Affirmative Action has now ended in the United States.
We just had to lock a thread in politics over this, I suspect we may have to lock this one as well. If your only take is “affirmative action bad” you might as well just leave now.
Sad, but expected. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just another casualty in Conservatives’ war on equality.
I guess being treated better/worse because of the color of your skin is equality.
My parents were alive and in schools when segregation in education was ending. Decades of Jim Crow laws holding people down isn’t simply remedied by saying “We’re all equal now.” and doing nothing to redress the damage inflicted through the abuse of governmental power. Especially not when “We’re all equal now.” is largely lip service and systemic racism is still prevalent.
That’s probably true, and for that matter, even if you imagine a truly colorblind society exists for the next 100 years, it seems likely that inherited wealth and privilege would still be passed down.
Having said that, AA was not a very good remedy. It laser focused on only one thing, sometimes disregarding a clear reality. In an extreme example, if you took someone like David Steward’s kids, they would benefit from affirmative action despite being born to a billionaire.
Keep in mind, colleges and universities can still provide all the advantages they want based on other signals. Good ones might be family income and first-generation college students.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Dismantling ‘not great’ solutions when our legislature is seemingly incapable of replacing them with any solution at all (better or worse) is just a net downgrade for society. Our government is broken and extremely ineffective.
Piling on more systemic racism makes things worse, not better. We should focus our efforts on addressing systemic racism in the areas where it still exists, not on compensating for it elsewhere. Provide better funding for schools in low income areas. Support economic development to pull those areas out of poverty, etc.
You’re not wrong, but the goal of AA was to create that by proxy. Give students better education to help them get better jobs and help their communities. That and forcing institutions hands so they don’t come up with other bullshit reasons why they’re only accepting white students.
So why would you want to do the same thing again, just to a different race? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
If I only work out my right arm for 2 years straight and then suddenly say “oh I’m going to now start doing the same, equal work out on my left” they don’t just suddenly become the same. You’d have to put more time and focus into the left for it to become equal to the right.
However if your honestly claiming that affirmative action = “doing the same thing again to a different race”, no analogy in the world is going to help you. Your ignorance is untreatable I’m afraid.
It’s the same level of understanding the solution as spez thinking editing the karma DB values makes him look good.
If the fix didn’t start at the ground, then it wasn’t a fix
We can’t solve the hiring/acceptance discrimination by forcing it, they first need to be at a competitive disadvantage by doing it, and then we target the discrimination that exists after that.
With the way it is right now it’s encouraging the stereotypes of minorities being lesser/incompetent because it expects them to compete with people who received much better training and practice. It’s downright cruel to expect them to succeed in that situation.
Copying from my response here, which I had made earlier to a different commenter who made a similar analogy: https://programming.dev/comment/440090
But why is the goal to get each arm to be the same? To untie that analogy, we’re saying that we want the cumulative experience of each racial group to be the same. Like, taken to the extreme, that means that the ultimate fairness would be to now enslave the other group to make sure it’s even. What? No, that’s not what we want. Right?
What we want is for each individual, regardless of their group, to have the same access to opportunity. Right? To use your analogy again, the future we want is not to change our workouts to benefit the other arm preferentially so that we can have two arms be the same. Why? Because there’s new people coming to our workout classes all the time! If we now preferentially prefer the other arm, those new people are being unfairly treated.
Let’s say you have two infinitely large pitchers, and an infinite amount of water to pour into them.
Every day, you pour some water into the pitchers: one gallon into the left pitcher, and one ounce into the right pitcher. After doing this every day for over a hundred years, there’s quite a discrepancy in the amount of water in these pitchers.
Then, one day, you decide you’re no longer going to pour different amounts. From now on, you’ll pour one gallon into each pitcher every day. Exactly equal and perfectly fair, right?
Except, if your goal is to get the same amount of water into each pitcher, you’re never going to accomplish that this way. And then someone points out that the right pitcher is still a hundred years behind the left pitcher, and you reply with “well what do you want me to do about it? I’m pouring the same amount into both now.”
