# Affirmative action in the Supreme Court again **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 24, 2012, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792 "2012-02-24T02:14:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/101 "2012-02-29T02:53:39Z")
[QUOTE=Smitty] How would you feel if a white B student got in over a black B+ student because he was white? Not happy about that? OK, then. You aren’t for “fairness and racial equality”, you are for discrimination. Justify it all you want, that’s what it comes down to. [/QUOTE] How would you feel if a white student was accepted at three times the rate of an Asian student with the same grades and SAT score? How would you feel if being white gave you a 140 advantage on the SATs over an Asian. How about we deal with the affirmative action that affects a small handful of already severely underrepresented blacks that get into decent colleges after we deal with the advantage that the system seems to give white applicants. Or is letting people in based on race only unjust if it helps other people? ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/102 "2012-02-29T03:13:16Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > These folks have defined the criteria that are used to determine whether an individual is “qualified.” It is not by coincidence that their children always manage to meet the bar. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be able to inherit the throne. But it becomes an arms race because folks on the lower rungs eventually become hip to the game–the upper echelon does not want to share its place. So with each generation, the standards become harder to attain. The “qualifications” become more abstract. You need a divining rod to figure them out. Geez. Why weren’t you saying this when we were talking about how higher scoring Asians were being rejected from school because white students did better with “soft criteria” > [@](#): > > indicator of an individual’s relative position to the upper echelon, and it is so by design. An individual’s SAT score has more to do with factors beyond their control than within their control. Maybe for white folks. Tell me how a bunch of Asian immigrants who came over during a period when currency controls prevented you from bringing more than a couple hundred dollars with you to start your new life in America and manage to have kids that do well on the SATs? Now to be fair there is a centuries long Confucian tradition that elevates academics and education. So there is probably some advantage to having that history instead of centuries of slavery and segregation. So Ive got no problem with AA for blacks. Less so for other races which I think should be replaced with socioeconomic consideration. Affirmative Action, for all its flaws, is a way to counteract the tendency of the “cream of the crop” to always be the product of people who were raised to be the “cream of the crop”, so that only their children will be the “cream of the crop”, while everyone else is beaten over the head for being so very lazy and stupid. It is a way to challenge the idea that “qualification” is something that can be numerically quantified or that is objectively meaningful. I have said so in earlier threads: I believe I benefited from AA, at least in undergrad. My SAT scores were not that great (compared to my university’s average), and while I was in the top 10% of my HS class, I did not have a whole roster of AP classes on my transcript. My school did not offer a whole roster of AP classes for me to take. Yet I was admitted to a top-notch engineer school. I wasn’t “qualified”, and yet I somehow managed to graduate with honors. As did other people just like me. And so many of the people who were “qualified” did not do so. I suppose you can weep for the future Bill Gates who ended up having to go elsewhere because my “unqualified” application was accepted in lieu of his or hers, but I don’t. From my perspective, I didn’t get something unfairly handed to me. The system that made me have to compete against kids who had been offered dozens of AP classes to the three my school had offered, and the system that had inculcated all of us with the notion that SAT scores summarize the complete worth of a human being, intellectually or otherwise, even though there is a billion dollar industry that exploits the very vacuousness of this lie…now THAT is unfair. Much more unfair than Affirmative Action. We have both systems of unfairness in place. If you want to undo one, you’ve got to undo the other. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![FixMyIgnorance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7feea3/32.png) [@FixMyIgnorance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FixMyIgnorance)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/103 "2012-02-29T03:45:17Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Geez. Why weren’t you saying this when we were talking about how higher scoring Asians were being rejected from school because white students did better with “soft criteria” Because this isn’t true, and please don’t bring that crap back into this thread and derail it, please. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/104 "2012-02-29T05:18:05Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > …but this isn’t anti-Asian discrimination in itself. It sounds subtle, but it’s a vastly important point that completely changes things. Subtle? Sure, we discriminate to the disadvantage of Asians but it’s not REALLY discrimination because our intent is not to discriminate that is just the coincidental result of our desire to discriminate. That’s just the unintended result. :rolleyes: > [@](#): > > If you have too many of _ANY_ one particular group, that will be a trend that’s selected against. For instance, if you had a huge influx of white violin players, that would be a trend that’s selected against because they don’t want the class to be homogenous. You realize that these school have like three or four times as many whites as asians at these schools. You don’t seem very concerned about the homogeneity created by so many white students. > [@](#): > > And yes you have to take into account that “favored races” are races that have been at historical disadvantages – usually unfairly so. And unfair historic disadvantage have white students suffered (at the hands of their Asian oppressors)? ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/105 "2012-02-29T06:08:40Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > I don’t want to answer the question with certainty, and I certainly don’t want to speak for anyone else in this thread, but I read something interesting the other day on a topic with some indirect similarities. It was about how well immigrants adapted to society. The person/people/paper (now I wish I had paid more attention at the time) indicated that it took approximately three generations before the individual was fully integrated. In other words, if you came over on the boat, your grandchildren would basically be totally integrated and good luck talking about anything “back home.” A bit OT - On one hand, yes, in my experience (and I know lots and lots of immigrant families, being an immigrant myself) the third generation are the ones fully integrated. On the other hand, they are also the ones much less ambitious than the first two generations, much more prone to “coasting” and ultimately less successful in life. I see this all the time. First generation work hard in whatever profession they have. Second generation become doctors, lawyers, engineers and computer programmers. Third generation become English or theater majors. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/106 "2012-02-29T06:17:08Z")
> [@andros](#): > > Poverty is demonstrably generational. Unless you’re going to argue that African-Americans are just worse people, they continue to feel the effects of systematic slavery, oppression, and disparagement. Forty years since civil rights legislation has not been sufficient to simply make all of that go away. Jews in Europe, for hundreds and hundreds of years, have been oppressed, disparaged, periodically slaughtered, and prevented from working in a lot of professions. Why are Jews not “feeling the effects” of all that? Or if they are, how do they manage to turn those effects into phenomenal achievement as a people? The Vietnamese “boat people” have been oppressed and disparaged for several generations in Vietnam. They were mostly ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam. Those that I saw that managed to get to the US and those I met in Israel integrated well, learned the respective languages perfectly, and were prospering. How did they manage not to “feel the effects”? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 11:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/107 "2012-02-29T11:38:36Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Jews in Europe, for hundreds and hundreds of years, have been oppressed, disparaged, periodically slaughtered, and prevented from working in a lot of professions. Why are Jews not “feeling the effects” of all that? Or if they are, how do they manage to turn those effects into phenomenal achievement as a people? Practice. After 2000 years, we’ve learned a thing or two. ---
**Author:** ![brickbacon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@brickbacon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brickbacon)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/108 "2012-02-29T15:41:08Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Jews in Europe, for hundreds and hundreds of years, have been oppressed, disparaged, periodically slaughtered, and prevented from working in a lot of professions. Why are Jews not “feeling the effects” of all that? Or if they are, how do they manage to turn those effects into phenomenal achievement as a people? Because, by and large, the Jewish (often forced) diaspora exposed the Jewish people to different ideas and information at higher rates than most other groups. It was that movement that ultimately strengthened Jewish culture despite the obvious hardships. While Jews have been hated in many of these places, they were usually respected and trusted to do the things that the gentiles didn’t want to do. That “respect” meant that, unlike Blacks who were assumed to be stupid, people trusted Jews to handle their money or dispense professional advice in some cases. That trust provided obvious avenues of success. Now that we live in an information economy, you see that the skills/ideals, picked up over generations, that have been culturally ingrained, have become strengths instead of weaknesses. One prime example of this is the law. Skadden, one of the biggest law firms in the country, was catapulted to success (largely) by Jewish lawyers (Flom, et. al) who were not hired at the white shoe lawfirms in the day. They dealt with M&As which, at the time, were not profitable or respected. The powerful firms of the day shied away from doing that kind of work, or they subcontracted to firms like Skadden. When the golden age of M&A came a few decades down the road, Skadden, and firms like them, were the only ones with the knowledge and experience to do the work. Thus, alienation