Well, I cited two studies above re: the labor market, and
this study discusses racial steering in real estate. So there are clearly ways to quantify exclusion from the market and the racial basis for that exclusion.
If Michael Moore can demonstrate racism among New York City taxicabs with just two actors and a cameraman, surely finding race-based exclusions in other markets can’t be that tough.
You mis-understand me.
tomndebb said:
To which I responded by asking how you could tell if my condo example was one of those occasions where it can be shown that groups have been deliberately excluded from participation in the market rather than me simply marketing my condo effectively.
We are discussing the specific occasions where this is going on. Not the overall trend.
I’m not questioning that these things are measurable on the large scale. I’m challenging the notion that there is any way to tell on an individual basis. Because this is what would be required for any AA program to be effective.
Shodan,
You are my hero. Seriously, can I have an autograph?
Chicago Faucet.
Like Hispanics?
Oh wait, they get AA. Nevermind me.
What a surprise! Comparisons of anti-AA beliefs to racism! :rolleyes:
The metirc of whether or not you have, indeed, been guilty of steering. Are you going to claim that you have been compelled by the government to advertise in particular media? If not, then you are not an example of “an occasion” in which the government has compelled anyone to post remedial advertising.
Heyak, you’re drawing a distinction between immutable characteristics versus those factors you say students (or their families) have control over. After a certain point, I’m not sure those some of those circumstances really are changeable. Not in a way that is meaningful in this context. Oh, sure, a parent could decide to go back to school, get a new job, move to a different town, enroll their college-bound children in a school with a more rigorous program, etc. but these aren’t simple changes to accomplish.
Also, since you’ve laid the issue out so neatly, it’s worth pointing out that some colleges have found that type E characteristics have the inverse relationship we’d expect with some some measures of SCP. That is, minority status is associated with MORE success. Law schools, for one example, have discovered that minority grads are many more times as likely to work in public service or other underserved areas after graduation. This is something that law schools find valuable (yes, they like to brag about the big salaries their grads get, and they like the big donations those grads can give, but they also have a service mission as well).
Huh? You’re really starting to not make sense to me now.
I have not been compelled by the government to advertise in particular media. The question is, how can the government AA programs tell the difference from me and a racist who doesn’t want to rent to minorities? (Existing AA programs, or theoretical ones, whatever you like).
What’s steering? What do you mean by “guilty of steering”.
Exactly. So the government is not forcing you to participate in any AA activities regarding your rental property.
I initially said that I believed the government had a right to compel people who had been guilty of discrimination to use affirmative action to demonstrate that they were no longer engaging in that practice.
You asked how anyone could be shown to have been excluded from the market.
The point is that people have been caught excluding others from the market: realtors have been caught referring blacks only to selected neighborhoods even when the black prospective buyer or tenant expressed an interest in seeing properties elsewhere. THe realtors simply claimed that there was no available property in the preferred location (when there was such property available) and that only less desirable properties were available. Landlords and sellers have been caught claiming that property was “just sold/rented” when a prospective buyer/tenant turned out to be black or latino (and then showing the same property to a white applicant after denying that the property was available to the first applicants).
Since you have not been caught engaging in those practices, the government has not business compelling you to use affirmative action to correct your previous crimes.
Nor should they.
Yes, this is my question.
So, only if I am caught red handed like the ways you describe would AA affect me?
That doesn’t sound like AA at all to me. That sounds like simply enforcing the existing laws against descrimination.
Of course, a lot of this depends on how loosely we determine who is “caught” descriminating.
Agreed.
How far would you take this?
Since college X has not been caught engaging in practices similar to those you describe, the government has no business complelling them to use AA to correct previous crimes.
Since city X’s fire department or police department has not been caught engaging in practices similar to those you describe, the government has no business complelling them to use AA to correct previous crimes.
If anything, your argument seems to be against AA more than for it.
No, as I have already said at least twice in this thread, I am opposed to quotas and lowering qualifications simply to get “good numbers.” However, I also oppose the broad paint brush used to claim that all AA is lowering bars and imposing quotas when there are other forms of Affirmative Action. I also oppose the propogation of the error that all AA is imposed by the government. I know of several companies that have engaged in outreach programs that did not resort to lowered expectations out of a sense of justice with no government mandate. (And I am aware that there are companies who go through the motions of AA–including lowered bars and quotas–simply to avoid future government intervention, but that does not invalidate the goal or process of effective AA programs.)
