You have made a braod based claim that is mostly false. It is too broad a claim that shows an ignorance of the topic. What “barrier of ability” is removed when a company seeks out qualified employees or realtor seeks out qualified applicants for housing? Your claim is nonsense.
The barrier of ability is removed when race becomes a qualifying factor in judging an individual’s suitablity for a position.
Let me know if sense is not complying with your brain yet.
Just for the sake of argument…
What I think *tomndebb is saying is that, if you, in addition to your conclusions, trace the path through which you arrived at those conclusions, which includes the elements (experiences, observations, facts) as well as the connectors (a system of logic ?), then more people might consider this a debate worthy of their participation (which is what you want, isn’t it?).
So Exec says “Rewarding the less competent and shoving aside the more able seems pretty silly to me.”
Your response is that affirmative action does not require choosing someone less competent, because in many cases affirmative action really consists of seeking out, or giving an advantage to, a preferred candidate who is just as competent.
That is a very good response. So, Exec… if affirmative action does not require lower standards, but rather consists of seeking out and giving the advantage to candidates who meet the standards and fit the affirmative action category, would you be against it?
Personally, I think AA would be much more defensible if they took rjung’s advice and targetted it at the poor and disadvantaged, rather than at those who happen to be a certain color. What is your take on that, Exec?
Ahhh! So when you ranted that"Affirmative Action" was a “racist program” that provided no genuine benefits to society, what you actually meant was that “on those occasions when Affirmative Action has been applied solely as a quota system in which admission standards have been lowered and unqualified persons have been admitted based on race, then that application has been a ‘feel good’ racist program.”
On that point I would tend to agree with you. (On the other hand, since AA is used to include a number of people based on categories other than race, your fixation on the racial aspect of it would tend to color the perception of your readers who realize that race is not the only criterion for AA decisions. It would tend to give them the impression that you are rather hung up on racial issues rather than issues of fairness and propriety.)
On the other hand, since I have seen companies exercise Affirmative Action by expanding their recruiting programs to include colleges with larger percentages of minority students while refusing to lower their hiring standards in any way and have seen real estate companies convicted of “steering” non-white buyers to less than satisfactory locations ordered to advertise for better properties in media that will reach minority applicants, I recognize that there are Affirmativce Action programs that are not “feel good” programs that lower barriers of “ability” and so recognize that your OP was simply a broad-brush characterization of all Affirmative Action based on a limited application in special circumstances.
EJ!! Still trying to be God? I can see you’re getting a little testy with folks who won’t play your game your way…
The supremely funny thing about arrogance is that it is innocently unaware of itself, and it keeps mislabeling all the input it receives as somehow dull, clueless and uninformed. It was funny on your God threads. It sounds kind of silly in here.
EJ:
As an opponent of AA, I would dearly like to agree with you. But I have to side w/ Tom here, in that you are simply setting up a rant, not a debate. And, as he said, this has been done to death in this forum. You’ll need to come up with a new, creative angle to engage people in a debate on this topic yet again. Good luck.
Then, what would be the premise for Affirmative Action? Is AA based on an assumption that someone won’t be hired because of the color of their skin, all other factors being equal?
This would mean that AA itself is painting all employers–because it is a national law–with a pretty broad brush, i.e., that they are racists at heart, at worst, or selfish human beings at best. It’s bringing in some debatable assumptions that are pernicious and unprovable. That’s why it’s a bad law. No because it’s about giving “preference” or first advantage. It’s assuming a thought, and legistating against that thought. Or it’s assuming a great injustice and is legislating compassion.
But one thing it is not assuming is that businesses care about hiring quality employees who will do the job, and create wealth for the company and possibly themselves.
Now the word “preference” carries even more interesting debate. A preference can only be granted by a greater to a lesser…or by the one in control to one with less control. Being the recipient of such an advantage can feel like a boon, or an insult, depending on one’s self-perception and point of reference. If AA is purely about preference, or advantage, then it takes the untenable position of becoming what it seeks to eliminate: preference for one candidate over another.
Studies may show that employers consistently hire one race over another, but the conclusions drawn from such statistics are also straw men. Such studies are not expansive enough to bring in the socio-ecomomic factors, public education issues, early childhood development, and world view.
