*"If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.
The test results highlight the importance of continuing affirmative action admissions at U.S. medical schools."*
When it comes to being admitted to a selective college (and I make the inference that this more or less scales all the way down to ordinary colleges), there is a very large proportion of blacks taking the race-based (defacto) AA slots whose ancestors have no enslavement history. See my earlier reference from Gates and Lanier, e.g.
The OP is an advocate for race based affirmative action. I disagree with that, but this proposal seems to purport itself to be a “compromise” where we are not using race, but merely a ancestral factor which, in practice, acts as a proxy for race. A three card monte trick.
I consider this to be an absurd attempt to merely have race based affirmative action. Instead of engaging in subterfuge, let’s just have a debate on race based affirmative action.
The context here is that SCOTUS is likely to uphold Fisher’s complaint in Fisher 2, and that beyond that, seems to be generally very skeptical of race-based AA. Proxies that accomplish the same thing without using race would therefore be useful, but to date the only proxy that has been advanced is opportunity.
Unfortunately, blacks given the same opportunity (at least, for family education and income) still perform substantially under par to other groups, so universities cannot attain reasonable black representation without race-specific boosts.
U Texas, for example, is not trying to get enough black students in general. They can do that with the 10% guideline. They want the best black students, who come from outside those defacto segregated schools. Those students, which U Texas considers under-represented black students from non-poverty backgrounds, are still well behind their white and asian peers from similar economic cohorts, so U Texas wants to use race-alone criteria as a stand-alone boost.
All colleges and universities do this, and the most selective institutions do it the most aggressively. But in recent years, the pool of blacks who get selected are increasingly those who do not have US enslavement ancestry. Therefore Rothstein proposes (seriously, I think), that we simply substitute enslavement history to make sure the blacks who are receiving the AA slots are the ones most harmed.
This idea has got to be one of the most bizarre attempts to redefine a term to weaken it politically. Affirmative action has absolutely nothing to with slavery. I am stunned to see there are people ignorant enough of the purpose of affirmative action to fall for this trick from one of the board’s best one-trick ponies. Hat’s off to you Chief Pedant for finding yet another way to make sure one of your racist threads populates Great Debates.
Once again, for those who just don’t get it, affirmative action has jack shit to do with slavery and you need to at least read a paragraph on Wikipedia to understand that.
But the proposal refers only to “American slaves”, where I reckon “American” refers only to the country: the racism AA is supposed to fight affects descendants of Brazilian slaves or Jamaican ones as much as descendents of American slaves or recent imigrants from Nigeria.
Are you suggesting, then, that a US University which extends an AA slot to a privileged black student from a different country is using race-based AA in the way it should be used?
I am aware that, in your paradigm, all that does not fit your view may be “racist,” but I encourage you not to inject inflammatory rhetoric which carries no argumentation worth. I supect Mr Rothstein might take issue with your “racist” label for this idea. I myself do not care, as “racist” is simply a lazy debater’s way to opt out of offering substance for a complex societal issue.
Perhaps you could begin by avoiding meaningless mud-slinging and instead enlightening me or Mr Rothstein about why his suggestion to limit race-based AA to those with a history of enslavement weakens it politically when the issue on the table is that leaving race-based AA alone risks losing it entirely if SCOTUS discards it for all but applications passing strict scrutiny.
Will you also be extending your “racist” paintbrush to Professors Gates and Guinier?
From my earlier cite:
*"While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them – perhaps as many as two-thirds – were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.
What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges – and with it, entry into the country’s inner circles of power, wealth and influence – African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind."*
Assuming this is true, and for the purposes of the argument, lets assume it is true, why should I have to tell my daughter, born in 2003, that she didn’t get admitted to a certain school even though her grades and test scores were higher than accepted applicants, because we simply have to make exceptions to allow for those whose ancestors were slaves in 1865.
What do I tell her when she asks why it matters what happened 150 years ago? What if my family 70 years ago were dirt poor coal miners from West Virginia when it is still socially acceptable to make incest jokes about us?
Isn’t it silly to talk about what remote and long dead ancestors had to suffer instead of what these individuals have to offer the school? Or should we pay for the sins of our fathers? Shouldn’t we put that aside and judge people based upon their own life experiences and (god forbid) actual merit in the form of universally recognized merit?
ETA: Does it matter if I can show that in my ancestral line, nobody owned a slave? Does it matter if I can show that my father and grandfather supported the Civil Rights movement? Any extra points there?
The first is race-based (let’s say, “self-identified underrepresented group based”) AA. You either are for it, or you are not. Without rehashing a bunch of things, let’s take it as a given that, without group-based AA, a merit-based system that accounts for every other variable such as income, family education, background, and so on, will NOT result in a proportionate number of blacks being admitted to higher education and jobs. At every tier, blacks underperform their peers. In fact, to such an extent that black children from wealthy and educated US families perform barely on par with whites and asians from poverty stricken, uneducated parents.
