9 ms·

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. In fact it isn't just based on race, it is based on skin colour - since some mixe

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. In fact it isn't just based on race, it is based on skin colour - since some mixed black-white people with white skin can be discriminated against. America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. You should help the disadvantaged or poor regardless of their great great grandparent's struggles. Affirmative action should exist; but it should be entirely based on parental income, growing up in a poor area, or other disadvantaged indicators. Not race, not ethnicity, and not gender. These things don't prove you're poor or disadvantaged.

king_jester 14y ago
You do realize that race and class are heavily intersectional, right? That rates of poverty are higher for non-whites, right? Also, helping people who are affected by institutional racism is not racist, it is an attempt to correct for existing racism.
- _casperc 14y ago
  You are not helping people because of their race, so why use that to select who gets help? There are rich black people as well as there are poor white people.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Think of this mathematically. We did something very wrong at time T = 0. It is a matter of fact that economic wrongs are self-perpetuating and long-lived. Thus, at time T = 450, you can isolate, statistically, some economic disadvantage in any black person who can trace their lineage back as being affected by that original wrong at T = 0. It doesn't matter how rich they are--they would be incrementally richer had that wrong not occurred. At the same time, the poor white person benefited from that original wrong, and you can isolate, statistically, some economic advantage to him tracing back to that original wrong. It doesn't matter how poor he is, he would be incrementally poorer had that wrong not occurred.
    - iy56 14y ago
      The harms and benefits you are talking about are not quantifiable in a commonly-agreed-upon way. I think that's a prerequisite for the kind of analysis you want to do.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        This is a common flaw in reasoning--just because harms or benefits are not easily quantifiable does not mean that they should be assumed to be zero.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        iy56 14y ago
        I didn't say it was zero. I said it precludes principal component analysis (or whatever variant you prefer).
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      What percentage of the US population is descended from people who primarily immigrated after 1865?
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  Even if everything you say is true (that some races are poorer than other races) how does that counter what I said? The strategy I'm talking about gives to poor and disadvantaged people regardless of their race, so if a ton of blacks are poor then they will receive the majority of the benefits. But as an additional benefit middle and upper class minorities won't get advantages they don't need. You also won't require people to "prove" their ethnicity to be granted these benefits (or discriminated against because they aren't for example "black enough"). Here is a fun question: Exactly how black do you have to be to get affirmative action right now? Do they have like a colour wheel? How does that even work?
  - adaml_623 14y ago
    You missed the part of his comment that did counter some of what you said. You said: "Affirmative action should exist; but it should be entirely based on parental income, growing up in a poor area, or other disadvantaged indicators. Not race, not ethnicity, and not gender. These things don't prove you're poor or disadvantaged." which seems quite reasonable. He said: "Also, helping people who are affected by institutional racism is not racist, it is an attempt to correct for existing racism." Your statement doesn't seem to acknowledge things in society contributing to future problems. So he is saying that you have to counter current institutional *isms which still exists today. Otherwise the current biases of today will just contribute to the population of disadvantaged people of tomorrow. I think you need both approaches. Kind of a PID controller kind of solution to the problem.
    - zanny 14y ago
      Countering institutional racism is reactive. It isn't passive like affirmative action is. I think he is describing facilitating courts to allow the discriminated to sue the discriminators, and given sufficient evidence charge them with racial discrimination. I do agree with him though, you don't repay racisms of the past and present with more racism in the opposite direction.
      - king_jester 14y ago
- grannyg00se 14y ago
  It is racist by the fact that it is based on race. Worse, it continues to reinforce thinking along racial lines rather than circumstancial ones thus perpetuating the idea that we should classify based on race. It would be much better to stop saying "you get this because you are this colour" and start saying "you get this because it looks like you could use a hand." Racism exists, but trying to fight it with more racism is not going to help reduce the focus on race, and until people stop identifying race as a good way to classify a human, racism won't go away.
  - alxp 14y ago
    > It is racist by the fact that it is based on race. Your definition is too simplistic. Racism isn't just prejudice based on race. Racism requires a power imbalance. Acting to counteract an institutional imbalance caused by racism is not "just anotehr kind of racism."