What an interesting excuse for racism
This is just going to be a fundamental disagreement here bud. What you call racism, many people call justifiable restitution.
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
AA had done more harm than good
Now, i do wish we had better solutions that actually address the issues of individuals and communities suffering from poverty and discrimination, but AA does not solve that.
I’d much rather we provide an actual solution, than a solution that looks like one while still being racist and in many ways making the situation worse, in particular by being a target to point to when talking about real solutions as “we already addressed that”
AA had done more harm than good
Would love to see a source on this, especially after I left a mod comment explicitly asking for people to be cautious about jumping in with a simplistic take of ‘AA bad’.
Literature is extremely mixed on this topic because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s almost impossible to control for all factors and implementation of AA varies so greatly (explicit diversity goals vs. some kind of equity boost vs. mandatory spots, etc.).
Ok, but if a solution can be found that has the same effect without codifying a groups race into law, isn’t that better?
And a lot of my experience comes from friends who qualify for these systems telling me it feeds quite a bit of imposter syndrome and distrust, because whenever something happens they ask themselves “did i earn this, or is this because of how i look?” and i don’t find that to be a helpful condition to be dumping on people who will likely already be behind coming in, due to the issues the AA was meant so solve in the first place.
I’m really not against solving the problem’s AA was meant to solve, but the AA solution looks like a racist go ahold of the project and made it cause more of the problem it’s meant to address.
first of all, white women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group. are your female white friends experiencing that same imposter syndrome and distrust? did you even know that that was the case? did they? most POC snap back at the white people that question their credentials, not take our hurt feelings out on one of the most effective social justice policies in American history.
second of all, as an actual person of color who was one of 5 POC out of 478 people to get their masters degree in my program, i’d love to learn more about how AA caused more of the problem it’s meant to address. hard to get imposter syndrome when you’re still too disadvantaged to get actual opportunities, lmfao.
also I’m not gonna lie, you saying “blacks” makes me highly doubt you have friends of color regardless. if you do I’m surprised they haven’t told you that using that as a term is uh. I’m gonna go with “eyebrow-raising”
white women have benefited from affirmative action more than any other group.
yeah, but lets be honest, they really shouldn’t be
which is another part of why it isn’t useful
you doubting the “color” of my friends means nothing, it’s an example and certainly the most prominent one historically used in regards to research and implementation of affirmative action, at least historically
If that offends you, that’s very much a you problem
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
uh …come again?
It was an example mean to illustrate the flippancy of the implementation, it applies to all affirmative action targets
Edit: and to answer your comment about calling blacks black, even though i certainly don’t have to answer, it’s because that’s what my black friends told me to call them, and not use african american. So back the fuck off that one maybe?
my point is more where are you hanging out that it’s routine to refer to black people as “blacks” like this, and it’s a little concerning you didn’t pick up on that point
Equality v equity.
Do you want every to be given the exact same resources at the start? Or do you want everyone to be able to reach the same outcome?
The state legislated racism - kneecapped a swathe of the population’s ability to access education and prosper. So how could the state possibly provide restitution for this without addressing the population it did this to?
From the majority’s opinion
nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice
Sounds like schools can still look at specific circumstances of a person’s life; just can’t make a blanket assumption that because they look a certain way they must have had things hard or easy.
If the goal is to provide restitution to people who have been impacted by government policies, evaluating whether or not they were actually affected, and to what extent, seems reasonable to me.
The issue here is exactly the issue affirmative action aims to help resolve - if you leave it so universities can if they so choose look at how someone’s experience of race has impacted on them, many of them won’t, because of structural racism and how ingrained it is. This decision is not requiring universities to consider their admission practices and what barriers might be in place - and many won’t.
It’d be great if they did, and in an ideal world we wouldn’t need requirements like this because universities and other organisations would proactively consider how their processes and decisions might be creating or removing barriers for all their students. Currently, that isn’t happening.