become integration. A liability became an asset. Much of this is because they worked hard, but a lot of it is because the assumptions made about Jews rarely represented a professional hindrance, or presumed any intellectual deficiencies. To distill the anecdote a bit; people generally live up or down to expectations. > [@Terr](#): > > The Vietnamese “boat people” have been oppressed and disparaged for several generations in Vietnam. They were mostly ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam. **Those that I saw that managed to get to the US and those I met in Israel integrated well, learned the respective languages perfectly, and were prospering**. How did they manage not to “feel the effects”? My bolding. The point is that the ones you SAW do well. This is the survivorship/selection bias at play. It does not tell you much about the cumulative effects long term discrimination has on the entire cohort. It’s like saying all the Black NBA players I meet are really rich. This is made more transparently obvious given that Vietnam is hardly a model of stability and economic success. ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/109 "2012-02-29T15:48:18Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > My bolding. The point is that the ones you SAW do well. This is the survivorship/selection bias at play. Seriously? You think I avoided “SEEING” the unsuccessful ones? Stats: 12% Vietnamese-Americans are under poverty line according to 2010 census. 27% of African Americans are under poverty line. And this coming from a very poor country with no English. ---
**Author:** ![furt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/439d5e/32.png) [@furt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furt)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/110 "2012-02-29T15:57:19Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > Because, by and large, the Jewish (often forced) diaspora exposed the Jewish people to different ideas and information at higher rates than most other groups. In much the same way that slavery enabled the African people to travel overseas and gain new experiences … :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![curioushat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b9e5f3/32.png) [@curioushat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curioushat)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/111 "2012-02-29T16:08:07Z")
Well here’s an excellent question. How do students who are granted admission due to AA fare versus students who were not granted admission due to AA?? That would at least answer the question as to whether disadvantaged minorities are disadvantaged by their high school credentials, meaning that non-oriental minority Sam’s low SAT/GPA were not an indication of future university performance. Or on the other hand, Sam is simply less capable as a university student, and his previous credentials reflect that. This could be for a variety of reasons but would demonstrate that institutional racism cannot be solved, or even affected much, by blanket granting admission to lesser performing but disadvantaged students. Study? ---
**Author:** ![Terr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/839c29/32.png) [@Terr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Terr)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/112 "2012-02-29T16:13:53Z")
> [@furt](#): > > In much the same way that slavery enabled the African people to travel overseas and gain new experiences … :rolleyes: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. ---
**Author:** ![AndyLee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/898d66/32.png) [@AndyLee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AndyLee)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/113 "2012-02-29T17:22:20Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > I have said so in earlier threads: I believe I benefited from AA, at least in undergrad. My SAT scores were not that great (compared to my university’s average), and while I was in the top 10% of my HS class, I did not have a whole roster of AP classes on my transcript. My school did not offer a whole roster of AP classes for me to take. Yet I was admitted to a top-notch engineer school. I wasn’t “qualified”, and yet I somehow managed to graduate with honors. So what you’re really saying is the qualifications are off, not AA. If you got in and weren’t qualified the conditions should be modified. What about the person you displaced? I wonder how he/she feels. I guess it’s no different that the man who marries the bosses daughter and gets to be vice president two minutes after he says I do. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/114 "2012-02-29T17:29:12Z")
> [@furt](#): > > In much the same way that slavery enabled the African people to travel overseas and gain new experiences … :rolleyes: Not really comparable. The Jewish diaspora at least mostly got to choose where to flee to, and were able to practise trades and live somewhat free once they got there. ---