    - ShawnBird 14y ago
      The focus on race in racism is, in part, due to people acknowledging race as a thing. There is nothing more significant about skin color than hair color but we don't have programs to help out blondes and we don't talk about 'the blonde vote'.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - grannyg00se 14y ago
      Oppression requires a power imbalance. Racism only requires using race as a classification upon which you base your actions. Choosing who you hang out with simply based on race is racism even though ut is not a power imbalance. And you can act to counteract an institutional imbalance caused by racism without furthering racism. Focus on something else. Race is being reinforced as an accepted means to classify people and that is the root cause of the problem.
      - 14y ago
rayiner 14y ago
The justification and rationale for race-based affirmative action is somewhat different from anything favoring people of low socioeconomic class generally. It has to do with correcting specific and massive historical wrongs in which our government was complicit, not lifting up disadvantaged people generally. Conflating the two is a little silly. If I destroy your house, you're not going to be happy if I make amends through a general program of urban renewal in your neighborhood. A lot of people don't believe that Americans of today should be liable for the actions of Americans then. But none of us today were alive at the time America consented to the Constitution, just as none of us today were alive at the time America imported millions of blacks into slavery. Yet we are nonetheless bound by the agreement our forefathers made in 1789! The document attesting to that agreement is also the document that protected and enshrined slavery in America for several more generations. I believe we are bound by that too. I believe the government created in that document, which still exists today, is bound by the obligation created by its sanctioning of slavery just as it is bound by treaties entered into at the time or treasury bonds issued at the time. It is of course impossible to try to remedy all the mistakes of the past. But that doesn't mean it is pointless to try and remedy any mistakes of the past. And this is a big one that still has lasting and major effects today.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  Let's accept that rational; but that does leave one question: when does this end? If we have no way to measure the damage then how do we measure the resolution of the damage? Do we continue this for 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 years? Or do we simply never end it? Do we try to "correct" it so there are literally no poor people of a particular ethnicity? How realistic is that?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - arrrg 14y ago
    How about until there no longer is any significant racism that systematically disadvantages black people?
njharman 14y ago
It's based on history. It's a tangential detail that that history victimized people of certain skin colors.
btown 14y ago
While I'm just a layperson on the subject, to me, there is far more to the question of affirmative action than giving opportunities to the "poor or disadvantaged." It's a way for our system to actively acknowledge and combat any (possibly subliminal) biases towards the previously privileged group of white males. As they say, old habits die hard, and it's naive to think that hiring and admissions processes are now completely blind to everything but parental income. Surely, strict quotas are an overreaction to this, but there is some middle ground between quotas and complete deregulation.
arrrg 14y ago
No, counteracting racism (which has to happen based on race, any other way doesn't make sense) is most certainly not racist. AA is not reparations, it tries to correct for existing racism.
- grannyg00se 14y ago
  "...has to happen based on race..." That is racism. And there are other ways. You punish people who are racist and you acknowledge that as the reason for their punishment, but you help people based on their situation. If they happened to be in that situation because of previous racism, that in no way has to be taken into account in how they are treated going forward to help their current situation. Sorry, but as soon as you use race as a means to classify another person for a decision you need to make, whether your intentions are good or not, you are being racist, and you are perpetuating the line of thought that is at the root of the problem.
  - arrrg 14y ago
    Ok, if you want to play semantic games then let's play semantic games. If you think any policy based on race is racism I will for the sake of the argument accept that weird definition and say that the racist AA policy is super awesome and that I full-heartedly support that racism. I'm a racist for AA!
    - alecst 14y ago
      Obviously not every policy based on race is racist, but affirmative action does advance a particular set of races. Call it whatever you want, but I think what the above poster has said is that to advance one race is to handicap another.
      - AnIrishDuck 14y ago
        I'd like to point out that affirmative action directly leads to more racism. I've heard many racists assume that affirmative action is the sole reason someone (is in college|has that government job|got that scholarship).
vertr 14y ago
