes dangerous discrimination upon settling in the new neighborhood. Anyway, so the goal of affirmative action was to try to break that cycle, by essentially awarding the best and brightest from those segregated communities opportunities they could never achieve otherwise. There was also maybe a sense of society thinking (at least in the case of blacks and maybe indigenous americans) "We owe them because we put them in this situation by kidnapping/enslaving or massacring their ancestors." Whereas with just generic poor people, to say that we owe them anything (as in "we owe them because our economy requires a pool of desparate labor") would be an indictment of capitalism, which is not an acceptable thought pattern in the USA.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  > I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. Right? It has been transformed into that through the twin attacks of "diversity" and "class, not race," but what it was meant to do was aid the problem that the US ran into after it released millions of slaves into the street with nothing, and they didn't manage to magically create something from nothing. It transformed from that into an efficiency argument to stay "constitutional" in a country that largely doesn't feel any guilt over slavery. Instead of staying an excuse not to pay reparations to their discarded farm equipment, the justification was A) that everybody should get a fair shake, and some people couldn't because of who their parents were ("class, not race", "equality of opportunity"), and B) that "diversity" of background gave an creative and decisionmaking advantage to businesses. The problem with these stupid justifications for affirmative action is that they don't support it at all. A) actually argues against race-based affirmative action, and B) paints it as a problem that should be naturally solved by the market with no intervention. The problem that the US has is that it had brutal discrimination by laws at times so harsh that in 18th century Maryland (iirc) there was a law that would sentence a white person to death for teaching a black person how to read. The problem is that black people collectively have barely more per capita wealth than they had when they were freed (which was $0.) That being said, black people have increased their proportion of national wealth since freedom, and white people's proportion of national wealth has been reduced, so that's sure libertarian evidence that black people are intrinsically superior to white people, though who can say if that's due to genetics or culture. If reparations were paid that brought the black share of national wealth to parity with the black proportion of the population, racism against black people would cease to be an issue that the government should be concerned with.
• naveen99 3y ago
  math needs to work out. if you have a 100 people and 50 defined to be poor, but can only admit 5 people. How do you decide which of the 50 poor come first ? The top 5, and you are back to square 1. The bottom 5, and you have the devil's problems. Remember the poorest people, the people with billions in negative wealth, are in jail or worse. You do not want to bring them back to the top !
  • arcticbull 3y ago
    Lottery? Seems to be the foundation of the immigration system.
    • naveen99 3y ago
      Why stop at the students, choose the professors by lottery too, Nih grants by lottery… May as well just burn limited resources. Lottery math doesn’t work. Someone has to fund the lotteries. And lotteries funding lotteries ain’t going to do it. Someone has to actually produce something of value for there to be value to allocate.
      • arcticbull 3y ago
        I think the argument here is that once you've already filtered down to qualified candidates by primary criteria, then you can lottery off the rest instead of performing a secondary sort.
        • naveen99 3y ago
          I guess the secondary sort is reserved for university, with a tertiary sort waiting at the corporate level. the heavy lifting is being done by the sorting, not the lottery at each level.
• prossercj 3y ago
  For many in America, the race issue is more about who we are as a nation than it is about practical results. We want to identify as abolitionists, who defeated the slaveholders and moved toward "a more perfect union" (a line from the Constitution which Lincoln echoed in relation to the war). The disagreement is essentially about the best way to achieve equality, which though a nebulous term is accepted as a goal without debate, even though the definition of the term can be widely different, as in this case. The conversatives argue that we can only achieve equality by being colorblind. The progressives argue that we can only achieve equality by consciously addressing inequality. I see some merit on both sides. I tend to lean toward the conservative view, but I recognize moments in our history where active intervention was both noble and necessary (desegregating schools, for example). The question is whether those actions were special cases or are examples for us to follow going forward.
  • mcpackieh 3y ago
    Equality has fallen out of vogue, the new hot term is equity.
    • goatlover 3y ago
      Because the focused has shifted to outcome over equal opportunity or treatment in the present. Some of us think that's misguided and the equal opportunity approach was working.
      • hedora 3y ago
        The equity approach is so blatantly racist / classist that I can’t believe it has taken root in left leaning states like California. Equality based: Fund the schools, and use evidence based educational reforms, with the result that California schools were top ten in the US. Equity based: Not everyone can do math and stem, so defund science and art programs (already done) and try to discontinue funding for calculus (almost happened this year). Schools are now 43rd in country, but rich districts can have parents fund the missing programs via donations, and are some of the best in the country. Further fuck with things by forcing UC admissions to be based on standing within each school’s graduating class, so illiterate minority kids end up being admitted to the top schools, and need to be weeded out.