**Author:** ![orcenio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/orcenio/32/1036_2.png) [@orcenio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/orcenio)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/115 "2012-02-29T18:07:58Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Jews in Europe, for hundreds and hundreds of years, have been oppressed, disparaged, periodically slaughtered, and prevented from working in a lot of professions. Why are Jews not “feeling the effects” of all that? Or if they are, how do they manage to turn those effects into phenomenal achievement as a people? > > The Vietnamese “boat people” have been oppressed and disparaged for several generations in Vietnam. They were mostly ethnic Chinese who lived in Vietnam. Those that I saw that managed to get to the US and those I met in Israel integrated well, learned the respective languages perfectly, and were prospering. How did they manage not to “feel the effects”? Im not going to jump into the correctness of racially based affirmative action as it pertains to school entrance, but It’s not difficult to understand why AAs suffer a relatively high rate of poverty. **Its due to the last 400 years of complete disenfranchisement in all areas of American life from the political to legal to economical to the educational arenas.** You don’t see these rates of poverty in any new immigrant groups because they simply were not exposed to this very real, long-standing, legally binding, and social discrimination. This goes for African immigrants as well as your Vietnamese example. More proof comes from another group with a similar American history to AAs and that’s the poor state of Amerindians (in both the US and Canada). I think one can rationally argue the effectiveness of affirmative action, but let’s not be ahistorical (or ignorant of basic American/Canadian history). ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/116 "2012-02-29T18:10:53Z")
> [@curioushat](#): > > How do students who are granted admission due to AA fare versus students who were not granted admission due to AA?? Not as well. > [@](#): > > …where the racial preferences in admissions are not as great, the differences in graduation rates are not as great. The critics of affirmative action were right: Racial preferences reduce the prospects of black students graduating. Other data tell the same story. > > Compare racial preferences in Colorado, for example. At the flagship University of Colorado at Boulder, test score differences between black and white students have been more than 200 points – and only 39 percent of the black students graduated, compared to 72 percent of white students. Meanwhile, at the University of Colorado at Denver, where the SAT score difference was a negligible 30 points, there was also a negligible difference in graduation rates – 50 percent for blacks and 48 percent for whites. > > In short, it is not the relative rankings of the institutions but the racial differential in admissions standards that has been crucial. [Cite.](http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/racism/1635-affirmative-action-and-college-graduation-rates.html) > [@](#): > > To measure affirmative action at a given institution, the researchers used the difference between the mean SAT score earned by blacks or Hispanics and the mean score earned by all students at that institution. > > Researchers found that the greater the discrepancy in SAT scores between black and Hispanic students and others on a specific campus, the lower the grades earned by those minorities on the campus. [Cite.](http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/04/02/23248/) > [@](#): > > What I find and describe in this Article is a system of racial preferences that, in one realm after another, produces more harms than benefits for its putative beneficiaries. The admission preferences extended to blacks are very large and do not successfully identify students who will perform better than one would predict based on their academic indices. Consequently, most black law applicants end up at schools where they will struggle academically and fail at higher rates than they would in the absence of preferences. [Cite (pdf).](http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/rubinfeldd/SanderFINAL.pdf) Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![brickbacon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/898d66/32.png) [@brickbacon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brickbacon)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/117 "2012-02-29T18:17:31Z")
> [@Terr](#): > > Seriously? You think I avoided “SEEING” the unsuccessful ones? Not so much that as the unsuccessful ones are still in Vietnam working in rice patties. Do you realize how much drive, ambition, and determination it takes to get here? That process weeds out all of the lazy, incompetent people. What you see here are the survivors, the winners. Even if they all aren’t rich in the US, the process by which they got to stay here selected for those who would likely do well. This is why you see African immigrants do better than African Americans, and for that matter, White Americans. > [@furt](#): > > In much the same way that slavery enabled the African people to travel overseas and gain new experiences … :rolleyes: Are you really trying to equate the two? Clearly, expulsion of Jews from various areas overtime resulted in often unspeakable hardships. But, in many places, Jews were given basic rights, and allowed to contribute to society in ways that were meaningful. Not all their collective movements were compulsory, nor where they coupled with many of the negative stereotypes that exist with other populations. To quote this [cite](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/portrait/diaspora.html): > [@](#): > > The Greek word “diaspora” means a scattering. And indeed there was a scattering of Jews throughout the known Greek and Roman world from the third century B.C. and on down. There’s a famous utterance by Strabo, a Greek geographer of the late first century, B.C., who says that you can’t go anywhere in the civilized world without encountering a Jew. And by his time this certainly was true. There