8 ms·

> 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

• 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?
        • djur 3y ago
          Representation in the Senate.
        • Volundr 3y ago
          None. Non-whites have plenty of unfair disadvantages however.
          • charlieyu1 3y ago
            Let’s fix the unfair stuff instead of introducing more unfair stuff then
        • panarchy 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
            These are all statistical measures. For any one individual may not see the benefits of these privileges. Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable. There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions? This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity.
            • Timon3 3y ago
              > These are all statistical measures. For any one individual may not see the benefits of these privileges. Grouping everybody into their race and statistics will tell you there is variation. That's unavoidable. Some variation is unavoidable, but statistically significant variation isn't! Why should people in those underpriviledged groups accept a society which gives them fewer chances? > There are thousands of homeless white men in my city. Maybe police interactions might be calmer for them, but what does it matter for somebody whose life is sliding downhill often by their own addictions? Yes, it does matter? If police interactions are calmer and you live longer, you have more chances to turn your life around. We as a society have more chances to help them. > This is why the focus on race seems like such a distraction to me. We could be helping the poor when we're still too busy discussing race and ethnicity. We should help the poor, and we should work to remove disparities between races and ethnicities. Why are those things opposed in your mind?
      • Der_Einzige 3y ago
        I can name several more 1. Communal cultures and stronger family structures. White Americans are insanely atomized and individualistic and that is a serious issue 2. Birthrates/Fertility 3. Far better food/cooking and eating 4. Cultural control, especially in music and to a lesser extent in sports. 5. In the case of certain immigrant groups, significantly higher family wealth than the average white american 6. In the case of some ethnic groups, significantly better physical prowess (it's a handful of tribes where many of the best runners come from) Obviously these are not all that significant compared to the disadvantages, but the idea that there are no other "unfair advantages" is just wrong.
        • sotorfl 3y ago
          [dead]
        • kacesensitive 3y ago
          1. Not a right 2. Not a right 3. Not a right 4. Not a right 5. Not a right 6. Holy shit not a right
          • deleted 3y ago
            [deleted]
      • hackeraccount 3y ago
        Do you think being an African American hurt Barak Obama's chance to be the Democratic nominee for President? Or to be elected President? To answer my own question - it's complicated; it did hurt him in some regards but it helped him too. There were a lot of people in the primary and general election who wanted to know they weren't prejudiced and voted for him at least in part for that reason. This wasn't legal affirmative action. It was something else. I don't know if I'd call it an "unfair right" but for the right person in the right circumstance it can be an advantage. Does it out weigh all the disadvantages? Probably not.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • bombcar 3y ago
        Higher successful suicide attempts I guess.
  • sotorfl 3y ago
    William J. Bennett’s Aug. 12 commentary is the latest example of a recent trend in conservative public relations--opponents of affirmative action claiming to be the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr. They invoke the sentence from King’s 1963 speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged by “the content of their character,” not the “color of their skin.” Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.” You are incorrect about MLKs assessment. From the LA Times.
  • zapataband1 3y ago
    Bennett conveniently ignores one fact--King was a strong supporter of affirmative action. In “Why We Can’t Wait,” published in 1963, he argued that given the long history of American racism, blacks fully deserved “special, compensatory measures” in jobs, education and other realms. Four years later, in “Where Do We Go From Here?” he wrote: “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
• zpeti 3y ago
  Because divide and rule works way better in America based on race and not class… It’s intentional. These political footballs are half real, half tactics.
• MockObject 3y ago
  > 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 is there really any better explanation?
  • jeltz 3y ago
    An alternative one: A culture which has a history of structural racism due to slavery which therefore still thinks about many topics through the lens of race despite it often not being the best suite lens.
• maxsilver 3y ago
  > 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? (snip) 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. Because that assumes "poor people" get "help" in a uniformly fair and anti-racist way, and that's never really true in the US today. If you help "all people" with "no regard" to race, you have just participated in favoring white folks over all others, even though you likely don't realize it. The systems by which you choose to "help" all have various types of racism built-in, and you will have racist results as output, even if you yourself never directly try to commit such an act. (This is what systemic racism is, sometimes called 'institutionalized racism' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism ) Affirmative Action, while not perfect, is one of the few things ever tried that actually accounts for this. It's saying, "you can't be more racist than X" where X is some kind of objective metric (say, "percent of enrollment by race"), and it does not care which of the thousands of people or systems involved are causing the issue, it attempts to force-corrects for it. It is an emergency stop-gap, until such a future as that result is already happening naturally, making it redundant. The fact that we still depend on it ~60+ yrs later, is sort of living proof that we haven't really dealt with systemic racism yet. (As if all the other evidence, between housing, employment, police brutality and murders, etc, wasn't already enough)
  • JSavageOne 3y ago
    The solution to racism isn't more racism.
• postmodest 3y ago
  Let's imagine a hypothetical America, where we remove the economic aspect. Let's imagine that every household in america pulls in $250k/year and prices are uniform for every household across the nation. No one is poor. Everyone goes to the same excellent free schools where the teachers also make $250k/year. We've removed economics as a variable. Everyone is equally educated and equally rich. But let's leave one variable in: America is exactly as racist as America is currently. Ethnic backgrounds and cultures still exist, and there are enough white assholes in "gatekeeping" roles to affect the distribution of people who pass their gates. This is a fact that is a true thing that already exists in America; we're not ADDING it to the model, we've just left it in as the only thing we want to measure. Structurally, as a society, you want the distribution of people who pass through higher education into roles like "Doctors" and "Lawyers" and eventually "Politicians" to broadly match the distribution of cultures that comprise the society as a whole. Otherwise you create an apartheid state, and an angry under-class that threatens the stability of the system. This is an axiom so simple that even Lyndon Johnson understood it. So in our Model America, you need to have a law that says "yeah we know that everyone is the same, but because a degree from [Prestigious University] has a ripple effect that affects society as a whole, we want to make sure that graduating classes have at least the CHANCE of reflecting the cultural diversity of the nation as a whole, so we need to have a law that prevents Bad Actors in Admissions from just saying 'Oh, we already let in all the white people in line, wink wink wink, sorry, maybe next year'" That's the reason you might still want quotas. And given the distribution of test scores because everyone ISN'T identical frictionless spheres, you might want to add a weight to minority test scores to float them overall, so they get in. And yeah, that might not seem fair if you're in the majority; or if you're in the minority whose test scores are highest, but there's a clear and self-evident purpose to those kinds of weightings. Life's not fair, but it should be equitable, overall.
• panarchy 3y ago
  https://indypendent.org/2015/01/the-white-race-was-invented-heres-how-it-happened/ https://indypendent.org/2015/01/the-white-race-was-invented-... https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-o... I also seem to recall a factory or trade uprising/strike in/around Europe between 1400-1700 where they basically made up whiteness to divide the laborers and get them to argue amongst themselves (successfully), but this may be apocryphal as I cannot seem to find a source.
  • sornaensis 3y ago
    Really, people had to be told that people with white(r) skin, are similar..? How stupid do these people think 'everyone else' is. This is the most absurd thing I've read all day. Humans, who divide themselves along such lines as _what tv shows they like_, had to have the concept of _skin colour_ invented for them. Really think about how ridiculous this assertion is.
    • panarchy 3y ago
      It wasn't that they just said that they looked different obviously, what a ridiculous assertion . They seeded talking points of racial supremacy amongst them to divide them when before they saw themselves more unified as workers with their race not having inherent merit.
    • MockObject 3y ago
      People naturally mix. They work together, worship together, and marry each other, unless this natural mixing is opposed by external forces.