• rayiner 3y ago
  There was a logic to the idea of racial preferences as originally envisioned. Studies show that the income gaps between American descendants of slaves and indigenous Americans basically have been unchanged even after segregation and legal discrimination was ended. The reasoning goes that racial preferences are necessary to undo these disadvantages. But the actual practice in US universities has become completely disconnected from that logic. For example, the largest group eligible for racial preferences is Hispanics. But Hispanics enjoy similar income mobility to whites and previous generations of white immigrants: https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerational-mobility-of-immigrants-over-two-centuries https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/intergenerati.... Insofar as they are poorer than whites as a group, that’s a transient condition due to recency and circumstances of immigration, just as it was for say Italians or Vietnamese. A child of a poor Guatemalan immigrant statistically will end up better off than the child of a poor Appalachian whose family has been in the US for centuries. It makes no sense to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the Guatemalan under the original justification for racial preferences. Moreover, most black students admitted to say Harvard are not American descendants of slaves: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/. Some are immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, who also are descendants of slaves. But many (up to half) are immigrants from Africa. Not only are they not descendants of slaves, they are typically elites in their home countries.
• russdill 3y ago
  I think if you want the historical context, read the dissenting opinions from the other justices. Such as https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Jackson-dissent.pdf https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Jacks...
• aylmao 3y ago
  It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance. Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance? My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation. For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.
  • calf 3y ago
    Norm Finkelstein recently said the careerist trajectory of college education (in America, but probably everywhere really) has been steadily going on for over half a century, and it really is a loss for cultivating an freethinking public commons.
• whinenot 3y ago
  Because the US has systematically disenfranchised ethnic minorities over the course of its history. Any time there was a non-white person or community that was starting to become prosperous, the power of the state could be used to crush them. At times it was overtly murderous[0], but as that became unfashionable, it was relegated to more subtle methods. Some of the most blatant examples include: - Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1] - Want a stadium? Build it in a black or brown neighborhood.[2] - Black folks got a nice property? Just take it from them.[3] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre [1]https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-... [2]https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-leagues-destroyed-barrio https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-lea... [3]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach-returned-100-years-california https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/bruces-beach...
  • dionidium 3y ago
    > - Want an interstate in your city? Run it through a black or brown neighborhood.[1] A lot these debates really come down to just how impressed one is by arguments like this. It so happens that an Interstate was built through the neighborhood my entire family occupied in St. Louis in the 1950s. Some of them were "displaced." I can't for the life of me figure out how this is supposed to be relevant to my life today. I'd wager that I'm the only one of my cousins to even know about it, since I'm interested in local history and bugged my grandparents about this stuff before they died. It just doesn't amount to anything. My family members had a trillion decisions to make -- big and small -- both before and after that singular event and the sum of those decisions had a much bigger impact on familial wealth -- note: there was none -- than that one time in the 1950s they were forced to move.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • animal_spirits 3y ago
      The one thing I can think about is that it is much harder to maintain a strong and healthy community if your community is divided by an interstate.
• asimpletune 3y ago
  I think it's a mistake to think the intent is to benefit individuals of specific races. This has very much been something where the intended benefactor is American society in general. As an example, I went to a good public school that had a policy where the top 5% of high school students were automatically given admission to the university. While this was technically race blind, it was de facto affirmative action, because a more poor high school is not as competitive as a rich high school. At first, I too, thought that affirmative action was bad because racism of any kind is bad. However, it dawned on me one day that if this policy wasn't in place, there just wouldn't be many minorities at our university, and in a way I would be deprived off a well-rounded, diverse college experience. Simply put, being exposed to a a rich, diverse student body is good for everyone, not just minorities. I don't think it's really any different in how the American justice system doesn't exist solely to provide justice for victim or the accused. The most important beneficiary of our justice system, is what happens when you have justice for society. Sure, individual cases don't always have what is perceived as the "right" outcome, but that's considered acceptable in our system if the result is justice for society.
  • pknomad 3y ago
    Guessing UT Austin?
    • asimpletune 3y ago
      Yeah, great experience
      • pknomad 3y ago
        Oh yeah I bet. I agree with you on positive benefits of having a diverse class, fwiw. I know few friends from Lake Travis who disagree though but I think that has to do with not making the top 8% (back then I think it was lower?).
  • lolinder 3y ago
    OP's point is still important, though: you're talking about the wrong kind of diversity. If you go to a school with a bunch of kids who grew up in upper-class neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., who cares if a few of those kids have black skin? They're contributing ~nothing to the diversity on campus, because they grew up in the same place and come from the same income level. On the other hand, if your admissions policies make a point of drawing from many income brackets or many countries, suddenly you have a whole world of people who you likely would never have associated with and who are actually different than you in meaningful ways. Country of origin and socioeconomic status are a much bigger deal when it comes to diversity than race, because race isn't real. It's a proxy for things that are real, and continuing to use it as a proxy perpetuates a subtle form of racism.
• chris_wot 3y ago
  The problem is, according to my reading of SCOTUS, that you can have affirmative action on anything but race. It occurs to me that it would have been far more effective if Harvard based their selection criteria on socio-economic considerations rather than race. It seems like a well-intentioned but badly thought through process designed to ensure disadvantaged groups gain access they might not have gotten to their system. The general idea seems to be - if you are of a particular race, you are automatically disadvantaged over ever other race. There is probably some truth to this. However, perhaps they now need to look at how people of a certain race are disadvantaged (other than because of their race itself) and use this as their selection criteria. This might actually also raise all groups - there are plenty of people in other racial groupings who also are disadvantaged for reasons other than their race. FWIW, I am not American and I realise this is a sensitive area, so if I am out of line for whatever reason I can just say this is an observation which may not be accurate.