were large Jewish communities in Egypt, especially in Alexandria, but even throughout the countryside, up the Nile Valley. There were large Jewish communities in Syria, a very large one in the city of Antioch, but throughout Syria, and there were numerous Jewish communities throughout Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, just as there were Jewish communities in Greece and throughout the Italian peninsula, most especially of course in the city of Rome. Even further west, we know about Jews in southern France, and Jews in Marseilles and perhaps even Jews in Spain… Again, they were spread throughout the _civilized_ world, while remained aligned with the Jewish faith. That enriched the Jewish culture even considering those hardships. More [here](http://www.myjewishlearning.com/history/Jewish_World_Today/Jews_Around_the_Globe.shtml): > [@](#): > > The story of the Jewish Diaspora begins in the year 587 B.C.E., when the kingdom of Judea was conquered by the Babylonians, who destroyed the temple in Jerusalem and exiled a large part of the Jewish population to Babylonia (now southern Iraq). Ever since, significant numbers of Jews have lived in the Diaspora, many expressing longing to return to the Land of Israel. > > The history of Jewish dispersion has led to the outstanding diversity of the Jewish people, who have settled in countries as disparate as Morocco, Cuba, Mexico, and Australia. There are currently some 13.4 million Jews in the world: more 8 million in the Diaspora, with the remaining more than 5 million in Israel. In was largely because of persecution that Jews tended to live in cities, which were (and still are) the engines of commerce and innovation. Being in those environments generally contributed positively to the Jewish culture. But again, I am not saying everything about their long history of persecution was positive, just that the movements themselves had some upside culturally. ---
**Author:** ![curioushat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b9e5f3/32.png) [@curioushat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curioushat)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/118 "2012-02-29T18:21:58Z")
> [@brickbacon](#): > > \*\*\*In was largely because of persecution that Jews tended to live in cities, \*\*\*which were (and still are) the engines of commerce and innovation. Being in those environments generally contributed positively to the Jewish culture. But again, I am not saying everything about their long history of persecution was positive, just that the movements themselves had some upside culturally. And this isn’t true for blacks now? What amazes me is just how easily nearly every other previously discriminated against culture easily integrated into society after just a few generations. Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, at one point Catholics..currently Mexicans, are largely discriminated against. What likely caused them to become integrated that does NOT apply to the black population? Institutional racism? Do we really STILL hate blacks THAT much? I know it isn’t apparent on the surface, but atheists and gays are a MUCH more widely hated group in the US. ---
**Author:** ![FixMyIgnorance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7feea3/32.png) [@FixMyIgnorance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FixMyIgnorance)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/119 "2012-02-29T18:57:18Z")
> [@curioushat](#): > > And this isn’t true for blacks now? > > What amazes me is just how easily nearly every other previously discriminated against culture easily integrated into society after just a few generations. Italians, Irish, Jews, Chinese, at one point Catholics..currently Mexicans, are largely discriminated against. What likely caused them to become integrated that does NOT apply to the black population? Institutional racism? Do we really STILL hate blacks THAT much? > > I know it isn’t apparent on the surface, but atheists and gays are a MUCH more widely hated group in the US. The nature of the slavery in this case isn’t fully comparable. There has been all sorts of disenfranchisement ranging from imperialism in Africa to slavery here in the US. Relatively speaking, such slavery was very recent, and it lasted for hundreds of years. Change doesn’t happen overnight, especially while everyone else has had a chance to directly benefit from their plight and surge ahead. ---
**Author:** ![curioushat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/b9e5f3/32.png) [@curioushat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curioushat)\ **Post date:** [February 29, 2012, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792/120 "2012-02-29T19:03:38Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > The nature of the slavery in this case isn’t fully comparable. There has been all sorts of disenfranchisement ranging from imperialism in Africa to slavery here in the US. Relatively speaking, such slavery was very recent, and it lasted for hundreds of years. Change doesn’t happen overnight, especially while everyone else has had a chance to directly benefit from their plight and surge ahead. Well here’s another good question. How do these ethnic minorities fare in other countries? Are blacks in England also far behind whites in England? Or is it even since there was much less institutional racism there. This whole discussion is missing the _ **possibility** _, that for some reason, one ethnic group is more or less capable than another. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/affirmative-action-in-the-supreme-court-again/613792.md?page=7)