Because available spots in colleges are limited in order to give to one group you have to take away from another, it’s a zero sum game. I don’t know what the right answer is but I know that treating asian kids worse because they are asian isn’t one. I also don’t belive that kids should suffer for the sins of their grandparents.
Like I said I don’t know what the right answer is but I think offering scholarships to talented, hardworking kids who can’t afford to pay for school, regardless of race is a better solution than race based preferential treatment.
If kids shouldn’t suffer for the sins of their grandparents then why should other kids suffer for the sins committed against their grandparents?
You can’t starve one man while feeding another for years, then give them both equal food for a few months and assume they’ll be even. You by necessity have to give the starving man more, and regardless of the fed man’s complaints it isn’t unfair for him to get less - he’s literally been getting more the whole time and is perfectly healthy.
You have to take a step back and look at it on a bigger scale. The state caused generational harm. Kids are in worse positions because of what the state stole from their grandparents. I can’t look up stats on my phone, but it is a thing that is measurable.
I definitely believe the poor need more resources, but it’s a different discussion from affirmative action.
This reply will almost certainly be lost, but I do understand where you’re coming from since it is literally true, but fails to account for context. Consider a marathon in which half the participants were given 10 pound weights on each leg. Halfway through the race, the judges ruled those participants shouldn’t have weights on. Is the race now fair, since everyone is being treated equally? Of course not - they were immensely disadvantaged from the outset, so the only way to try to approach some level of fairness is to give them advantages to make up for their initial handicap. In theory, AA is meant to be corrective action to restore equity, at which point it can be dropped because it’s no longer necessary, but a simple glance at census data demonstrates we’re nowhere near that point.
Incidentally, this is also why “race blindness” is considered a bad thing in social justice. In theory it would be ideal that you don’t treat people differently, but in practice it means ignoring their disadvantages.
The Trump presidency was a near death sentence that we’ll have to reverse.
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School is better for everyone if it includes a diversity of experiences. It enrichens and deepens our culture to know each other and to have professionals from all backgrounds learning from one another.
This is a loss for every single person that actually wants our schools to be the best that they can be.
I’m going to copy over parts of my response from another thread on this topic. I don’t think it’s a loss for every single person, and the topic of equity is much more complex than just race.
As someone who went to an “elite institution,” coming from a first-generation immigrant background, and used it as a vehicle for massive social mobility, I am quite ambivalent (not in apathetic, but strong feelings about it on both sides) about the elimination of race-based admissions at these institutions.
The people who truly benefit from the current state of race-based affirmative action are not real “underprivileged people”. 99.999% of those will never even reach the academic qualification needed to get past the first round of screening at these schools. The overwhelming number of people who “benefit” from this are under-represented minorities from extremely elite backgrounds - the black of latino kid who went to top-tier private schools. If you have two applicants: 1 White/Asian kid from a poor background, vs 1 black/latino kid from Philip Exeter, who do you think these schools will take?
These schools are institutions with the goal of perpetuating elitism. period. Legacy, athletes, and “extracurriculars” are all just forms of gatekeeping for people without the knowledge, or social economic freedoms to partake in these activities. (I’m very confident about this from my years of helping underprivileged kids get into universities)
Now I do think race-based affirmative action does 2 things very well:
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It broadens the racial and international perspectives of the new “wave” of elites, and there are numerous studies on how that improves the performance (mostly from a capitalistic point of view) of those students in the new international world. This flows into your argument about how allowing race-based affirmative action actually makes schools better. However, this could be a dangerous justification. What if segregation makes schools better? That same logic can be used to justify private school admissions metrics that we can agree are objectively unjust.
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It makes it so that there is some semblance of race diversity (at the cost of economic class diversity) within the new wave of “elites” coming out of these schools. I think this is actually quite a good thing, which is one of the reasons that I am quite ambivalent about race-based affirmative action at these private schools.
In many ways, the current race-based admissions system in the elite schools actually sacrifices economic affirmative action, for race-based affirmative action. Again, we can debate how intersectional the two topics are, but that’s just the reality of how these systems work.