It is not racist. It would be racist if it argued or presented itself in such a way to express that one race was inferior or superior. It does not.
Locke1689 14y ago
The issue here is that affirmative action conflates two separate things. One element of affirmative action is correction for economic disenfranchisement. You're right that maybe we should look at this more broadly and attempt a more race-neutral approach. However, the second horn seeks to correct for prejudice and descrimination, not poverty. This is not necessarily heavy-handed correction, like quotas, either. For example, one of the most effective instances is the enforcement of blind auditions for orchestras. Almost immediately after the rule was instituted, the demographics of major US orchestras shifted hugely. The point is to correct for latent, perhaps even unconcious, descrimination. To understand how even unconcious descrimination can be self-reinforcing, consider someone hiring a new software developer. If they have a team of middle-class white male software developers and a middle class white male software developer applies, they have to give almost no thought to how they will integrate with the team. Sure, there are your corner cases, but we all share a lot of the same cultural background. With vulnerable groups, it's not the same. It requires some thought. Since we all don't like to expend mental energy on something we're not really thrilled about doing in the first place (reading resumes, interviewing, hiring), it's just so much easier to pick the white male and be done with it. By putting counterbalances in place we don't have to actually favor anybody, we just have to reduce the forcing function in the system that pushes us towards the status quo.
- jivatmanx 14y ago
  I don't think there is a greater aversion to blacks or Indians than there is to Asians. Should Asians be advantaged? For college admissions, they are actually considered more privileged than whites because they score so highly on tests. As others have pointed out, and as I agree with, affirmative action is for recompensing past wrongs against Blacks and Indians, who suffered slavery and Genocide, respectively. But what about Hispanics? The affirmative action for them is entirely economic (they are poorer in general).
- clicks 14y ago
  Sorry, a small off-topic question: why did you again and again misspell 'discrimination'? You sound too educated to make the mistake -- and I'm not aware of any alternative spellings of the word. So, why did you spell it that way? I'm just genuinely curious.
rmc 14y ago
The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. There are several definitions of racism, one is essentially "making references to someone's race and implying everyone in that group is the same (in some attribute)", or more simply "anything based on race". Lots of people like this definition because it's a nice, simple and objective defintion and it means black people in the USA can be racist to white people, or that affirmative action is racist. I think this is the definition you're using. There's another definition, which is that racist actions are actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among races. Right now, if modern USA life was a video game, "white male" would be an easier difficulty level than "black male". There are statistically less problems for the "white male" group. Racist actions is talk that re-enforced that imbalance, and attempts to undo the power imbalance is not racist. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means that affirmative action is not racist, and attempts to stop is could be construed as racist (since stopping affirmative action can re-enforce power imbalances). This is the definition I use. So no, affirmative action isn't racist. America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. Totally agree. Classism is a real and big problem.
Tsagadai 14y ago
You said the C word (class) and you weren't downvoted into oblivion. Thank you, Hacker News readers, for not voting purely on political biases. Class mobility is essential for a healthy society. When everyone who starts life at one income level and almost always finishes life at that same income level you have an unbalance, neo-feudal society. We live in a world where if a child's parents don't have the income or education to take them to a doctor when they get a simple inner ear infection they can be permanently disadvantaged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitis_media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitis_media). This kind of class lock-in is what was so terrible about earlier human models of cooperation and what the Enlightenment apparently fixed. Any argument against class-based discrimination is void while poor children are going deaf and ending up with speech development problems from a curable condition that very rarely causes serious long term consequences for a child of wealthier parents.
shardling 14y ago
The catch is that it's a feedback loop: the fact that a minority is disproportionately poor leads to stereotypes (conscious or not, and the unconscious biases can be quite substantial) about that minority. Those stereotypes throw additional obstacles in the path of that minority. So even absent any idea of the government "owing" a group for historical wrongs, there's (to me ) a convincing argument that affirmative action is needed. It helps break the feedback cycle. Completely eliminating class distinctions would also break the cycle pretty quickly, but that seems staggeringly unlikely any time soon. :(