OK. So if you believe that, in order for us to have the best society possible, we need to see reasonable representation from every group, then you need group-based AA.
So the question I want to look at is not the first question: Should we have group-based AA? I am an ardent supporter of that (because no other mechanism will get us to reasonably proportionate representation).
I want to know if it’s a good idea to limit group-based AA to those in the US with a history of enslavement. Without that limitation, what’s happening (as Rothstein, Guinier, Gates and others point out) is that group-based AA benefits are accruing to privileged immigrants, and not US blacks.
Heh. I’m going to have to have that conversation with my daughter, too.
“Why did they pick her over me? I took harder classes and got better grades.”
“Because you have to pay for your father’s sins.”
“What sins?”
“Heh. No, I’m just messing with you, kid.”
“Oh.”
“No, all I ever did was get better grades in harder classes than her father did.”
“But they picked him over you?”
“Yep. It’s funny; my dad said, then, that I had to pay for my father’s sins.”
“And you replied, ‘What sins?’”
“I did.”
“And he was kidding, too?”
“Of course he was.”
“Did he add something about losing out due to affirmative action?”
“Of course he did.”
“Will my kid and her kid someday get judged on their merits?”
“I’d guess her kid will get affirmative action while your kid ‘pays for your sins’.”
“What, just so my kid will say ‘What sins?’”
“Exactly.”
“And I’ll say ‘Well, I worked harder after the spot I earned went to her mom’.”
“That’s what we do.”
“Do we ever sin?”
“Not as far as I can tell, no.”
I see what you are saying, and my earlier comments were too harsh. Although I disagree with race based affirmative action, if we assume that it is appropriate, then it is only appropriate that disadvantaged minorities reap the benefits. So, following the example, if we are going to give a leg up to black people, then it should be Johnny, the grandson of sharecroppers from Alabama, and not Eddie Murphy’s character from Coming to America.
It makes sense only so long as we assume that race based affirmative action is desirable. I disagree. I have read your other threads and you propose that if things were based solely on merit that there would be almost no black doctors, for example. I haven’t done as much research as you have, but assuming that is true, why is it a problem?
IOW, Why must there be a representative sample of races in all professions? Is it your contention that minority groups, again using blacks as an example, lack only the ability to pass standardized tests, but would otherwise make fine doctors, or is it that they lack the capacity to pass the tests and that lack of knowledge carries over to the practice of medicine?
If it is #1, then we need to change the tests. If #2 then we should not have poor doctors of whatever race.
Hmm. Why not go the other way? Why not just write off people who were descended from slaves and give them far fewer benefits and absolutely no judicial discretion?
If we’re allowing ourselves to discriminate racially in order to reach the desirable goal of an elite class that is representative racially, why not just tweak the racial make-up instead of trying to tweak who the elites are? If we’re going to discriminate, why not do it in the other direction?
Actually, yes. Yes it is. Forest fires are a natural part of healthy ecosystems; small fires clear out the low brush periodically and allow the growth of larger trees. Preventing all forest fires alters natural ecosystems in ways we don’t really like the result of, and makes sure that any forest fire we don’t prevent will burn really big, really fast.
I’m not really sure what this does to the metaphor intended. I mean, I was being straight Swiftian; I don’t think we really should manipulate welfare and the legal system to cull the population of economic underperforming minority groups in the name of decreasing the gap between percent-of-population and percent-of-economic-elite. But that’s because I don’t support trying to target minority groups in general, and because I don’t assume that equality of outcome will result in equality of result. Culture is strongly associated with race, and cultures affect what a group values, and what it pursues; stereotypical Jewish culture produces relatively few children willing to dedicate their lives to being sports superstars, for instance. I don’t think that this is due to institutional discrimination against Jewish athletes, nor do I think that there would either fairness or gain in attempting to ensure that Jews were proportionally represented in all sports teams (or had their own proportionally-funded teams).
I was talking about people with those kinds of ancestries living in the US. Are you proposing to have foreign governments tell American companies and nonprofits how to behave in the US? Cos I got a feelin’ Uncle Sam would disagree.
I agree. The purpose of AA should be to counter the ongoing institutionalized racism here and now, and the associated systemic socioeconomic inequality that it engenders.
And from this standpoint I think the OP and the OP’s cite is greatly overthinking what is essentially a simple justification for AA: to counter the artificial barriers that have been created on the basis of being a particular kind of visible minority. Why it does it need to be more complicated than that? To be sure, this simple fact has created a whole socioeconomic underclass and one of the nation’s deepest and most persistent problems, but if blacks weren’t a visible minority the institution of racism could not have survived long. The idea of “self-identifying” as black while glowing with all the color of an albino polar bear strikes me as academic sophistry.