  • bandrami 3y ago
    The uncomfortable fact is that we're actually very bad at predicting who will thrive at college and who won't. It's like hiring in that way, and I'm not joking when I say a lottery would probably work just as well as what we do.
    • chris_wot 3y ago
      Very true. But I think that it’s more important to give as broad a cross section of society the chance to succeed, whether they do I guess is not something we can predetermine.
• danabrams 3y ago
  For 350 years of US history africans and their descendants were enslaved. Native Americans were ripped from their land and relocated, often with genocidal levels of casualties. After that, these two groups were substantially discriminated against in law, and other races were added to the mix to be given less rights than others. Today, there are huge disparities between outcomes for different races in large part due to this historical discrimination. There's also an ingrained culture of stereotyping and discrimination that's hard to lift. It doesn't matter if you're the first generation of Americans descended from African immigrants who came in the 1980s... you still are impacted by this legacy. The concept of affirmative action was to specifically counteract the effects of these negative, historical circumstances and provide a countervailing effect. I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people. (I suspect it's similar elsewhere, but we are also a pretty racially diverse country, so the effect is larger)
  • arbuge 3y ago
    > it is definitely the case that poor people of color have a harder time getting ahead than equally poor white people Do you have any sources for that?
    • danabrams 3y ago
      Do I have any sources that systemic racism is real? I mean, there's a large body of evidence (I personally like the economics methodology of this study, which has been repeated many times: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0203hrnews2.aspx https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/pages/0203hrn...). But just like many will never be convinced that vaccines are safe and the earth is round, many will never be convinced that racism in the US is real, I suppose.
      • ix-ix 3y ago
        I once failed an undergraduate student because they argued that racism ended in 1965 and that racism did not exist after that. It's like they didn't pay attention in class at all.
• senthil_rajasek 3y ago
  I am from India and have lived in the U.S for over 2 decades. I have observed "affirmative action" arguments in two continents. I am going to answer your specific questions, >Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Racial justice issues are separate from economic justice issues. Shouldn't this just be run-of-the-mill social democratic "lets hand out some extra opportunities/benefits to the poor" program? Racism is a complex issue and in listening to Black/Asian/Brown Americans I have come to the realization that such programs have to be specific to each and every race because they experience racism in different ways.
• mc32 3y ago
  At some point, you have to declare the war against something, over. The war against polio, the war against dengue fever, etc. even while there may continue low-grade outbreaks. Perfect is the enemy of the good.
• fundad 3y ago
  It's foreign to most American college students too, almost all US colleges accept almost all applicants. A very small number of private, public and military colleges attract so many applicants they have to select students for admission.
• variadix 3y ago
  People want to play identity politics, not solve tangible issues like income disparity and economic mobility.
• edgyquant 3y ago
  The reason often given is that most poor people are white
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Imagine the same argument but swap race for gender. Why are you trying to get women into medicine? Just to help the historically disadvantaged? Why don't you just let poor people in and not care about their gender? Nowadays, you could probably get away with that because everyone has got over the whole "women's brains are too small and their wombs too big for logical thought to even be possible" idea. But when the (highly successful) affirmative action for women was brought in, that was still a major part of American culture that it was designed to work around. Similarly with the race thing. The US fought a big civil war about whether people with dark skin were livestock or people and the losing side didn't actually change their mind just because they lost. So they needed laws to address that.
  • paconbork 3y ago
    I think that worked in the timeframe it did because women as a group aren't generationally poor (which is to say they aren't born any more or less well off than men), and so the entire shift was one of cultural attitudes. Perhaps AA for women helped normalize female doctors more quickly (haven't looked at any data on this but it seems plausible), though it remains to be seen if the same strategy can work for balancing CS. I'm curious though: did people at the time assume female doctors were less qualified because of AA?
  • influx 3y ago
    This is an interesting point, however: "As of spring 2021, women made up 59.5 percent of all U.S. college students", does that argue that we should have affirmative action for men's admissions to college?
    • dahwolf 3y ago
      No, doesn't count for men. They're just broken and need to "step up".
      • somewhereoutth 3y ago
        Or perhaps, once shorn of the advantage of being physically stronger, it turns out that they are a bit rubbish really.
• snowwrestler 3y ago
  There is another reason, less talked about, that higher education started considering factors like socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and national origin in admissions. It became clear that immersing predominantly white, privileged students in a predominantly white, privileged campus during 4 years of college was poorly preparing them as leaders for a future world in which they will encounter a greater diversity of backgrounds than their parents did. (Because of both changing U.S. demographics AND growing global trade.) And it became clear that sourcing students primarily from white, privileged backgrounds was poorly positioning the institutions themselves in an increasingly diversifying society. As legal barriers to the financial and political participation of women and minorities fell, there were more opportunities for people of those backgrounds to succeed. And elite higher education institutions want to remain the schools of choice for the most successful members of society (regardless of background). They can’t do that if everyone thinks they only care about rich white people. Adjusting admissions to increase the diversity of backgrounds of new students was a way to short-cut solutions to these challenges. In short, a thumb on the scale to bring the student body more in line with global diversity was also done with an eye toward remaining competitive as a top choice among options for higher education.
• kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  One issue is it isn't applied fairly. I know a Chinese-American who inquired into AA and was turned away because he wasn't a "traditionally disenfranchised" minority.
• firstlink 3y ago
  It's telling that not a single reply to your comment actually engages with the question about poor smart white kids. The answer is simple: poor white kids are the outgroup, and "mainstream" American society would like them to kindly go away. They aren't wanted. Society has no use for them.
• Natsu 3y ago
  I've long thought that poverty is the best way to do this, because it's self-correcting. We'll probably never be truly and fully equal in every way, just because random stuff happens and there's only one perfectly equal state out there, but a whole lot of unequal possibilities. So inasmuch as any group is disadvantaged, they'll get more help due to there being more of them that are poor and this strategy will work to self-correct the imbalance.
• rawgabbit 3y ago
  I genuinely don't get why the race thing is part of the equation. In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. In his opinion, he argued that affirmative action which is a race based policy is logically incompatible with the Equal Protection clause. Affirmative Action was always about race. The US historically and systematically discriminated, disenfranchised, and disadvantaged slaves and children of slaves. The problem with race based policies like Affirmative Action is (a) like Roberts argues it is illogical to fix historical racial discrimination with modern racial affirmation (b) you have unintended consequences like discrimination against Asians (c) how do you even define race in today's hyper connected world? e.g., Is Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, an African-American? Are recent immigrants from West Africa also African-American? Race conscious policies are generally distasteful because you then dwell into how many generations of your ancestors were from X continent and what percentage you are of Y race.
  • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    > In the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, the US fought a civil war to end racial discrimination. That is so ahistorical, it makes me wince. A war to end slavery, yes (though you could argue even that). To end racial discrimination? That is a ludicrous thing for a supposedly educated person to say. Abraham Lincoln didn't think the freed slaves should get the vote.
    • rawgabbit 3y ago
      It was during oral arguments with Waxman. Below is the full quote from https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/john-roberts-affirmative-action-supreme-court/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/john-roberts-affirma.... The controversy animated Roberts, himself a graduate of Harvard College and Law School. “Take two African American applicants,” he said to lawyer Seth Waxman, representing Harvard. “They both can get a tip, right, based on their race? And yet they may have entirely different views. Some of their views may contribute to diversity from the perspective of Asians or Whites. Some of them may not. And yet it’s true that they’re eligible for the same increase in the opportunities for admission based solely on their skin color?” Waxman acknowledged that being an African American or being a Hispanic could give the applicant a boost and may even be determinative of who gets a coveted place in the freshman class. “Race, for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being, you know, an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip,” Waxman said, offering an example that Roberts immediately skewered. “We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players,” he rejoined. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of considerable concern.”
• lost_tourist 3y ago
  Go read any article/book about living as a person of color in America, also read about the history of slavery, jim crow, and civil rights. You might understand then, you will never get that story via HN or American mainstream media. I mean if you're serious about it at all, read about it from the perspective of those who are being discriminated against.
• nameless_prole 3y ago
  [dead]
• CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
  A tangent question I have, and have asked here before without any satisfactory answer: How does it even work? I can proof I'm poor with for example tax returns, but how does someone proof they are of a certain "race"?
  • bombcar 3y ago
    You don’t. And arguing that someone is not the race they claim is extremely taboo.
    • CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
      So why doesn't everyone fill in whatever gives them the highest chance of getting into college?
      • bombcar 3y ago
        Because by and large most people are basically honest. Same reason everyone doesn’t just walk out of restaurants without paying. But there have been high profile cases where it has come to light later and people have endured some social shame.
        • CorrectHorseBat 3y ago
          That's not what I meant, let me rephrase my question: How does someone know what they should fill in? Is it fine to fill in African American if one of your grandparents was black? Or only if your skin is dark enough?
          • bombcar 3y ago
            Hard to say. General consensus seems to be “appearance” but others go by the one drop rule.
• gghffguhvc 3y ago
  As a non-American, I think watching season 4 of The Wire, which has an education and politics focus, was both eye opening and profound. Highlighted the profound gap between US and where I grew up on a number of issues.
• cheekibreeki2 3y ago
  It's an idea as obsolete as daylight savings time.
• bcatanzaro 3y ago
  I have wondered this myself and I think the answer is that American universities want to discriminate based on wealth. They actually want the richest kids possible going to their schools. Their business model depends on it.
• frankfrankfrank 3y ago
  I cannot go into the actual reasons for automatic action here because it is heresy against the church, so to say. But let me put it this way, it makes no sense and is insane, because it is of course not logical or sane, regardless of the various excuses and irrational mental knots America has been twisted and abused into in orders to support it.