king_jester 14y ago

You do realize that race and class are heavily intersectional, right? That rates of poverty are higher for non-whites, right? Also, helping people who are affected by institutional racism is not racist, it is an attempt to correct for existing racism.

_casperc 14y ago
You are not helping people because of their race, so why use that to select who gets help? There are rich black people as well as there are poor white people.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 14y ago
  Think of this mathematically. We did something very wrong at time T = 0. It is a matter of fact that economic wrongs are self-perpetuating and long-lived. Thus, at time T = 450, you can isolate, statistically, some economic disadvantage in any black person who can trace their lineage back as being affected by that original wrong at T = 0. It doesn't matter how rich they are--they would be incrementally richer had that wrong not occurred. At the same time, the poor white person benefited from that original wrong, and you can isolate, statistically, some economic advantage to him tracing back to that original wrong. It doesn't matter how poor he is, he would be incrementally poorer had that wrong not occurred.
  - iy56 14y ago
    The harms and benefits you are talking about are not quantifiable in a commonly-agreed-upon way. I think that's a prerequisite for the kind of analysis you want to do.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      This is a common flaw in reasoning--just because harms or benefits are not easily quantifiable does not mean that they should be assumed to be zero.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - iy56 14y ago
        I didn't say it was zero. I said it precludes principal component analysis (or whatever variant you prefer).
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    What percentage of the US population is descended from people who primarily immigrated after 1865?
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Even if everything you say is true (that some races are poorer than other races) how does that counter what I said? The strategy I'm talking about gives to poor and disadvantaged people regardless of their race, so if a ton of blacks are poor then they will receive the majority of the benefits. But as an additional benefit middle and upper class minorities won't get advantages they don't need. You also won't require people to "prove" their ethnicity to be granted these benefits (or discriminated against because they aren't for example "black enough"). Here is a fun question: Exactly how black do you have to be to get affirmative action right now? Do they have like a colour wheel? How does that even work?
- adaml_623 14y ago
  You missed the part of his comment that did counter some of what you said. You said: "Affirmative action should exist; but it should be entirely based on parental income, growing up in a poor area, or other disadvantaged indicators. Not race, not ethnicity, and not gender. These things don't prove you're poor or disadvantaged." which seems quite reasonable. He said: "Also, helping people who are affected by institutional racism is not racist, it is an attempt to correct for existing racism." Your statement doesn't seem to acknowledge things in society contributing to future problems. So he is saying that you have to counter current institutional *isms which still exists today. Otherwise the current biases of today will just contribute to the population of disadvantaged people of tomorrow. I think you need both approaches. Kind of a PID controller kind of solution to the problem.
  - zanny 14y ago
    Countering institutional racism is reactive. It isn't passive like affirmative action is. I think he is describing facilitating courts to allow the discriminated to sue the discriminators, and given sufficient evidence charge them with racial discrimination. I do agree with him though, you don't repay racisms of the past and present with more racism in the opposite direction.
    - king_jester 14y ago
grannyg00se 14y ago
It is racist by the fact that it is based on race. Worse, it continues to reinforce thinking along racial lines rather than circumstancial ones thus perpetuating the idea that we should classify based on race. It would be much better to stop saying "you get this because you are this colour" and start saying "you get this because it looks like you could use a hand." Racism exists, but trying to fight it with more racism is not going to help reduce the focus on race, and until people stop identifying race as a good way to classify a human, racism won't go away.
- alxp 14y ago
  > It is racist by the fact that it is based on race. Your definition is too simplistic. Racism isn't just prejudice based on race. Racism requires a power imbalance. Acting to counteract an institutional imbalance caused by racism is not "just anotehr kind of racism."
  - ShawnBird 14y ago
    The focus on race in racism is, in part, due to people acknowledging race as a thing. There is nothing more significant about skin color than hair color but we don't have programs to help out blondes and we don't talk about 'the blonde vote'.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - grannyg00se 14y ago
    Oppression requires a power imbalance. Racism only requires using race as a classification upon which you base your actions. Choosing who you hang out with simply based on race is racism even though ut is not a power imbalance. And you can act to counteract an institutional imbalance caused by racism without furthering racism. Focus on something else. Race is being reinforced as an accepted means to classify people and that is the root cause of the problem.
    - 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

