1 - The idea that people get into college or get jobs based solely on their qualifications, an idea which underlies the opposition to AA and which always gets trotted out as the first argument against it, is silly and naive. Perhaps deliberately so, perhaps not.
Ecclesiastes even has a quote on this, with which I’m sure some of you are familiar: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (9:11)
There have been studies that show that the more attractive you are, however that may be defined, the better you do:
2 - People get into colleges based on connections (think Dubya, who still pronounces nuclear as nucular, would have gotten into Yale on his own? Honestly?), and lots of jobs are gotten through connections, and lots of promotions are had that way as well.
Against all of this, the law asks that a little mitigation in favor of the less favored be performed. I mean, if just being taller affects how you’re treated when getting jobs and promotions, imagine what being a minority member will do to you, in the absence of any societal pressure to correct it?
I am not giggling over institutionalized racism. I am giggling at the notion that there are masses of people who are being harmed for being white. There certainly are cases where some educational institutions have tilted the playing field to give preference to non-whites (and women). Throughout society, however, away from those specific universities, jobs and housing are all tilted toward whites.
Over the last ten years, the EEOC has had findings for complainants running from a low of 2,475 in 1996 to a high of 6,149 in 2001, with a most years running above 3,000. These are only the people who actually had the time and energy to take their cases to the government. http://www.eeoc.gov/stats/race.html
There have been numerous studies where paired white and black applicants were sent to the same location for job interviews or to inspect a house or apartment for sale or rent, where the white was offered the job or lodging and the black was either turned down or told that the position/unit was filled/rented/sold.
Your assumption that I would accuse you of being either racist or evil is as silly as the claim that lots of whites are being “punished” for their race. I recognize the issues that are involved in the situations at various colleges and how that would anger people. (What happened to unclviny was stupid and wrong). However, I also recognize that those situations are less frequent than the daily barriers that people face in the real world.
I worked at a company that had an outstanding AA outreach program that truly worked. On the other hand, I am aware that it would have worked even better if it was not constantly sabotaged by the people who didn’t want to have to work with “coloreds.”
However, if you go on about “punishing” whites, then your statements are risible, and I will laugh at them.
I really think that it is interesting that this discussion continues to dwell mainly on race rather than other AA issues. Women of color have said to me that they are more likely to be discriminated against because of gender than because of race.
If you truly want to make your feelings known on AA, why not start with Harvard University? It lowers its standards for males in order to have a 50-50 ratio of women to men. Yep! 70% of the most qualified applicants for admission to Harvard are women. When I went to college, Harvard had a figurative sign at its entrace saying “Women need not apply.”
I have been discriminated against on the job because I am white. In my school district a racial balance is required in each school. I didn’t like losing out on the assignment but I understood the purpose so it was no BFD. I was constantly discriminated against because I am a woman. And that pissed me off.
Over the last fifty years I have seen the racial and gender gaps narrow considerably. But wake me when Congress and corporate ratios are balanced. And be sure to let me know when the gender of school administrators reflects the male-female ratio of teachers.
See the portion of your sentence I bolded? You’re answering your own question. Go to the census cite I provided and look at the economic gap that exists between whites and minorities. Explain to me why this exists if whites do not enjoy a privilege (another way of saying that minorities are disadvantaged).
You can attribute this privilege/disadvantage to whatever you’d like. Some people believe it’s simply a function of inferiority of the minorities in question. I happen to believe it’s reflective of institutional (even if unintentional) racism. Look over the stats and you explain 'em.
And BTW, the same stats may help demonstrate for you that there is not some enormous new class of aggrieved whites, not if income is still a prime indicator of one’s station in society.
Yep, keep repeating it. That’ll make it true.
No, in an ideal world, it would be establishing hiring practices where there was no need to consider race. Unfortunately, as all available data makes clear, our current society is not ideal.
And, friend, let me turn it around. Why don’t you just say what you mean instead of using euphemisms?
Ok, in MIPSIMS or the Pit this argument #2 would be acceptable. Here I don’t think that it is. It’s a logical fallacy in fact. The President is from South Texas. What possible difference could it possibly make how he pronounces a word? What if he had a stutter? Would that make him retarded? I think not. Find another insult.
As to Affirmative Action, I’m against it and that’s my position. It is ridiculous that I should have to be held at a disadvantage due to a trait that I have had no choice in or be held accountable for actions that I did not commit. Because I am white I should not have the same chance to get into, say, University of Michigan as some black person? That is just discrimination and nothing more.
Please explain how it is not discrimination…I’ll be waiting.