• kylerush 3y ago
  Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people (or “model minorities” like Asian race) are not disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it’s the opposite. You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system. Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct. If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.
  • lolinder 3y ago
    This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated topic. While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial. This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.
    • kylerush 3y ago
      The point you’re making is that some cultures devalue educational achievement and success? So much so that we should expect to see members of those cultures disproportionately lacking access to opportunity because they “don’t want it?”
      • lolinder 3y ago
• da39a3ee 3y ago
  The answer is basically: America has managed to make race and socioeconomic status incredibly highly correlated, especially in its large coastal cities where basically all poor people are non-white. It's nothing like, for example, Northern European cities with large white working class populations. Obviously there are a huge number of poor white people in America. Mostly in the vast countryside with its small towns. And you're right that they're forgotten about a bit in this debate; certainly no one expects them ever to send their children to Harvard. I think the reason they are forgotten about in this debate is that the white educated classes feel very guilty about the terrible race-wealth correlation.
• rrauenza 3y ago
  > I've come understand it to mean "positively discriminate based on race, so long as it's a minority race" - please correct me of I'm wrong. In theory, but in practice it often includes “unless you are Asian.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-fight-school-discrimination-affirmative-action-racial-justice-admissions-standards-testing-charter-schools-achievement-gap-harvard-supreme-court-11646172518 https://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-fight-school-dis...
• j45 3y ago
  It’s a part of the equation because the Equation is so designed to be against it by the variables that are included and excluded. I promise if you spend even an iota of time digging into this you will find some meaningful substance that resonates wi the buoy without asking other (indirectly or unintentionally) to do your mental labour for you and to your satisfaction to be convinced otherwise. This itself is an example of the type of variables and equations that exist that seem second nature because of how they are conditioned into most people from a young age without awareness.
• aredox 3y ago
  Because the US uses race as a trigger to keep the poor fighting amongst themselves. That's why.
  • wyager 3y ago
    Or, more parsimoniously (no pun intended), because poverty isn't as strong of a unifying factor as you think.
    • aredox 3y ago
      Are Irish people of a different race than British and German people? You may think they aren't, but it used to be so. Absurd, eh? Except that it was the case, because of a deliberate strategy to make poor people fight among themselves. Latinos are just the foreign "du jour".Tomorrow it's going to be someone else. And it is deliberate.
• willio58 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? I recently listened to an NPR piece on this and it seems like you're right here. Even with affirmative action you're really only affecting those that are going to elite colleges, and a large amount of people who benefited from it actually didn't come from low-income households. Essentially affirmative action benefited a tiny (like <1%) portion of all people going into universities in the way it was intended. What would be much more useful is exactly what you say, taking much more of the student's overall socioeconomic status into account rather than race. We would probably find that this does a better job of helping those who actually need help. And that would likely mean that minorities are still prioritized. Finally, what we should really be doing if we care about helping those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder is make all community college free. It's already very cheap as-is , we just need to take the leap to make it totally free. This would also help the student loan crisis since those who are going for bachelor degrees would only need a couple more years of education vs. 4
  • doktorhladnjak 3y ago
    I listened to that same episode of Throughline. It was a great discussion that touched on aspects I’d not considered. One the key takeaways for me was the question of “what is it trying to achieve?” and “is it working?” To which the answers are nobody can agree but it’s not achieving any of the possible goals. The effects of affirmative action having been banned from California public universities since 1996, including Berkeley and UCLA, was also quite telling. This happened nearly 30 years ago, so the effects are very clear to see. Diversity was rocky for a few years, but they eventually figured out other ways to have it without using affirmative action. The part about community colleges being a huge lever at getting more students into higher education was interesting. It’s not talked about much but has proved to be very successful.
  • least 3y ago
    No, we don’t need to be making community college free. Why do people always place so much emphasis on college when it’s clear that the entire system before that point is failing kids? All you’re doing is making it marginally easier for the people already sufficiently motivated to succeed in college to have a little easier time. Elementary and Secondary education is what desperately needs attention, not college. Certainly not with public funding.
• User23 3y ago
  Basically the problem is that poor Whites and Asians significantly outperform even affluent Blacks and non-White Hispanics. So simply going based on income would lead to a wildly unrepresentative low proportion of Black and Hispanic students.
  • onos 3y ago
    It’s really simple: if black s and Hispanics want to go to Harvard let them study as much as the asians. I’m confident they can do it.
• slt2021 3y ago
  Affirmative Action is not about social-democratic "lets help poor black people". Nobody is gonna help poor people in America. Poor people are always told to "pull themselves by the bootstraps (sic!)" The beneficiaries of AA are: 1. Kids of rich black people (like children of OBAMA) 2. Rich international students from African continent (Nigeria, Ghana etc) 3. Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender)
  • usaar333 3y ago
    > Rich white young women (for those colleges that do AA based on gender) Very few colleges prefer women. Of those that do, it's pretty much just the engineering focused ones and thus would pick up nearly as many Asian women as white women. Generally, (weak) male preferences are more common given the general male underrepresentation in higher ed.