The justification and rationale for race-based affirmative action is somewhat different from anything favoring people of low socioeconomic class generally. It has to do with correcting specific and massive historical wrongs in which our government was complicit, not lifting up disadvantaged people generally. Conflating the two is a little silly. If I destroy your house, you're not going to be happy if I make amends through a general program of urban renewal in your neighborhood. A lot of people don't believe that Americans of today should be liable for the actions of Americans then. But none of us today were alive at the time America consented to the Constitution, just as none of us today were alive at the time America imported millions of blacks into slavery. Yet we are nonetheless bound by the agreement our forefathers made in 1789! The document attesting to that agreement is also the document that protected and enshrined slavery in America for several more generations. I believe we are bound by that too. I believe the government created in that document, which still exists today, is bound by the obligation created by its sanctioning of slavery just as it is bound by treaties entered into at the time or treasury bonds issued at the time. It is of course impossible to try to remedy all the mistakes of the past. But that doesn't mean it is pointless to try and remedy any mistakes of the past. And this is a big one that still has lasting and major effects today.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Let's accept that rational; but that does leave one question: when does this end? If we have no way to measure the damage then how do we measure the resolution of the damage? Do we continue this for 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 years? Or do we simply never end it? Do we try to "correct" it so there are literally no poor people of a particular ethnicity? How realistic is that?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- arrrg 14y ago
  How about until there no longer is any significant racism that systematically disadvantages black people?

njharman 14y ago

It's based on history. It's a tangential detail that that history victimized people of certain skin colors.

btown 14y ago

While I'm just a layperson on the subject, to me, there is far more to the question of affirmative action than giving opportunities to the "poor or disadvantaged." It's a way for our system to actively acknowledge and combat any (possibly subliminal) biases towards the previously privileged group of white males. As they say, old habits die hard, and it's naive to think that hiring and admissions processes are now completely blind to everything but parental income. Surely, strict quotas are an overreaction to this, but there is some middle ground between quotas and complete deregulation.

arrrg 14y ago

No, counteracting racism (which has to happen based on race, any other way doesn't make sense) is most certainly not racist. AA is not reparations, it tries to correct for existing racism.

grannyg00se 14y ago
"...has to happen based on race..." That is racism. And there are other ways. You punish people who are racist and you acknowledge that as the reason for their punishment, but you help people based on their situation. If they happened to be in that situation because of previous racism, that in no way has to be taken into account in how they are treated going forward to help their current situation. Sorry, but as soon as you use race as a means to classify another person for a decision you need to make, whether your intentions are good or not, you are being racist, and you are perpetuating the line of thought that is at the root of the problem.
- arrrg 14y ago
  Ok, if you want to play semantic games then let's play semantic games. If you think any policy based on race is racism I will for the sake of the argument accept that weird definition and say that the racist AA policy is super awesome and that I full-heartedly support that racism. I'm a racist for AA!
  - alecst 14y ago
    Obviously not every policy based on race is racist, but affirmative action does advance a particular set of races. Call it whatever you want, but I think what the above poster has said is that to advance one race is to handicap another.
    - AnIrishDuck 14y ago
      I'd like to point out that affirmative action directly leads to more racism. I've heard many racists assume that affirmative action is the sole reason someone (is in college|has that government job|got that scholarship).

vertr 14y ago

It is not racist. It would be racist if it argued or presented itself in such a way to express that one race was inferior or superior. It does not.