You apparently didn’t read what I wrote. Explain to me again how someone with the same skin color as me having money constitutes some kind of advantage for me. Yes, fine, some people with white skin have a lot of money. The fact that there are some people whose skin happens to be the same color as mine who have a lot of money doesn’t improve my life any; outside of that old Eddie Murphy skit, an oridinary middle-class white guy doesn’t get to walk down the street and get handed money. Explain to me how the existence of some rich white guys means that I enjoy a priviledge, and use a better explanation than ‘some guys with the same skin color have money’! (While I’m not keen on trying to ‘explain’ statistics that are only vaguely referenced, an easy explanation would be ‘whites had an advantage in the past but don’t now, that’s why the historical inequalities came about’.)
After all, if you look at the stats, women have far more money then men. Should we implement AA policies to discriminate against females in favor of males to redress the balance?
You can ‘happen to believe’ whatever things support your racism, but you’re not providing any support that would lead someone else to happen to believe the same thing. I’m not even clear on what ‘stats’ you expect me to ‘explain’ for your benefit, and I see no reason why I should bother trying to ‘explain’ something when you won’t even answer the very basic question above. I’ll repeat: How, exactly, does someone with the same skin color as me having a lot of money constitute a privilidge for me?
Anyway, the AA programs that are being argued in favor of here harm every white person who applies for a job/education where said program is in place. Giggle all you want, but saying ‘there are people with white skin and a lot of money, therefore anyone with white skin is well-off’ is simply absurd.
Cite, please.
Um, yeah, so there are some 4,000 complaints per year in a nation of 300,000,000 people? I don’t really get it - do I need to just find 4,000 white people harmed by AA policies to show ‘masses’ of whites being disadvantaged? And aren’t those just complaints, not things that have met with any burden of proof? Furhter, what are these numbers supposed to show - that some people discriminate against other people? How do you arrive at justification for ‘this guy with your skin color did something bad to this person with another skin color, therefore you deserve to be punished for it’?
That’s not a cite. Anyway, there have been numerous hiring decisions made using the criteria ‘hmm, we’ve got a lot of white males, since we’ve got a diversity candidate who can probably do the job lets hire him/her over the more qualified white guy’. I’ve been in on two myself, and that’s as much of a cite as ‘there have been numerous studies’.
I’ve seen whites denied a job because there was a less-qualified-but-hits-more-diversity-boxes candidate applying for the same position. That, combined with your ‘giggling’ when your racism is pointed out, is quite enough for me.
What, the daily barriers that make all of 4000 incidents a year in a nation of 300,000,000 people?
It’s not suprising that a racist would just laugh when his racism is pointed out to him.
You think the hundredth repitition is going to turn them around? They seriously want to believe that affirmative action is about discrimination rather than the rectification of it. Despite sound explination that AA need not be about quotas and that the examples of such are a lazy, unbenifical implementation of the idea and should be stopped, they keep repeating their little Jesse Helms platitudes that whites are being oppressed by minorities. It looks like his ad was extremely effective. It also looks like another example of the oppressed white male bandwagon.
I think AA debates are impossible as long as one side purposely misinterprets, or misrepresents the intentions of the other side. Anyway, I’d like to hear about tomndebb’s outstanding AA program. I’m optomistic that a clear example of a non-discriminatory AA program might get through to someone who’s not being intentionally thickheaded.
I’m not convinced what the intentions of politicians are. Maybe they’re trying to do something for a voting bloc. In any event, intentions are less important than actual results.
It’s unfortunate that the same name, “affirmative action” is used for
– special outreach efforts
– quotas and for
– lower standards for selected groups
If one had only the first, I don’t think there would be any disagreement. I’m not in the military, but my impression is that the military has been extremely successful doing just that.
The reality of AA in college is that it tends to affect privileged minorities who need it least. E.g., my mixed race cousins, whose parents between them have two PhDs and an MD degree. Furthermore, I’m not sure it made any difference. They may have attended more prestigeous colleges, but that hasn’t done anything for their career.
Furthermore, they were the successful ones. Minority students who are pushed into colleges with lesser qualifications tend not to graduate.
I think AA was valuable at one time to change the way all of looked at race. However, I think it now hurts blacks more than it helps them. It has also had a bad effect on institutional standards and it automatically promotes racist feelilngs.
You need to read and understand better. There are 4,000 complaints are year that are proven to have been actual race-based cases of discrimination, (the actual complaints filed run to around 30,000 a year according to the linked site), which ignores that thousands of people who did not know where to go to seek help, the thousands who went to state agencies instead of the Feds, and the thousands who did not bother to complain because they knew that the laws have been increasingly rewritten (both by congress and the courts) to place an overwhelming burden of proof on the person discriminated against.
On the other hand, despite all your cries for proof, all of your “evidence” also remains anecdotal, as well.
Enjoy making strawmen, much? I have never made that claim. And since I have vocally opposed quotas, in general, and the placement of any unqualified person specifically on numerous occasions, your straw man is simply going to blow away in the next gentle breeze.