    • slt2021 3y ago
      Also it mostly benefits legacies. Legacy female +black with subpar SAT scores (despite having enough money for SAT prep) is a perfect candidate in Harvard’s eyes
• tecoholic 3y ago
  There are a lot of replies here and anything that talks about "economic" conditions probably doesn't understand AA. AA is not a poverty alleviation program. It is a social justice program. Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. For example, despite owning homes in the same neighbourhood, the appraisal of homes of black people ends up lower than white folks[1], there are more traffic stops and searches for black folks than white[2]..etc., you get the drift. So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. Now there aren't many ways to suddenly make this go away. So, AA is an attempt at making this go away by saying, put more of the people from the underrepresented community in places where they are underrepresented, starting with the high echelons of education. By that the society hopes to the laws we create, systems we build as a result will have the perspective of people from those community. It's not a silver bullet, not a magical solution, but one amongst many things to try. [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-home-appraisals.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/realestate/racial-bias-ho... [2] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
  • austin-cheney 3y ago
    > Poverty alleviation can be done just with money, but social systemic unfair treatment cannot be undone with money. That sounds backwards on both points. Poverty impacts how people perceive and interact with the world from building relationships to the use and conservation of assets. For example people in poverty are less likely to save for the future because institutions necessary to safely preserve assets into the future are distant therefore resulting in behaviors motivated towards immediate consumption. That is not something fixed by just throwing money at it. At the same time social systemic unfair treatment can be fixed with money as it allows an otherwise well positioned person to alter their relationship with the constraints imposing such unfair conditions. > So, if a poor white family is given a lot of money and they move into a richer neighbourhood, they would enjoy a social capital the same amount of money cannot buy for a black family. That imposes a bunch of unstated assumptions that may or may not apply. Most all my neighbors are black families of different economic statuses who moved into a predominately white neighborhood and did just fine regarding social capital.
• sandworm101 3y ago
  >> I assume the intent is to help disadvantaged people have opportunities that more priviledged people have already. That's actually where you have missed the point. This isn't about disadvantaged people. This is only about race. In the US, racial discrimination is evil and is generally disallowed. But you are 100% allowed to discriminate against poor people. That is capitalism. If someone said Disneyland was discriminating against poor people because they charged an entrance fee, the vast majority of Americans would laugh at the concept of even calling that discrimination. Everyone who sells something for a price, including schools that sell access to education, are allowed to discriminate against those who cannot afford to pay. So "disadvantaged" isn't enough. To get protection or some sort of leg-up your disadvantage must arise from race/sex/religion ... basically anything other than lack of money.
• mannykannot 3y ago
  Ethnic and cultural discrimination (in the US and elsewhere) is not just a form of discrimination against the poor; in fact, it is a causative factor (in the US and elsewhere) in relative and absolute poverty. Trying to squeeze the issues into a one-dimensioned worldview misses what is really going on.
• rmbyrro 3y ago
  > "illegally discriminating based on race" Is there a legal way to discriminate based on race? I thought that was pretty much illegal in most countries, despite efforts in sections of both left and right to keep racism alive...
• eyelidlessness 3y ago
  There’s some good discussion downthread already. I want to make a particular observation that your intuition is: - totally obviously correct in a vacuum with no other factors - reflective of how most white Americans think of the issue, because their experience of persistent racism is that it’s mostly unnoticeable or trivially ignorable - what people motivated to reverse AA have reinforced for decades, because they want this to be the predominant intuition even for people with more context - logically reasonable if you assume advantage barriers generally follow a similar pattern and even then if you assume good faith - untenable on inspection for the same reason any social democratic institution needs to exist: a thing that’s supposed to be structurally fair intrinsically isn’t, and demands correction to address that The problem is that an economic axis isn’t the only one involved. Sometimes it isn’t even involved at all. Racism is deeply embedded in American culture and history and outcomes, even when other factors are otherwise favorable. And at least in the US, this is a huge source of conflict among otherwise like minds even on the left. It would be much better if those with an open mind to “can’t we just level the field” had a more open mind to the various axes of relative and historically intentionally stratified advantage. That applies to race, to sex, to sexuality and gender identity, to disability. And in each, structural inequality is much more particular and involved than access to money/resources.
  • raxxorraxor 3y ago
    There are a lot of other factors that influence advantages and disadvantages in every aspect of life. This is of course trivial. The point is that you cannot reach a better approximation of justice by a complex rule set determined by some king makers. No, racial discrimination will inevitably worsen the situation. Also, this is by definition the most prominent and straight forward example of structural discrimination as well. It becomes structurally unfair. Likewise a better approach to social democracy is to look at disadvantages today. It is a common mistake to create false problems. This would not be the first time. And participation in society sadly has a lot to do with economic factors and I am sure that is something social democracy would like to address. Of course there are exceptions, but you have to be careful about the metrics you choose.
• pyuser583 3y ago
  Modern affirmative action is not about helping disadvantaged groups up. It’s about ensuring diversity.
