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Although I agree with you, I get the impression that someone who doesn't think affirmative action should exist even after learning about the gang violence, inte

• jivatmanx 14y ago
  Why can't we just try to remedy those ills directly? Why does there need to be an association with race? I'm not denying that these are a result of the U.S's past action, and that we have a responsibility to fix them, but I have doubts that associating them with race is necessary or helpful in any way.
  • ajross 14y ago
    OK, what's your solution? Affirmative action is a bandaid, and its effects are at best poorly distributed. But it actually works to reduce ethnic imbalance, and most people (I assume you too) agree that's a good thing. You have an alternative to suggest that doesn't have equivalent problems? Just recognize that (I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume) that, because you are a middle class white man, probably 90% of the reason you oppose "affirmative action" is because it negatively impacts your own demographic group. Well, sorry. We're in a priviledged group; get over it.
    • jivatmanx 14y ago
      As I have said, the alternative is affirmative action for the poor in general. Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other social programs don't discriminate based on race, but certainly have that effect where there is larger poverty among African-Americans. What would be the advantage of basing them on race? I'm questioning the best way to achieve the economic effect that we agree on, reducing racial inequality, in the same way that I question if Carbon credits are the best way to reduce emissions (simply taxing fossil fuels, I believe.
      • ajross 14y ago
        It sounds like you simply don't understand what affirmative action is. It's not welfare. You're seriously saying we should give out slots on boards of directors to people on food stamps? AA doesn't correct for immediate need, it corrects for the fact that people growing up in unpriviledged environments lack advantages. So they have to work a job instead of going to a test prep class. They go to schools with high teacher turnover and poor class selection. They live in social environments with high crime. So they don't get into the "right" colleges, and they don't get the great jobs. At what spot on that chain would your "make AA like food stamps" idea actually work? You're not even addressing the problem.
        • MordinSolus 14y ago
          > AA doesn't correct for immediate need, it corrects for the fact that people growing up in unpriviledged environments lack advantages. So poor white folks never grow up in unpriviledged environments? You're providing no justification for why AA is race based instead of socio-economic based.
          • mkr-hn 14y ago
            It came about when the disparity was more substantial. That it's less obvious now is a sign that it's working. Institutional underrepresentation of poor white people is already dealt with separately by the lack of historical institutional discrimination against them.
          • ajross 14y ago
            The first sentence is just bad statistics. Obviously all that's required is that "more" poor black kids grow up in unpriviledged environemnts (something that I assume you agree with) to have a problem worth correcting. You can't disprove a correlation with a single counterexample. And why must I "justify" that it be "race based"? There's a problem. It's a solution. It works, if imperfectly. I'd like to see a better option too. (Not least because one of it's biggest problems is that it pisses off entitled white kids like you and starts pointless internet flames like this.) So I repeat what I said earlier: if you have another solution that works better, then propose it and advocate for it. Right now all you're doing is whining. (edit to avoid prolonging thread: both replies have ignored the issue mentioned upthread, namely that AA corrects for disadvantage in the past, not currently. You can't give executive jobs to unqualified poor people, you need to start farther upstream. So if that's your suggestion, come up with a new one -- you're essentially saying "eliminate poverty", which is dumb.)
    • mkr-hn 14y ago
      It seems like privilege is more transparent the more you have.
    • mtoddh 14y ago
      Just recognize that (I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume) that, because you are a middle class white man, probably 90% of the reason you oppose "affirmative action" is because it negatively impacts your own demographic group. Arguments for or against AA aside, this line of reasoning, where you invalidate somebody's argument based on what demographic group they belong to (white middle class males in this case), really seems like a simple ad hominem argument. You're no longer addressing what is said - only who is saying it.
      • ajross 14y ago
        Sigh... First: that's not a logical argument, it's a message directly to the poster (and anyone like-minded, probably including you) intended to provoke introspection. Read it again, I don't claim anything in those words says anything about AA. Second: you seriously think it's inappropriate to point out that people tend to have opinions which advantage their own station? Really? You're not simply saying that this is incorrect, you're actually saying that I'm not allowed to make the argument that white people might not like AA because it disadvantages white people. That's insane, sorry.
        • Locke1689 14y ago
          I agree that affirmative action is a good thing, but I thought it was a quite interesting discussion we were having. Let's go back to the original topic at hand and refrain from derailing the discussion with personal messages directly to the poster and those like-minded. A good argument is not solely made up of logical arguments, but it does not sacrifice logic for pathos. If your argument is sound you should be able to defend it both logically and emotionally.
