is so dumb. I mean you’re defeating the purpose for which you installed the system by awarding people jobs baced on race and not on merit.
Bah, I’m getting more conservative everyday.
Sinful I totally agree. You can call it affirmative action, which sounds nice, but it’s really just another form of discrimination.
I’ve been conservative for a long time.
Doesn’t this belong in Great Debates?
Isn’t this what December calls the “standard bias of lowered expectations”?
It’s “affirmative action”. Don’t normally nitpick about spelling, but oftimes, spelling errors like this are indicative of deeper problems. IME, people who attack “affirmitive” action, don’t understand the issue well enough to debate it usefully.
What is the purpose of AA? This is your thread. Educate us.
Seems to me the fundamental problem with affirmative action is its acceptance of race as a legal fact, something that can be defined, ascertainable. But in truth race is entirely a social and cultural construct, it cannot be proven. If I were to claim to be black, who could prove otherwise? It would be an absurdity apparent to any reasonable eye, but…it can’t be proven.
The appropriate approach to such social uplift is to define the matter by economics: look for ways for the less wealthy kids to get education, and never mind what tone of biege they are.
That said, I would favor cutting some slack in the interests of “diversity”. That has to be very elusive and subjective, but if you look around at your school and its 95% white bread, well, maybe a bit of outreach is in order. Maybe a lot.
I agree. Affirmative action should be based on economic indicators not race. Since blacks are disproportionately poor they will still be helped. Class-based affirmative action will also probably be more popular and breed less resentment than its race-based counterpart.
More generally the real solution lies in tackling the vicious problems which afflict the poor in America: crime, drug abuse , illegitimacy, rotten schools etc. These problems are complicated and government money alone won't solve them (though it helps) but it's shocking how little attention they receive in the public discourse.I am a white male who disagrees with affirmative action. To exempt myself of what I consider an unfair and ineffective method of selection, I always list myself as " Black" on any application. Since there is no " test" for race other than being recognized as such or claiming to be such, then there cannot be any dispute on ones claim to race. I know that some will disagree with my chosen method of dealing with this but when someone chooses to make being a white male a hinderance then I will fight fire with fire " or dumb with dumb".
You mean we CANT solve all these problems by setting arbitrary quotas in our schools and workplaces?
Affirmative action, as it was proposed, was not at all about quotas. President Kennedy, through Executive Order 10925, directed employers to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during their employment, without regard to race, creed, color or national origin.” Who can argue with that? Bottom line, affirmative action needn’t be about quotas.
Yes, it has been imperfectly applied in given instances. Yes, we should judiciously monitor the application of it. Yes, race itself is a murky boundary.
But the current economic chasm that exists between minorities and whites is both indisputable and tragic. Check the most recent census data if you doubt it. Racial inequality is not some distance memory, even if circumstances have improved.
For me:
- Whites (those society perceives as whites, if you’d prefer) continue to enjoy the privilege of their race.
- We should all be disturbed by this circumstance.
- Until someone has a better solution, I support affirmative action, despite the fact that it may occasionally be applied unfairly.
YMMV. (And, BTW, I have no problem using “poverty” in place of “race” in administering affirmative action, since it effectively addresses the same issue in our society.)
It’s interesting that the issue of quotas is always associated with affirmative action. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being debated in Congress, its opponents could see, and argued accordingly, that the only practical way to implement such a law was to implement racial quotas, an instrument almost universally reviled – except by the least sophisticated of those who benefit. In response to this powerful argument, the legislation as passed contained specific language banning racial quotas. But within a few years of the law’s passage, activist judges had found that the language banning quotas really meant that there should be quotas. Yeah.
It’s difficult to imagine a more fundamentally stupid – not to mention completely illegal, constitutionally speaking – idea than permitting politicians to pursue the reconstruction of our society. AA is an attempt to do exactly that.
Rewarding people simply because they’re born a certain color, or because they’re poor, or because they live in BFE is unforgivably dumb. It is precisely the sort of idiocy that can only emanate from government – individual people are, on the whole, smarter than that.
We are rewarding them?..
What do you propose as a solution? Or should people just be satisfied with their lot in life, even when statistics strongly suggest that race plays a major factor? Or are you one of the camp who says that there is no inequality to rectify?
Just curious…
WOW…this must mean that you presume that those that disagree with your view must be wrong and or misinformed. Don’t you think it just possible that they understand it just as well as you but have drawn an entirely different view than you have.
And saying that spelling errors are indicative of " deeper problems" …come now, you don’t give yourself enough credit. We all know you are smarter than that
If you give me a job or lend me money or admit me to your medical school, not because I have the correct qualifications to make you action sensible, but because – or even partially because – I am a certain color or come from a specific social background or live in a particular location, you have rewarded me for that reason. Would it make sense, logically, for you to do that? Of course not. From your position as an employer or a banker or a college dean, it would be, um, stupid for you to do that. It would make even less sense if you gave me what I wanted and were then forced to deny the same to someone who actually was better qualified. (Who, incidentally, then receives punishment for not being disadvantaged.)
