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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
by 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 agoExcept 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 agoYeah, 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 agoand 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 agoAnything explicitly discriminatory that the government could have done something about and chose not to. We need to forget about "microaggressions" and deal with the macroaggressions. It's typical that white liberals have embarked on the project of detecting subtle clues to the slightest slights and condemning people for them, when they should just treat historical race-based abuse claims like any other compensation claim. If you look at black people's family trees enough, you'll find plenty with specific inheritance claims against their white, slaver ancestors. Black people in America are the descendants of white rapists as well as imported slaves.
- earthboundkid 3y agoYes. I was sort of lumping redlining in with Jim Crow, although I guess it's technically a distinct thing.
- giardini 3y agoYes, and generations have passed, so that train has left the station, so to speak. Reparations are no longer an acceptable solution.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAnd yet the grandkids of those slave owners sure as hell still profit from their ill gotten gains
- BobbyJo 3y ago> And yet the grandkids of those slave owners sure as hell still profit from their ill gotten gains. Source? I'd venture to guess most have reverted back to mean wealth given downward mobility rates [0] and the time since slavery ended. [0] https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergenerational-economic-mobility https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration...
- Alupis 3y agoNot to mention so very few families owned slaves back in the day. The way people talk, you'd think everyone had slaves - no, that was a very small minority of ultra-wealthy people. What about people who's families immigrated here post-slavery? Their tax money has to pay reparations too? Reparations is a non-starter. Any discussion or endeavor to push for reparations is a naked attempt to buy votes with lies.
- QuarterReptile 3y agoIt's probably a reliable collective action problem. For example, the point of the 1965 Civil Rights Act was to help black men so their families could stay intact, but Howard Smith poison-pilled the whole thing by diverting it to women. For people who are in the military, I point this out in its internship form. The Skillbridge program was designed to facilitate internships for departing servicemen to address difficulties with veteran unemployment, but the spoils mostly go to officers with highly marketable skills, like submarine and cryptography officers. After all, those officers have each been practicing the art of finding and utilizing beneficial programs to their advantage for decades by that point in their lives; why wouldn't they use this one too?
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoBut people who never owned slaves are now discriminated against so people who never were slaves get priviliges and get accepted to college.
- pessimizer 3y agoRich ADOS should still benefit, though. We should be looking at lineage instead of skin color, because thinking all black people are the same is a handicap of both the left: who think that all "people of color" should be compensated for slavery, and the right: who love to say that US blacks were sold by "their own people." That's like claiming innocence for molesting a child because their parents sold it to you. (I know you know this:))
- Izikiel43 3y agoThe rest of the developed world: why do you care so much about race? Just decide on household income
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y agoThat would run the risk of helping the poor. We don't like doing that here in the USA.
- BobbyJo 3y ago> Just decide on household income Why not just decide on a test scores? Or just grades? Or just sports? Because there is no silver bullet measurement for "how deserving is this kid?" I'd venture to guess that if you asked 50 people how to measure someone's worth with regard to some goal you'd get 50 different answers.
- Izikiel43 3y agoTest scores and income are enough, as they are objective measurements. Grades, as mentioned in another comment, are not consistent across different high schools, and they favor people with more resources. Sports, as in play in the university team, which demands high performance, is also fair, and probably doesn't demand a lot of places, as you can't have a sports team with hundreds of people.
- bobthepanda 3y agoThe issue is that also, generally speaking, anyone who was legally discriminated against probably lives in a jurisdiction performing poorly in test scores, since all schooling in the US are based on geographic districts funded by local property tax, and due to historic discrimination the formerly discriminated groups also live in areas with lower housing wealth. (A lot of people also moved out of districts with large minority populations when integration was mandated, taking their taxes and wealth with them.) Want to make a bunch of people very angry? Propose a metropolitan-area wide school district.
- rd 3y agoAnyone who's attended an Ivy League school can attest to the truth of this, and I've been vehemently disagreeing with every anti-AA comment in this thread, so that says something. Pretty much every Black student I see at school is African (immigrant)-American, not ADOS.
- prepend 3y agoI think ADOS stands for “American Descendants of Slavery” [0] as it is used in terms of US populations and, by definition, Americans aren’t African. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Descendants_of_Slaver...
- vacuity 3y agoYou're technically right, but you and parent (GP?) seem to ultimately be referring to the same group of people. Apologies if you picked up on that; I can't tell.
- ahtihn 3y ago> Poor White and Asian kids still beat out poor Black and Hispanic kids academically on average Why is that the case? For Asians, I don't see what systemic privilege they could have that would need to be compensated away?
- crackercrews 3y agoAsians spend much more time than others on homework. [1] 1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214221101422 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07311214221101...
- charlieyu1 3y agoSo hard work should be punished?
- spacephysics 3y agoThe underlying important question is what do you define as equality? Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? This is a very slippery slope when some definitions are not equal, or stated, as we’ve come into a recent crisis of definitions being rewritten unnaturally (I understand the meaning of words change over time, but there have been recent inorganic changes, I’d argue) The classic opportunity of outcome is proven to be doomed, and is not aligned with your imperfect world assertion. I can get behind equality of opportunity, which I’d argue affirmative action’s impact was antithetical to this vision. We’ve come to a point where the new generation is being held accountable for something they had no hand in. We shouldn’t be trying to treat these diversity reports as a checkbook that needs to be balanced. I heard something that resonated with me, and will probably get me downvoted to oblivion (if it hasn’t already happened): those that want to look for racism, will find it. Once a certain area is solved so to speak, some groups tend to look even harder, and we get to a point now where we have this ever-widening definition of what racism is, the goal posts ever expanding, and this endless loop is our culture eating itself alive. I shouldn’t have to say this, but this doesn’t imply racism doesn’t exist. But it does imply that our definitions of it have radically evolved, and perhaps is being used for ulterior motives outside of “equality”
- djur 3y agoHow exactly has equality of outcome been "proven to be doomed"? At the aggregate level, at least?
- kneebonian 3y agoEquality of outcome is just a fancy way of saying tyranny. Freedom can only exist and only be freedom if you have the right to fail or succeed, if no one can fail or succeed because everyone is made the same there is no freedom, there is no choice. Those that advocate for equality of outcome desire to make again a slave state, where they as "superior educated white people" can ensure that black people are "taken care of" by ensuring they all have jobs, they all have housing, they all have healthcare, they all have food, and that they have no freedom.
- nfw2 3y agoAll else equal, poor white kids probably get a leg up as well if they can articulate it in some way in their application. For example, my (white) dad got into Yale and Princeton, and it probably helped that he was from a podunk town in Wyoming. For a lot of poor white kids though, their situation isn’t obvious from their application.
- klyrs 3y agoYep, I got some scholarships for being the first in my family to go to college, and also from the Dante Alighieri Society for my Italian heritage. They really didn't put much of a dent into tuition, and I worked full-time or took on loans for the rest. I wouldn't describe myself as "poor" but my parents were lower-middle class.
- tester756 3y agoWhy would it take hundreds of years instead of e.g 80?
- ix-ix 3y agoGenerational wealth.
- goatlover 3y agoDoes generation wealth apply to poor people in general or just descendants of slaves?
- ix-ix 3y agoWell non-whites especially, because the government literally gave away money to white people (specifically excluding black people) in the 50s and 60s to buy houses and build generational wealth. So yes, poor people, but also very much non-whites.