IMO, the path to more social equality isn’t by changing the skin color of people who become elite, but by opening the gate for more people from non-traditional backgrounds in the form of community colleges and an easy path to transfer to universities (a la California university system, though the current pace of UCs is also aiming to join the ranks of these “elite” institutions). There needs to be a non-“luxury” path, a non-rarified path, towards quality higher education.
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I didn’t have to read the article to know that the black guy definitely voted against black guys.
Samuel L. Jackson dubbed him “Uncle Clarence.”
This may be apocryphal, but rumor was that Jackson said he based his performance in Django on Clarence.
While AA is not a good remedy, I wish that shooting it down would have come with some better solutions attached.
The supreme court can’t make policy they can only declare policy actions made by others as unconstitutional. There would need to be a bill from congress with solutions…
Solutions? From current politicians?!
This is perhaps the most significant indicator of bad faith decisions by conservatives.
It’s like gun regulation. A functioning, pro gun, political party would propose gun control regulations which achieve and addresses concerns, while maintaining and satisfying the fundamentals of gun ownership. Advocacy groups, like the NRA, would then have involvement and assurance. They shouldn’t instead advocate for no solution whatsoever: The only possible result of which will be an eventual critical anti gun majority with following blanket fire arm bans. Or occasional, disruptive bans on specific weapons.
Obviously Affirmative Action wasn’t something that should be in place forever, but any reasonable person has to see that it sought to un-tip scales that were already heavily tipped. The process for removing Affirmative Action should not be “well let’s ask some old people whether we should remove it”, it should have been a long term study showing the impact of the measure, and perhaps come up with a plan for scaling it back until it was no longer needed. Removing it outright without any kind of intelligence behind it is just…irresponsible.
I’ve known quite a lot of people to complain about affirmative action and similar efforts. And while I can agree it’s a pretty clumsy solution, I’m not sure what people expect when they’re not willing to have a deeper conversation about the tensions and issues that lead there, even outside the United States. In the U.S. itself it’s headache-inducing when people’s “solution” is to simply undo affirmative action with no other response or ideas to take its place.
Good, any law that gives anyone an advantage or disadvantage based on race seems short sighted to me.
Jumping into a thread on such an important issue and leaving a potentially inflammatory response strikes me as bad faith. Would you like to expand your comment?
Does using a spare tire to get to the tire store also seem short sighted to you?
Been on that spare for a long time, if we don’t go without we may never replace the wheel anyway.
your wheelchair is old so I threw it away, you’re welcome 😤
That’s a big departure from the spare tire analogy. The spare tire analogy is based on the principle that affirmative action should be a stepping stone that gets us to the place we want to be and then stops being needed. Whether we’ve gotten to that point or not isn’t a topic I want to get too weighed down on, but I think the point is that the goal is a world where we don’t need affirmative action.
But a wheelchair is (in general) a tool that compensates for a permanent problem. People who need wheelchairs need them forever. Are you arguing that’s what affirmative action is? Systemic racism can never be undone and affirmative action has to live on in perpetuity?
Not trying to get too bogged down in the analogy itself, but it seems you’ve got a fundamentally different view of the issue than the person you’re replying to.
the goal is a world where we don’t need affirmative action
Completely agreed. A lot is lost when you go in for a one line zinger, and I’m not going to write up a whole post replying to someone who didn’t put the effort in the first place, especially when presenting an opinion that’s easily interpreted as hostile towards minorities.
But that’s not what it does.
Shocker
This is one I actually agree with. I don’t know of a solution to historical racism, but current racism against another group doesn’t seem like it can be it. That would just lead to an unending loop IMO.
how is affirmative action as a concept contributing to “current racism against another group”?
Sorry, we had to deny your application because you’re Asian. Try another school.
Affirmative Action has had a net positive impact on Asian Americans, given the fact that Asians had the largest college enrollment (59%), more than any other race.
A study from Georgetown University also found that Asian Americans actually benefit from affirmative action. It showed that if colleges only considered test scores, while Asian American enrollment would increase slightly, 21% of Asian Americans admitted under the holistic system would lose their spot.
