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> 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. You're implicitly assuming it c

> 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. You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. The people who had been harmed by those policies are not the ones seeking admission to Harvard. Everyone seeking admission to Harvard has been born into circumstances through no fault of their own, so just help the financially less fortunate to provide more equal opportunities across the board. Black people are disproportionately represented among the poor, so this would disproportionately help them anyway.

cloverich 3y ago
But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth. IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out. Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.
- naasking 3y ago
  > But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period). If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
  - dayvid 3y ago
    The real answer is you have to get anything you want ASAP before people stop caring or it becomes more difficult to achieve. This is why certain groups have received reparations and others haven't. Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.
  - kenjackson 3y ago
    > If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
    - naasking 3y ago
      > How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world. > and the same schooling prior to college This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps. > The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough. Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.
      - nightski 3y ago
        Universal healthcare sets a base standard which is fantastic but it in no way equalizes healthcare across the economic spectrum.
        naasking 3y ago
        I'm frankly not concerned about the 0.1% that can afford to fly to another country for experimental treatments. The US is the primary place for this anyway, so if the US went universal healthcare route, that shrinks the pool even further.
- scarmig 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - llbeansandrice 3y ago
    There are kids applying to college very literally right now whose parents were legally discriminated against by the Federal government in the 1970s.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago? Are their children materially worse off statistically? Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods that everyone who's materially worse off should be uplifted. What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
      - adbachman 3y ago
        > How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago? Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was discussed. Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents, your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you have representation in that process? Affirmative action is an artificially generated membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for people who may otherwise be excluded.
        scarmig 3y ago
        That's missing the point: how does giving person A preferential access to college recompense person B who is distinct from person A? As far as legacy admissions go, they're noxious, but you're not accounting for the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege.
- gmarx 3y ago
  When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale
NeverFade 3y ago
The social justice movement presumes to "make things right", but often it's hard or impossible to do so, and trying can have the opposite effect. Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized. Why? Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?
- wizofaus 3y ago
  Except those even able to immigrate out of such recently "impoverished" nations are a small self-selected subset of that population, that are likely considerably better off than those who stay behind and and certainly likely to be those with a strong determination to succeed. Perhaps you could argue the same of slave-descended native born Americans who then apply for college, but the former group are making the same decision, and at any rate, applying for college is rather easier than deciding to move your entire family half-way across the world. FWIW I'm generally skeptical of whether AA is actually a good thing for various reasons but I assume it's felt "something" has to be done to address underrepresentation of particular races in college admissions. Recent Asian immigrants if anything seem to be slightly overrepresented so for AA policies to have their desired effect, yes, they will by design discriminate against such a group.
  - thworp 3y ago
    The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community. As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.
    - 3y ago
RajT88 3y ago
> You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. There will never be a consensus on what is "made right" and "fair". And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way. Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more. I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found. Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  "And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way." I have family who recently immigrated from Liberia, and their general sense is that the black slave descendants had their family structures so incredibly destroyed that it makes sense to focus on those descendants instead of all Black people. In their communities with strong family networks and more fathers in the home, they don't see nearly the same issues as the mostly fatherless slave descendent families.
cycomanic 3y ago
While that would very much be the the rational decision to make it goes against one of the core principles of much of the discourse in the US, which is that poor people are poor because of some character flaw or being financially irresponsible if you would have just tried hard enough you would not be poor, so why should the state help you. Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.
pkulak 3y ago
But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. And black folks who are doing fine, but not great, might be doing great right now if not for the color of their skin. Sure, affirmative action based on income will accidentally sweep up some of the right people, but we know how to exactly target these programs, even if we're no longer allowed to.
- naasking 3y ago
  > But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. Maybe they were discriminated against because they were Irish 100 years ago, or Italian 70 years ago, neither of which were considered "white" at the time either. I'm sure we can play this grievance game back to the first humans, but I'm not sure what that would accomplish. The question you have to ask yourself is: is it more important to help people who are suffering right now, regardless of their race or ethnicity, or is it more important to try and fail to solve some nebulous, poorly understood "inherited grievance" problem.
  - vkou 3y ago
    Very few people in the US piss on the Irish today, but plenty of people and institutions continue to piss on African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. Sundown towns, and the same sick mentality that produces them hadn't gone away, even if some of them have mellowed out on the edges, or are too afraid to be brazen about it. There's a large difference of degree between the problems faced by those groups.

cloverich 3y ago

But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. (Black) Affirmative action seems like a reasonable way to speed that process up, given the strength of network effects (ie who you know) on progress and wealth. IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out. Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.