• ajmurmann 3y ago
  Lex Fridman had a very good discussion of the topic with Harvard professor and author Randall Kennedy: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WRIDTV6l5WcbNt2aaO02K?si=f7a3e659a16441a0 https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WRIDTV6l5WcbNt2aaO02K?si=f... The discussion of affirmative action starts at 2:22. The entire episode is very much worth listening to if you want to get hear a nuanced perspective on race problems in the US.
• coliveira 3y ago
  You misunderstood the intention of the program. The problem is not to help poor people, there are other programs available for that. The problem is to fight racial based discrimination, which is rampant in the US. Until the 60s, universities were out of reach for African Americans and other minorities, not just because of economic issues. This type of programs came to revert this situation.
• proxiful-wash 3y ago
  ROFL. This is the Communist Propaganda machine of pit the free people against the free people so the liberate media aligns with this message.
• morepork 3y ago
  To add in a slightly different angle, this sort of thing is not exclusive to America. For example, in New Zealand, a couple of weeks ago there was a bit of a kerfuffle due to reporting on those of certain ethnicities being prioritised on surgical wait lists. Those against it were arguing (validly) that prioritisation should only be based on clinical need. However, the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation. So how do you resolve this? In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution. Instead you get a "hack" like this to increase the weight of the minorities to even things out overall, hopefully to be removed later while you resolve the trickier issues. Sometimes just targeting things to those in most need doesn't always fairly target across ethnic groups. You can read a bit more detail about the NZ situation here: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ethnicity-a-factor-in-surgery-waitlists-for-years https://www.newsroom.co.nz/ethnicity-a-factor-in-surgery-wai...
  • LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    > In an ideal world you will dig into the details, and figure out why that was happening, and resolve the underlying issues. But as with a lot of these problems with a human element there's no quick and easy solution. If they managed to identify that “the data over many years was showing that for people with the same clinical need, those from the minority ethnicities were not getting the same prioritisation”, it means they have done 95% of the required work already. So either the report is bogus, or the solution isn’t as complex as you make it to be.
• Groxx 3y ago
  The tl;dr is: because there exists systemic disadvantage-ous-ness clearly caused by, and maintained along lines of race. It's not just The Past™ that was racist to damaging degrees, Now™ is too. All people in bad circumstances beyond their control deserve ways out. There are tons and tons and tons of subsidies and whatnot targeting individual reasons, like poverty (people think you're poor? you're less likely to get a good-paying job, and more likely to get one that abuses you). Race is just one more, and it's particularly effective at leveling the field because it has extremely strong correlations with (and very clearly a cause in) tons of them.
  • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    But with affirmative action it's about race and not being poor. It's not a measure that looks at household income, but a measure that looks at skin color. Poor white Bobby from a trailer park in alabama is financially fucked, and noone cares about him, because he's white.
    • Groxx 3y ago
      Yes, because by being of race X they will continue to be affected by racists.
• nonstopdev 3y ago
  Basically it’s a bandaid. There is a massive problem with the talent pool coming from minority communities. Look at any school in a lower income area and it’s plagued with issues of attendance, resources of things like access to technology, commitment of parents to help their kids outside of the classroom with homework, and general safety that fails to provide a quality learning space for children to become qualified when they leave school. Since you can’t put massive school reform with budgets and funding to provide this to schools in a political cycle of 2-4 years, we just keep kicking the can down the road and accept instead of helping build better youth who all can compete for jobs and colleges, let’s just lower the bar and make it seem like we are doing something.
• leonidasv 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Data shows that poor white children fares better in life than poor black kids[0][1]. This pattern is not even exclusive to the US: Brazil, for example (a case I'm familiar with), faces the same problem[2] and this led the government to implement affirmative action racial quotas for admission in state-owned Universities since 2012[3] with very positive results[4]. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black-poverty-differs-from-white-poverty/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black... [1] https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/two-american-experiences-racial-divide-poverty https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/two-american-experiences-ra... [2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/10/pobre-preto-tem-menos-chance-de-fazer-faculdade-do-que-pobre-branco-diz-estudo.shtml https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/10/pobre-preto-t... (article in Portuguese) [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/world/americas/brazil-enacts-affirmative-action-law-for-universities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/world/americas/brazil-ena... [4] https://nacla.org/affirmative-action-brazil https://nacla.org/affirmative-action-brazil
  • hcurtiss 3y ago
    But why is that? Wouldn’t the right answer be to identify and root out any systematic racism benefitting whites rather than implement explicitly race-based (one might even say “racist”) counter-measures?
    • leonidasv 3y ago
      The "root" is probably in the police, war on drugs, racist people on positions of power, neglected neighbourhoods, etc. The World has been trying to solve racism for decades now, if it was so easy, we wouldn't be talking about this right now. Affirmative action makes sense because it's a policy that's simple, cheap and fast to implement to counterbalance this. And let's not forget that, in the past, the State legally discriminated against those people and no historical reparation has ever been given to them.