Nearly all broad generalizations about AA (and all absolute declarations about AA) are riddled with errors of fact and logic. It is an issue that should be dealt with using more particulars and better facts on all sides of the discussion.
You’re either not reading my comments closely or you’re deliberately erecting a straw man. I hope it is the former rather than the latter, so that you’re just being careless rather than intentionally deceptive.
I’m not drawing a black and white (to use an inopportune phrase) distinction between that which is under our control or not. It’s all shades of grey. That is why I use phrases such as ‘factors that someone (say, their family) had some control over.’ Some control is more than zero control, less than infinite control.
E.g. Dad ran off with the babysitter, causing a divorce and lower household income due to single-parent household. Someone (Dad) had a very high degree of control over that. Contrast with Dad was hit by a car and crippled, causing lower household income. Low degree of control.
My formulation of an outcome measure was deliberately multi-factor–in fact, I would favor just such a measure. And if people with one kind of socioeconomic or demographic characteristic are more prone to Good Deeds, that would be a reason for using socioeconomic or demographic data.
HOWEVER: I’d be interested in knowing whether a history of involvement in Good Deeds wouldn’t be a better predictor of future Good Deeds, rather than (say) being poor or black. Again, it seems both more probabilistically valid (though this is an empirical matter) and more morally legitimate to judge people based on their past conduct than on something they had little or no control over.
I’d also be wary that Good Deeds (whose good?) and/or underservice (underserved relative to who and what? Who decides what adequate service is?) are political concepts. A public institution, in my mind, should strive to be non-partisan. Private institutions should have more leeway.
Sorry. It’s kind of amusing to see this overlooked, from you with the face.
Thanks, margin.
Since I’m here, let me respond to this by agiantdwarf:
Hey, if the vitriol against AA was distributed more in proportion to those who benefit from it, then maybe it would be more difficult to say there is a racist undercurrent to the anti-AA tide. But as it stands, what we have is a whole bunch of people foaming at the mouth because they think shiploads of black folks are unfairly snatching jobs and college seats out of the hands of more deserving people. What we hear is a whole lot of talk about “reverse racism”, but we never hear talk about “reverse sexism”. The statistics, funny enough, show that gender is the more prevalent preferential determinant when it comes to AA. Since white women make up the largest group of people who are eligible for AA, odds are greater that a white male will be “shafted” by one of them than they will by a black person. Just based on numerics, most people in the workplace who have been helped by AA are white folks.
But this reality is downplayed. To so much an extent that many white women forget or are unaware
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0300/1_25/54955658/p3/article.jhtml?term=[/urlthat they have a stake in the program.
For a personal anecdote, at my job (which is for the federal government), most of the Equal Employment Opportunity complaints are filed by white women. A significant number of these women, as a consquence of these complaints, have been able to make significant strides up the grade scale at a much faster rate than they would have without the complaint. These kinds of things happen everyday, and yet black people remain the scapegoat for all the white man’s AA woes.
If this isn’t the result of racism, what is your hypothesis for it, agiantdwarf?
I guess I didn’t read carefully. I’m not a staw-man kind of poster.
I don’t think “Good Deeds” are a partisan concept. Public Service is one of the three arms of ANY higher education institution–and when it is supported with public funds the expectations, IME, are higher. Public service is accomplished many ways, not just by the work of alumni, but what graduates do is valued. It’s very important to U-M, for example, that it has a nursing school which is helping to address the nursing shortage. That we have an ed school (even though a public institution with a historically great ed school exists 15 miles to the east). That some of our doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc go to the inner city, developing countries, and rural areas underserved by their professions. That’s important no matter what party affiliation is held by the governor or the majority of the state legislators. If few of our graduates were doing those things, there would be concern. We might alter the curriculum, but also do other things like recruit people who claim they aspire to, or studies show are more likely to, go into areas we’d think of as “public service.”
you with the face please provide a cite for your claim that women are profiting by their EEOC complaints. As a personal anecdote, I worked in all-male job, got harassed, and got let go. My complaint never went anywhere. If we’re going to talk about EEOC complaints, that’s a whole other issue.