naasking 3y ago
> But the question is whether those wrongs will right themselves and over what time period and at what cost. How can the Holocaust be made right? How can the genocide of the Native Amercians be made right? I think these questions are a distraction at best, probably because they are unanswerable at this time (maybe unanswerable period). If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I agree there will be lingering discriminatory effects, which is why every system should take precautions and have feedback loops for self-correction, like blinding, regular audits, etc. This last part is where most of the failures occur, mostly because they're missing entirely.
- dayvid 3y ago
  The real answer is you have to get anything you want ASAP before people stop caring or it becomes more difficult to achieve. This is why certain groups have received reparations and others haven't. Saying how can we or what can we do is an honest answer at best and a stalling tactic at worst.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  > If you want to live in a world where people are treated as individuals and where individuals have equal opportunities, then you have to normalize language and behaviours and create systems that treat people as individuals. I'd love this world. How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) and the same schooling prior to college. It seems like for many Americans this philosophy first applies during college admissions. The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough.
  - naasking 3y ago
    > How do we get poor kids access to the same healthcare as a child (and prenatal) Universal healthcare, like everywhere else in the world. > and the same schooling prior to college This one is tougher with wealth disparities, because the wealthy will always have more opportunities and programs available to them. Public funding for after school programs and camps. > The first 17 years of everyone's life is apparently equal enough. Democrats did a good thing with the child tax credit that lifted millions of kids out of poverty. They of course botched it, per usual, by placing a time limit on it, and now it's expired.
    - nightski 3y ago
      Universal healthcare sets a base standard which is fantastic but it in no way equalizes healthcare across the economic spectrum.
      - naasking 3y ago
        I'm frankly not concerned about the 0.1% that can afford to fly to another country for experimental treatments. The US is the primary place for this anyway, so if the US went universal healthcare route, that shrinks the pool even further.
scarmig 3y ago
[flagged]
- llbeansandrice 3y ago
  There are kids applying to college very literally right now whose parents were legally discriminated against by the Federal government in the 1970s.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago? Are their children materially worse off statistically? Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods that everyone who's materially worse off should be uplifted. What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
    - adbachman 3y ago
      > How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago? Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was discussed. Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents, your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you have representation in that process? Affirmative action is an artificially generated membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for people who may otherwise be excluded.
      - scarmig 3y ago
        That's missing the point: how does giving person A preferential access to college recompense person B who is distinct from person A? As far as legacy admissions go, they're noxious, but you're not accounting for the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege.
gmarx 3y ago
When Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding vote in favor of keeping AA back in 2003 even though she was against it, she suggested it might be done away with after another 25 years. We have had affirmative action in college admissions for 50 plus years now. Seems we would have some data to judge its effectiveness by now. More than 20 years ago I recall some top Harvard people lamenting that at Harvard it was mostly helping people who were black but not descended from American slaves. Also, from what I read it is much heavier than a thumb on the scale

NeverFade 3y ago

The social justice movement presumes to "make things right", but often it's hard or impossible to do so, and trying can have the opposite effect. Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized. Why? Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?

wizofaus 3y ago
Except those even able to immigrate out of such recently "impoverished" nations are a small self-selected subset of that population, that are likely considerably better off than those who stay behind and and certainly likely to be those with a strong determination to succeed. Perhaps you could argue the same of slave-descended native born Americans who then apply for college, but the former group are making the same decision, and at any rate, applying for college is rather easier than deciding to move your entire family half-way across the world. FWIW I'm generally skeptical of whether AA is actually a good thing for various reasons but I assume it's felt "something" has to be done to address underrepresentation of particular races in college admissions. Recent Asian immigrants if anything seem to be slightly overrepresented so for AA policies to have their desired effect, yes, they will by design discriminate against such a group.
- thworp 3y ago
  The first and second generation descendants of dirt poor immigrants from Latin America are doing very well in the US (or at least better than African Americans). Some of the recent Caribbean and African immigrants even decry the toxic culture embedded in the "Black" community. As an outside it seems to me that the issue is much deeper than economic calculus and I'd recommend you read/watch some of Thomas Sowell's thoughts on the matter.
  - 3y ago

RajT88 3y ago

> You're implicitly assuming it can be made right. That seems doubtful. I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. There will never be a consensus on what is "made right" and "fair". And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way. Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more. I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found. Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
"And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way." I have family who recently immigrated from Liberia, and their general sense is that the black slave descendants had their family structures so incredibly destroyed that it makes sense to focus on those descendants instead of all Black people. In their communities with strong family networks and more fathers in the home, they don't see nearly the same issues as the mostly fatherless slave descendent families.

cycomanic 3y ago

While that would very much be the the rational decision to make it goes against one of the core principles of much of the discourse in the US, which is that poor people are poor because of some character flaw or being financially irresponsible if you would have just tried hard enough you would not be poor, so why should the state help you. Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.

pkulak 3y ago

But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. And black folks who are doing fine, but not great, might be doing great right now if not for the color of their skin. Sure, affirmative action based on income will accidentally sweep up some of the right people, but we know how to exactly target these programs, even if we're no longer allowed to.

naasking 3y ago
> But poor white people are poor for a reason other than the color of the skin of themselves and their ancestors. Maybe they were discriminated against because they were Irish 100 years ago, or Italian 70 years ago, neither of which were considered "white" at the time either. I'm sure we can play this grievance game back to the first humans, but I'm not sure what that would accomplish. The question you have to ask yourself is: is it more important to help people who are suffering right now, regardless of their race or ethnicity, or is it more important to try and fail to solve some nebulous, poorly understood "inherited grievance" problem.
- vkou 3y ago
  Very few people in the US piss on the Irish today, but plenty of people and institutions continue to piss on African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, etc. Sundown towns, and the same sick mentality that produces them hadn't gone away, even if some of them have mellowed out on the edges, or are too afraid to be brazen about it. There's a large difference of degree between the problems faced by those groups.