I have lost two job opportunities because the company hired either a woman or a minority and I lost a job in one RIF where a “protected” person kept theirs. I was, in effect, subjected to quotas. Was I punished, however? No. I wasn’t even resentful. I knew that I had a far easier chance of finding other employment than any of the people who “beat me out” to get or keep those jobs. And in each case, I was, indeed, employed within two weeks–in one case at a much superior position.
On the flip side, I have worked with several managers who carefully ensured that they never hired women or minorities. Nothing could ever be proved against them as they always found ways to make their choices look presentable, but they were clearly working against the corporate directives to use outreach programs to find minorities. So, despite an AA policy that was clearly not based on quotas, they were establishing their own quotas of 0%–and successfully implementing them.
If you want to rail against quotas, go ahead.
When you insist that all AA is quota-based and that whites, as a class, are being punished, I will dismiis your claims. Individual whites hace suffered in specific instances, but your implication that whites are suffering all over the country is simply not real.
By the way,
What specific AA programs have you seen argued for in this thread? You seem to be inventing a discussion point for some goal of your own. I have addressed only two issues: that AA outreach is appropriate while quotas are not and that claims of massive “punishment” of whites is illusory. There do not seem to be a lot of specifics in either of those points. Other posts have mentioned various aspects of original intent and later execution, but I cannot find anyone arguing for some specific implementation.
You seem to think Affirmative Action is just about quotas, when others have posted that Affirmative Action programs exist that are not based on quotas and that that system is a poor implementation of AA.
I posted earlier that my current university has outreach programs to boost the minority application/enrollment. The programs have finally paid off, since this year the number of minority freshmen enrolled went back up, after years of decreasing. I consider such programs at least a better example of AA than quotas, even when some people don’t call those programs Affirmative Action.
Another thing: Enrollment in many universities, even with quotas, is extremely competitive. Unless you have some inside knowledge that only the admissions committee has, how can you say that a black person got in at expense of a white person? If the institution didn’t have the quotas, it would still be very possible that the white person wasn’t accepted.
And again, as monstro says: Why focus only on a black person as the sole beneficiary of AA programs? Now, or soon enough, Hispanics/Latinos are/will be the largest minority group. Surely they will benefit more!
Do you have a cite to back up this feeling? Because I’m geniunely curious why you think this.
When I applied to my alma mater several years ago, the average SAT score there was 1350. Mine was nowhere close to that, and I admit to feeling some shame because of it. My high school grades were excellent though, and I probably had pretty good recommendations. So despite my lackluster performance on the SAT, I was admitted to Georgia Tech.
Maybe my being black and a woman helped. I dunno. But a couple of white boys in my high school class had sorry-ass grades and exceptional SAT scores and they got accepted to Tech too. And yet when I would walk down the halls on my way to calculus or physics, I always got that annoying feeling that people didn’t think I belonged. They saw me as quota-fill, not worthy of calling myself a Wrambling Wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer. I remember thinking the worse thing about AA was that it made me feel like I wasn’t a “real” college student. I’ve later come to realize that I would have had that feeling even without AA, if only because I was a double minority–a woman and a black person–on a predominately white male campus.
But somehow, I don’t think those lazy white boys from my high school felt like they didn’t belong. No one was constantly reminding them how unfair it was that they had gotten accepted to such a prestigious school without meeting the qualifications. No one was telling them they had displaced a “deserving” white person. No, those fingers were pointed at me and people like me.
If I was an AA beneficiary, I don’t think it harmed me. I graduated with honors and I’ve gone on to a Ph.D program where I’ve had many successes. Never have I ever felt inferior to my classmates or like I’m incompetent. If anything, I’ve had to work twice as hard as my peers just so that people don’t think I’m lesser than they are. And my hard work has paid off, since I’ll be graduating much sooner than everyone had expected.
And if I am an AA beneficiary, I’m not ashamed of that. I don’t think I’m taking advantage of anyone or keeping anyone down. I have applied to places and have been rejected just like anyone else has–being a minority is not tantamount to winning the lottery. I’m sure that when I graduate and look for post-docs or faculty positions, I’ll also be rejected. Those are the breaks in life. I’m no more entitled to a job than anyone is.
Sometimes that sense of entitlement–that feeling that a job or position has to be yours just because you’ve met all the arbitrarily-set criteria–seems to drive many of the anti-AA arguments. But when people say that we’ve always had AA, they are telling the God’s honest truth. We’ve never operated strictly on merit alone (if that was the case, those lazy white boys wouldn’t have gotten into Tech, and neither would I). Maybe one day we will, but I can’t see it happening anytime soon. Maybe AA supports the “two wrongs don’t make a right” argument. But I think it’s a way to use the system to work the system until we get to a point where inequalities are fairer (if that makes any sense at all).