In short, Asian Americans with lower SAT/ACT scores would give up their admission to Asian Americans with higher test scores. This would potentially affect lower-income Asian Americans, who cannot afford to spend money to prepare for those tests.
That said, your statement is so blatantly silly I’d like to confirm you’re actually arguing in good faith, or just stirring the pot with a hypothetical that absolutely does not happen. Thanks!
Well, I suppose it depends on your definition of racism, but to me giving preferential treatment to one group and lowering treatment of another based on race is a form of racism. From my understanding of the case, Asian and White applicants needed substantially higher SAT scores to be admitted.
That’s not how it worked at all. Affirmative Action actually benefited white women more than any other minority group.
Affirmative Action was never about “lowering treatment for one race vs. another.” It was about evening the playing field. That evening is gone and we have no solution as a replacement. It will demonstrably negative for minority groups (that aren’t white women, lol) all because white people couldn’t stand the idea of not having a leg up in something.
Which, btw, is the reason why your definition of racism is flawed, if not flat out incorrect. There has to be a power imbalance for racism to be real. Me calling someone a cracker doesn’t mean anything compared to the structural inequalities I face as a black person. One of the few structural benefits I did have is gone now thanks to mediocre white people seething. Does that make sense?
I understand where you’re coming from since it is literally true, but fails to account for context. Consider a marathon in which half the participants were given 10 pound weights on each leg. Halfway through the race, the judges ruled those participants shouldn’t have weights on. Is the race now fair, since everyone is being treated equally? Of course not - they were immensely disadvantaged from the outset, so the only way to try to approach some level of fairness is to give them advantages to make up for their initial handicap. In theory, AA is meant to be corrective action to restore equity, at which point it can be dropped because it’s no longer necessary. AA isn’t perfect and really needed to be replaced with less of a bandaid solution, but it was better than nothing which we now have.
Incidentally, this is also why “race blindness” is considered a bad thing in social justice. In theory it would be ideal that you don’t treat people differently, but in practice it means ignoring their disadvantages.
this is why relying on precedent is very bad, write that shit down as law like youre supposed to
As someone from a country that’s not America but does use common law, the scariest thing to my foreign eyes is the politically-appointed judges in general. How on Earth is that not seen as a massive conflict of interest in a system that emphasises the separation of powers? We have a lot of politically appointed roles too with the House of Lords but their powers are weak (they can only delay legislation) and parliamentary systems don’t emphasise separation of powers strongly in the first place.
It’s a little early to be piecing together the details and impact. The Post is being more cautious with their initial full story in terms of definitive statements.
But, as it stands, the hed of “Supreme Court restricts use of race in college admissions” directly conflicts with Sotomayor’s dissent quote in graf 7: " … It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits," which more closely matches the breaking-news stream hed.
I’m not saying there’s no reason for concern; rather, the things to be concerned about have yet to come into specific relief.
There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.
The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: “wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans”. (I’m using ‘wealth’ as a stand-in for all the good experiences we’re trying to optimize for, and ‘black’ and ‘white’ as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.
We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I’m willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.
But I don’t think that it’s a useful metric in the first place. And I can’t really articulate why. I’d welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.
I guess… it just seems racist to me to be comparing “oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let’s make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians”. That doesn’t seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.
Like I said, I’d welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.
There’s plenty of discussion in here if you’d just read it instead of posting inviting someone to reply
My first sentence was:
There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.
As I indicate, I’ve read the discussion that was here at the time, and appreciate it. I’ve even responded to a couple of posts. In this comment, I was hoping to bring up a different angle.
If you don’t agree and/or don’t want to engage, that’s fine, but don’t assume that I’m just blindly soliciting responses without reading what people are saying.
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It’s extremely naive to think that those traits don’t have impacts on academic performance and capability. Not to say that black people are biologically more <whatever> than white people, but their experience living as a black person in this country has direct impacts on their academic experience, both historical and future. A pure meritocracy ignores the benefits of diversity, both to society and at the individual level.