My apologies then. One of my pet peeves is when people ignore qualifiers like ‘some’ ‘much’ or ‘tend’. Too many people think in terms of binary distinctions and can’t (or won’t) grasp shades of gray.
Is arms a typo? Did you mean aims?
Says who? That, in itself, is a political or ideological assertion. If I wanted to run a for-profit higher educational system–like University of Phoenix or the various DeVry-type technical programs–I’d have to place Public Service as one of my goals? Is this a claim that Public Service is an essential and integral part of higher service, something that is inherent in it’s very nature? Or is it a claim that all educational institutions have a moral obligation to undertake Public Service? What about non-educational institutions? Do you think all institutions have a Public Service obligation?
What are the other 2 arms/aims? Other than some kind of political/ideological discussion, how did we know these 3 were the goals, not 2 of them or these 3 plus another you’ve omitted?
[QUOTE]
**
–and when it is supported with public funds the expectations, IME, are higher. Public service is accomplished many ways, not just by the work of alumni, but what graduates do is valued. It’s very important to U-M, for example, that it has a nursing school which is helping to address the nursing shortage. That we have an ed school (even though a public institution with a historically great ed school exists 15 miles to the east). That some of our doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc go to the inner city, developing countries, and rural areas underserved by their professions.
**
[QUOTE]
Suppose there in Michigan you have a group of poor white applicants from the backwoods of the UP, a group of poor black applicants from the backstreets of Detroit, and a group of applicants from (say) the West Bank. You have 100 in each group, and you only have 100 slots. Is it not a political decision to decide how many you should admit from each group? Suppose that the West Bank has a per capita income lower than the other two groups. Pure raw need would be a rational for preferring the West Bankers. But we might think it’s more important to use Michigan state (and federal matching) tax moneys to improve Michigan. That’s a political decision. In making the choice between the white rural applicants and the black urban applicants, you’d have to make some similar sort of political judgement about the need, merit, or raw political power of the different communities.
Should the law school view Public Service with Hamas as equally valuable as Amnesty International? How does a lobbyist with the Sierra Club compare with someone who lobbies for the Nat’l Association of Manufacturers? ACLU vs. Moral Majority? Does the ideology of the non-profit matter? Does how much the person gets paid matter?
Suppose black law school graduates tend to go into jobs as private practice defense attorneys in poor black inner cities and white grads tend to go work for the DA’s office in those same neighborhoods. The whites are working for the government and the blacks are in the for-profit sector–which is doing public service?
Gosh, you know, I think I did mean arms, though aims is okay too.
The three are research-teaching-public service. As for “who says” it probably goes back to Cardinal Newman but don’t quote me on that (his book is in my office, not here at home). It’s just kind of a given amongst those in higher ed in the U.S… Those are the three things traditional higher education is about. I’m sorry if that seems vague–it’s one of those things that’s so ingrained, I don’t know where it comes from.
I can’t speak to U of Phoenix and others. They are avowedly non-traditional. For example, as I understand it U of P doesn’t include in its mission the creation of new knowledge (research).
Of course there are values at work there. I don’t think they’ve done some detailed study to determine which students do which kind of service and where they’re most likely to do it, so they are not in a position (yet) to choose between admitting someone which might go on to help in the Appalachians versus admitting someone who might go on to help in Detroit. Or with a certain racial group. I suppose if they cared about that, then yeah, they’d have to make decisions about what is more important. Which would be as thorny as you imply. I know we’ll probably let the Nursing school admit more students this year, and that means someone else can’t grow. I guess that was a political decision–but it happens at the college level, not at the level of looking at applicants.
I think I misunderstood you because of your use of the word partisan.
margin, an administrator of the EEOC at my office told me this information. I don’t know if there is a cite detailing the composition of EEO complaints and the consequences that result from those in the fed government, so if this is what you are looking for, sorry. Things may be different in the private sector. I was just giving an example of how public perception and reality frequently disconnect when it comes to AA. EEO is not immune to the same bias. Race is frequently blown out of proportion and gender is usually only brushed upon. No one has yet explained to me why that is fair.
you with the face:
It’s easier to rant about “them” when “them” doesn’t include your wife, your daughters, your mother, or your best friend. Or you.