• wyager 3y ago
  > Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? "Poor people" aren't a unified political coalition in the US. For various reasons, you can't do political favors for poor people and expect them to reliably vote for you. Black people are a unified political coalition in the US. I recommend reading about Bueno de Mesquita's model of selectorate theory for understanding how stable political patronage networks operate; the model is very insightful for cases like this.
• dudeinjapan 3y ago
  Amen. AA benefits middle and upper-class black kids far more than it does kids in the inner city. You can't convince me that Ivy Blue Carter (Beyonce and Jay-Z's daughter) has faced more hardship and prejudice in her life than a white kid who grew up in a trailer park.
• ano88888 3y ago
  And don't forget the blatant high rejection rate smart asian kids. You get rejected just because there are too many smart asian kids.
• jowdones 3y ago
  I assume it's similar to the system of "minorities quotas" for admission into Romanian universities in Transylvania. The region has a significant number of Hungarian ethnics and used to have Germans too but now they're rather vanished. Anyhow, from the total number of seats per year, a larger number is allocated to Hungarians and a smaller one to Germans. The caveat being you don't have to be ethically German, only to speak it. In the wake of the new woke movement I can see a radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one ;) ;) ;) So with Hungarian they fill those places with what I estimate to be 100% ethnic Hungarians. With Germans however, they're like 99% Romanians and Hungarians who take the hit of having to learn / speak German for the advantage of having fewer competition. Like mainstream (Romanian, Hungarian) computer science can have 10 candidates per seat, the German line has 1.5 or so: much easier to get in. I know a guy who couldn't code a FOP loop (with the typo of P instead of R) out of a paper bag but completed the German computer science line.
  • int_19h 3y ago
    > radical version of affirmative action where you don't have to be black as long as you identify as one Look up Rachel Dolezal.
• ricankng787 3y ago
  The one thing I find that is often lost in this discussion in America is, why aren't we targeting the K-12 system where the majority of these discrepancies occur? We talk about tipping the scales at admission to universities, but never to what I believe is the actual root of the problem.
• 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  > But then why the entire detour with race? Why not just.. well, let poor people come first? Capitalist societies literally cannot subsist without a class of people living in poverty. At best, that poverty is exported to other countries but it must be somewhere.
• devwastaken 3y ago
  Income based help is the only non discriminatory way of admissions. Colleges dont like this because then the college would overwhelmingly reflect poor white people, and they would not be able to claim "diversity". No institution of wealth exists that does not play politics. To demonstrate this fact you will overwhelmingly see black individuals from very white and non-poverty backgrounds graduating from unis. Most don't make it their first year, the costs are insane and the culture drinks its own Kool aid. If blues legitimately cared about people the streets would back them - they do not. It's us vs gov.
• tijl 3y ago
  The podcast of the WSJ might answer this for you (episode of june 29 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-rules-against-affirmative-action/b0ed2c20-ad6f-43b5-90db-8604964bf091?mod=audiocenter_podcasts https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-r... ) They say, some states already banned affirmative action. Universities in those states have tried to still recruit minority students, by going to schools with large group of minority students, and actively recruit there. The problem is, those tend to be schools with poor students. Students who cannot pay their university fee. Universities end up subsidizing those students, which is expensive. With affirmative action, they could more easily attract rich minority students.
• luckydata 3y ago
  As an immigrant to the US I also see things that way on the basis that you can't fix the wrongs of a race based problem by using a race based solution. Especially left leaning folks around here like to deride that notion by calling it "color blind policies" but I think seeing everything in the frame of race is THE problem and it just entrenches the views of people on both sides of this debate. I think it's much saner to completely throw away the framework and look at the issue: what you're trying to fix here is economic inequality, so do that. The side effect is you can avoid resentment from people unjustly disadvantaged by race based policies and avoid further radicalization of a discourse that has no basis in anything measurable. To be clear: race is made up BS, and how americans view race is absolutely idiotic for anyone that hasn't been raised here. Whenever I need to check a box I have to choose between being white, or latino, or black etc... Right there you see the problem: that list has two skin colors of uncertain definition, and a category that's cultural and not based on skin color or other physical attributes. I was born in a mediterranean country (Italy) and according to current categorization I'm white but I went to school with other Italians that are darker skinned than people I know that call themselves "of color" in the US. So which box do they check? Can I check "latino" since well, we're the original ones? Or do I have to ask to add a "cisalpine gaul" since I'm partially from the north of the country and have a red beard? It's complete nonsense. You're not missing anything, it's just an entrenched cultural view that people raised in this country can't seem to be able to escape.
  • int_19h 3y ago
    As an immigrant in US, I feel that this whole American exceptionalism thing has been sort of internalized and reflected by much of the American liberal left into some kind of "we're exceptionally bad" deal. I often hear claims that US is horrible because such-and-such is common practice here unlike "all other civilized countries" or some such, while the speaker is oblivious to the fact that many American laws regarding something are actually very liberal by that standard (voter identification is probably the single most common example, but it also comes up sometimes wrt abortion term limits in some states). To be clear, being better at something than somebody else who is even worse than you is not a valid excuse for being bad either way. I just hate that this kind of rhetoric 1) discredits the points being made, and 2) spreads misinformation.