Locke1689 14y ago

The issue here is that affirmative action conflates two separate things. One element of affirmative action is correction for economic disenfranchisement. You're right that maybe we should look at this more broadly and attempt a more race-neutral approach. However, the second horn seeks to correct for prejudice and descrimination, not poverty. This is not necessarily heavy-handed correction, like quotas, either. For example, one of the most effective instances is the enforcement of blind auditions for orchestras. Almost immediately after the rule was instituted, the demographics of major US orchestras shifted hugely. The point is to correct for latent, perhaps even unconcious, descrimination. To understand how even unconcious descrimination can be self-reinforcing, consider someone hiring a new software developer. If they have a team of middle-class white male software developers and a middle class white male software developer applies, they have to give almost no thought to how they will integrate with the team. Sure, there are your corner cases, but we all share a lot of the same cultural background. With vulnerable groups, it's not the same. It requires some thought. Since we all don't like to expend mental energy on something we're not really thrilled about doing in the first place (reading resumes, interviewing, hiring), it's just so much easier to pick the white male and be done with it. By putting counterbalances in place we don't have to actually favor anybody, we just have to reduce the forcing function in the system that pushes us towards the status quo.

jivatmanx 14y ago
I don't think there is a greater aversion to blacks or Indians than there is to Asians. Should Asians be advantaged? For college admissions, they are actually considered more privileged than whites because they score so highly on tests. As others have pointed out, and as I agree with, affirmative action is for recompensing past wrongs against Blacks and Indians, who suffered slavery and Genocide, respectively. But what about Hispanics? The affirmative action for them is entirely economic (they are poorer in general).
clicks 14y ago
Sorry, a small off-topic question: why did you again and again misspell 'discrimination'? You sound too educated to make the mistake -- and I'm not aware of any alternative spellings of the word. So, why did you spell it that way? I'm just genuinely curious.

rmc 14y ago

The problem with affirmative action is that it is based on race. It is racist. There are several definitions of racism, one is essentially "making references to someone's race and implying everyone in that group is the same (in some attribute)", or more simply "anything based on race". Lots of people like this definition because it's a nice, simple and objective defintion and it means black people in the USA can be racist to white people, or that affirmative action is racist. I think this is the definition you're using. There's another definition, which is that racist actions are actions that's designed to maintain & reinforce the institutionalised power structure among races. Right now, if modern USA life was a video game, "white male" would be an easier difficulty level than "black male". There are statistically less problems for the "white male" group. Racist actions is talk that re-enforced that imbalance, and attempts to undo the power imbalance is not racist. This definition is harder for some people to accept because it means that you need to look at yourself and think about what power imbalances you might be benefiting from, and it means that affirmative action is not racist, and attempts to stop is could be construed as racist (since stopping affirmative action can re-enforce power imbalances). This is the definition I use. So no, affirmative action isn't racist. America needs to put race on the sidelines and start thinking in terms of class. Totally agree. Classism is a real and big problem.

Tsagadai 14y ago

You said the C word (class) and you weren't downvoted into oblivion. Thank you, Hacker News readers, for not voting purely on political biases. Class mobility is essential for a healthy society. When everyone who starts life at one income level and almost always finishes life at that same income level you have an unbalance, neo-feudal society. We live in a world where if a child's parents don't have the income or education to take them to a doctor when they get a simple inner ear infection they can be permanently disadvantaged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitis_media http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitis_media). This kind of class lock-in is what was so terrible about earlier human models of cooperation and what the Enlightenment apparently fixed. Any argument against class-based discrimination is void while poor children are going deaf and ending up with speech development problems from a curable condition that very rarely causes serious long term consequences for a child of wealthier parents.

shardling 14y ago

The catch is that it's a feedback loop: the fact that a minority is disproportionately poor leads to stereotypes (conscious or not, and the unconscious biases can be quite substantial) about that minority. Those stereotypes throw additional obstacles in the path of that minority. So even absent any idea of the government "owing" a group for historical wrongs, there's (to me ) a convincing argument that affirmative action is needed. It helps break the feedback cycle. Completely eliminating class distinctions would also break the cycle pretty quickly, but that seems staggeringly unlikely any time soon. :(