Maybe AA isn’t a bad law, but I don’t think it is solving the problem or hitting the mark. I think it is treating the symptom.
To all:
Geeze, I looked around and see that this topic HAS been pretty well covered. Sorry to prolong it. Newbie mistake.
Sounds like you’re here to troll, then – which, IIRC, is a bannable offense on these boards.
Can we get a passing mod to give us a ruling on this?
Come on rjung, he already said that was a typo.
And from the context it seems to be a typo.
I don’t agree with him either, but trying to con the mods into banning him is pretty low.
Anti-affirmative action is a racist program (see: rabid KKK support), a pacifier for the masses, a feel good that doesn’t appear to do much blur accountability for white losers in the job market by scapegoating minorities. At least it appears so to me. It’s an affront to all intelligent and informed folks, as the barriers it removes are not those of ability, but those designed to prevent or compensate for current and past discrimination.
Or rather the barriers of a biased means of evaluating “raw intellect” are broken down to give those who are just as gifted but are less fortunate (due to past discrimination) a chance to compete with the majority they have long been excluded from and oppressed by.
Which is, due to widespread discrimination and racism, exactly what has historically happened to minorities in america and, in many cases, continued (and continues) to happen even with affirmative action. Affirmative action does help to correct this tho, something you, given the opinions here, should be quite thankful for.
Look at it this way: When you look at the issue form the outside, it is hard not to see that some groups (minorities, for lack of a better word) are underrepresented in some institutions (assuming that, all things being equal, the percentage of a population in, say, a university of any given group should roughly approximate that of the population at large).
If we then move forward from that assumption, there are really only two conclusions:
[ul]
[li]The underrepresented group is somehow inferior, and has no place in that institution (in which case you are probably being a bigot).[/li][li]The underrepresented group was not given the same opportunity to succeed (in which case, as a society that is supposed to be a meritocracy, if falls on us to redress this wrong).[/li][/ul]
This is not to say that I (as an individual white man) would not be pissed off if I was passed over for a job or admission to a University for an equally qualified (or slightly less qualified) minority, but I can see how doing so can serve the greater good. And to be sure, a strong argument can be made for solving these problems “upstream” so that by the time a child reaches university age, the point is moot.
All of that being said, if you have a better idea I am open to hearing about it.
Actually, affirmative action is the racist program, since it assumes that blacks and other targetted minorities are inherently inferior, and cannot be expected to compete in a fair market.
Other minorities (Jews, Chinese, Irish) all managed to overcome the prejudices of their times to join the mainstream. Blacks and other favored groups, it is assumed, cannot do the same.
Regards,
Shodan
While those programs that lower the bar certainly seem to take this approach (while your argument blithely ignores programs that do not lower the bar), we actually have the historical record to show how blacks have been prevented from “overcoming prejudices of their times,” so there is a bit of disingenuousness in your implied blanket statement.
Mea culpa, I missed that part.
Please demonstrate to me that the market is fair and that “Targeted Minorities™” are competing on an equal playing field. Thanks ever so much.
actually, it assumes that there are barriers in the market designed specifically to prevent certain groups from advancing. to me, it seems that people who keep harping on how less-qualified blacks get chosen for jobs over whites are coming a lot closer to assuming minorities are inherently inferior.
perhaps you could provide an example of a minority that overcame the prejudices of say, i don’t know, slavery? was the national guard ever needed to help chinese children go to school?
Actually the status of Chinese coolies in California was not all that different from slavery, except in name.
The Chinese suffered from most of the disadvantages of slavery - forced family breakups, legal discrimination, rampant racial prejudice, physical identifiers that marked them as part of the group (so they couldn’t assimilate by changing their last names, as Irish or Jews could) - in addition to the disadvantages of a mostly agrarian cultural background and linguistic differences. Yet they managed to overcome all these in the absence of government-mandated affirmative action.
Regards,
Shodan
Of course, your list ignores the fact that the Chinese were never prevented from establishing their own intra-community economy in the way blacks were and that they were not repeatedly driven from their communities–and their communities destroyed–if they became “too” prosperous, and that once they did achieve citizenship, they were not denied the right to vote, and that there was no serious effort to deny them education throughout the same period that blacks and immigrant Chinese were simultaneously struggling against overt prejudices. Yeah, let’s just pretend that all things were equal.