I don’t deny the existence of inequality any more than I deny the existence of trees; it is that obvious. But equally obvious is the fact that there will always be inequality, and nothing we can do, as people or as a nation, will ever change that. Even in the most socialistic nations (and AA is most definitely akin to socialism), there is not now and has never been equality. There will always be a ruling class and those who are ruled, there will always be those who have and those who don’t, there will always be bad places to live, just as there will be good places.
Far from denying the existence of inequality, I celebrate its existence! “Rectifying” it is not only impossible, it’s not even smart! Removing the natural or situational inequalities also removes the seeds of motivation and ambition that are the core components of progress.
As for statistics, they can – and routinely are – manipulated and “interpreted” to mean whatever the manipulator or interpreter wishes them to mean. If you examine the homicide statistics in the U.S., for example, you’ll find that a black person is roughly 21 times more likely to murder or be murdered than is a non-black person. What does that mean? A mathematician would say just about what I just said. A social reformer would say that there must be horrible socioeconomic conditions within and outside the black community that should be examined and fixed. A racist would say that it’s proof that blacks are fundamentally bad. A police officer might say that it’s a pretty good reason for racial profiling. A statistician might point out that if you exclude homicides committed in the U.S. by blacks, the U.S. would have one of the lowest murder rates of all developed countries.
Where do I stand? I dunno. But I do NOT support AA, simply because it DOES NOT WORK.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that inequality exists and will probably always exists.
It’s quite another thing to be happy that it exists.
One observation that I’ve always picked up on from listening to folks debate over AA is that everyone is always so fired up about it–using the buzzwords “quotas”, “reward”, “playing field”, “unfairness”, etc—but it’s clear that few really know what AA is. What is the purpose of AA? Can anyone produce a cite that describes the policy and what it entails? Can anyone present FACTS for why it isn’t living up to its purpose and why it–as Tbone2 so vehemently put it–DOESN’T WORK?
And also explain this: Why is it that blacks–out of all the minority groups that are targeted by AA–are always the ones who are consistently bashed on the head when it comes to debates on this subject? What about white women, the biggest beneficiaries? What about disabled people? Or people from non-Anglo backgrounds like Hispanics? Why is it that time and time again, folks like Tbone2 must drag BLACK PEOPLE AND IRREVELANT STATISTICS INTO THE DISCUSSION!!!
For once I wish there could be a little more intelligence–a little less “I don’t know where I stand but I don’t support AA” to discussion of Affirmative Action.
[sub]can you tell I’m just a little tired of this topic and the stupidity that it always seems to attract? but please do carry on…[/sub]
Do you have cites to support this? Here, I offer two cites that note that affirmative action is not interpretted to mean quotas in general. Quotas have been imposed as consent decries by judges only in extreme cases where there is evidence of ongoing and persistent discrimination that is not being alleviated by less extreme measures:
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/L-aaquotas.htm
http://www.hr.ucdavis.edu/FAQS/SAAD/001/004a
Again, I’d like to see a cite. This cite suggests that in order for this claim to be true, at least three fourths of the murders would have to be committed by blacks, which sounds dubious to me. (Even that would get the murder rate committed by whites down to ~2 per 100,000 which would still put it ahead of Poland, Czech Republic, England, France, Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, and Japan, among others.)
Spoken like one who is on the “have” side of the inequality fence.
You’re serious? Inequality is good because it spurs people to try to obtain equality? And if we all started out equal, that’d be bad, because then no one would be motivated to try to obtain equality. Anything about that seem circular and illogical to you?
MONSTRO,
If you are “a little tired of this topic and the stupidity that it always seems to attract”, please allow me to be the first to invite you to feel free to glide right past this thread.
I myself (white, male) have had bad experiences with this junk before, I was trying to get into a financial aid program so that I could stay in school and I was denied because “we are over our quota for this term”, it was explained to me later (by the director) that they were over the quota for white men, and they were having trouble filling the spots held out for “proteced groups”, the school denied me and then it ran with a reduced class load because they COULD NOT fill those “protected group” spots but they could not give those spots to white men because “it would throw off our ratio’s”.
Affirmative action was probably a good idea once, but it has been so twisted up that it is bullshit now.
unclviny
But your experience only shows that quotas are a bad way to implement AA, not that AA is, itself “twisted.”
I have long opposed quotas–and have always opposed any action that will permit an unqualified applicant to obtain a job or an education or lodging. However, I have seen a number of effective outreach programs taking affirmative action to increase the ability of minorities to enter the workforce. A blanket condemnation of AA simply poisons the efforts that do work.
I also support the general notion of means-based rather than ethnic-based support. However, failing to recognize that people are still denied opportunities because of their ethnicity regardless of their economic situation means that such efforts will help poor whites at the expense of other groups.
Oh, piffle. No one has been allowed to even ask about ethnic background on any job or housing application in over 25 years. If you are really putting down black on the after-approval paperwork, you are simply being spiteful.