  • rmc 14y ago
    Why can't we just try to remedy those ills directly? Why does there need to be an association with race? Because targeting based on race is a simple and effective way to target these ills. Race is often strongly correlated with these problems.
    • alexanderh 14y ago
      Yes but not all African American's are disadvantaged. But all disadvantaged people are disadvantaged. Why not make laws to simply help the disadvantaged? Why does race have to be the indicator, even if its a pretty good one? Why cant income be the indicator? It seems like it would be at least as accurate, if not more so... and no need to bring race into it.
      • rmc 14y ago
        How do you define & measure disadvantage? You suggest income, but then that ignores: (a) debt (b) medical costs (Joe & Jim have the same income, but Joe has cancer and has to pay $LOTS per month, has less energy etc. Who's more disadvantaged?) (c) where one lives (Joe & Jim have same income, but Joe lives near where possible jobs are, Jim needs a 2 hour bus journey) (d) existing assets (Jim has a new car and partner has a second hand car, Joe has a crappy car that could break, who is more advantaged) (e) family support/obligations, both financial & emotional (Joe has to care for his mother, Jim's mother can pay for her own nursing home. Joe knows he can rely on his parents to bail him out, Joe can't). etc. All systems have flaws. This stuff is hard and complicated, and you'll have mistakes, false positives and false negatives with all methods (yes including race/ethnicity). There'll also be costs to each method: Cost for the applicant to have to find & submit paperwork, cost for staff to process and review it, opportunities for fraud (e.g. asset-based-measurement means you can fake it by moving assets to a family member/close friend for a year). Race/ethnicity has several advantages as a "disadvantage metric": (a) easy to apply (hard to fake), yes there are problems with people of many ethnicities (b) cheap and quick to decide, no calculations or hours of staff time checking that the payslip from 2007 is legit, or try to figure out if the person really is a single parent or is the partner still living there, etc. (c) applicants don't have to find old information & forms & letters (d) strongly statistically correlated with disadvantage However some people just react negatively about race being mentioned at all, thinking that "racism = any reference to race" and "racism = bad" ergo "any reference to race = bad". Sometimes conversations about this can be like talking about evolution to a creationist, ask yourself if there is any evidence you'd accept that would convince you that it's OK to have affirmative action, if not, you might be being dogmatic.
  • johnrgrace 14y ago
    We just had an election and almost 50% of the country said No we don't want "big goverment" which is what it takes to remedy those ills. If you want to solve the ills it's going to take years of hard work and a lot of money. Also, a part of why we don't have the political will is latent racism.
• gyardley 14y ago
  Well, sure, since affirmative action doesn't help those people nearly as much as it helps upper-middle class kids from the suburbs. That's the problem with it - whatever its intentions, it just doesn't help the people it truly needs to.
• bdunbar 14y ago
  The problems you mention were not problems until after affirmative action was implemented.
  • _delirium 14y ago
    I don't believe your chronology is correct: affirmative action was first implemented in the U.S. in 1961, with widespread implementation not until the late 1960s, but there were already many poverty-ridden black ghettoes in the 1950s. (And the areas talked about in this article have been full of grinding poverty for their entire existence, with most of their inhabitants being slaves prior to the 1860s, and then desperately poor from the 1860s to today.)
    • AimHere 14y ago
      Maybe I'm leaning too much on the 'benefit of the doubt' side, but I parsed the prior post to mean that all those things existed, but they weren't considered problems by, say, white people, or people in power, prior to the 1960s. The alternative is that some (presumably intelligent) poster on HN stating something completely at odds with the facts, and perhaps even informally suggesting that affirmative action was likely to have caused black people to live in poor, squalid, crime-filled ghettoes.
      • bdunbar 14y ago
        "even informally suggesting that affirmative action was likely to have caused black people to live in poor, squalid, crime-filled ghettoes." That is what I am suggesting.
      • tjic 14y ago
        > completely at odds with the facts Asserted without evidence. The argument makes perfect sense to me. What part of it do you think is false?
        • _delirium 14y ago
          Isn't the person making a very strong causal claim the one in need of evidence? If someone's claiming that affirmative action caused black poverty, then I would expect some good data to back up that claim. Merely asserting it is not an "argument".
• wallawe 14y ago
  If you really want to take this line, then you should take action. I am from one of these counties originally, and there is a much larger percentage of the black population working side by side with whites than anywhere you'll find in Silicon Valley. In fact, if this is the mentality that presides, then why aren't there more blacks working at startups in SV or anywhere for that matter? Edit: It should also be noted that Alabama has no comprehensive fair employment law or specific affirmative action requirements covering public or private employers.