So I am to pay for the ‘sins of my fathers?’ Why exactly should I be held accountable for the actions of people before any of my ‘fathers’ were in the country!
The issue of ‘rectification’ is just stupid. It does amount to discrimination and I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why I should accept legalized discrimination based on my race.
You’re the one who posted the 4,000 number as evidence of actual discrimination, not me. It’s not my job to make your claims make sense, you have to do that. And the fact that some 86% of the allegations of discrimination turn out to be without merit is rather interesting too.
And you STILL haven’t explained how discrimination by some people justifies discrimination against other people with the same skin color, which I’ve asked you about over and over.
What, specifically, do you want a cite from me for? Whining that someone doesn’t have “evidence” when they’re making an argument based on the statements of the other side is simply absurd, and whining that someone ‘doesn’t have cites’ without specifying what cites they’re lacking is hardly convincing.
Let’s get away from the ‘punished’ word since you have some strange definition of it. Do you think that racial discrimination, like denying someone a job or firing them on the basis of skin color, is good or bad? Or maybe good if its against people with one particular skin color, but not another?
BTW, could you post your definition of ‘punishment’? I’m interested in how being fired or not hired on the basis of skin color doesn’t fit into your definition of punishment.
Ah yes, the 'ol conspiracy theory trick. Nothing could ever be proven, therefore there’s something bad going on!
Quit lying about what I said. I never said anything about “whites, as a class”, and I never insisted that all AA is quota-based. For someone who whines about ‘strawmen’ to try to hide his own racism, you sure post an awful lot of them yourself.
So your argument is that suffering inflicted on individuals with a certain skin color is OK because of the wealth held by others with the same skin color? Or what?
It’s all well and good that you can invent an ‘implication’, but that’s not what I said. It’s also so vague as to be meaningless, but I think the fact that I never said it is more significant.
In my experience, it is very hard to try to convince someone of the benefits inherit in being born white. They refuse to believe that there is any advantage to this.
My most successful (though not very but have had success) way of imparting this idea is to ask a guy what his life would be like if he was less than 5’6" tall. If it is a woman you are trying to get across to ask her what her life would be like if she weighed 300 pounds. Ask them if they thought they wouldn’t experience any sort of discrimination.
Yes you should pay for the sins of your fathers. I’m glad you picked up on that in my post (actually, I’m surprised. I thought I obscured my code words well enough). Whites have had enough fun in this country it’s entire history. Now it’s time to step aside. Your time has come, and you just have to accept that. The ‘sins of your fathers’ were never retributed, and now they’re dead. Someone has to pay for their wrongs, and that someone is you. You very much deserve to be punished for slavery, as you are white, and whites enslaved blacks. That’s why I support affirmative action.
There, now it’s YOUR turn to play the false charicature of YOUR side. Here, I’ll start you off: “I hate black people and anything that benifits them is a threat to the white race”.
Good Lord! I’m glad that you claim that this was some sort of charicature for your position. I was doubtful for a bit on that one. I never said anything about the ‘white race.’ I have no hate at all for black people. I am not against minorities having an equal chance of success with majorities.
My quarel is not with ‘black people,’ it is with discrimination in general. I’ll ask again: ‘why should I pay the price for people who are no relation to me for crimes that I have not committed?’
No answer other than calling me a racist?
I am not claiming that I should get a better chance of finding employment or being admitted to a university because I happen to be of Scottish ancestory and not African or Spanish or <fill in the blank.> What I am saying is that I should have the same chance as them. They should not be given an advantage just because they have a different skin tone than I do. Don’t be confused.
I’ll ask my other question again: ‘how is this not discrimination?’ KarlGrenze: Please don’t be confused. I am not simply talking about quotas, as that is not how many universities use affirmative action. I used U of M for a reason. Their practice of giving minorities a distinct advantage is well documented and they are actually involved in at least two seperate lawsuits on the topic at the moment. I believe that at least one of them has been accepted by the Supreme Court. For a cite please see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage of the suits and situation in an issue from about a month ago (I don’t have it in front of me here.)
I specifically said that there were a number of proven complaints and provided the link to which it could be established. You restated that (either willfuly or though a lack of comprehension), that there were only that many complaints lodged, proven and unproven. It is incumbent on you to avoid false statements.
You then go on to claim that I am misquoting you, all the while that you are making claims about what I have said that are false. This would seem to be the sort of double standard against which you pretend to complain.
Since I have never advocated discriminating against anyone (and you have not asked me to justify doing so–not once, much less “over and over”), your entire second paragraph is another falsehood.
If you now want to abandon the verb “punish,” that is fine by me. It was your silly claim, to begin with.
Again you have failed to read what was written. I did not claim that I saw managers who happened to never hire minorities and then assumed that they were practicing racism. What I said–and what I witnessed–was that I saw them practice that discrimination. They spoke of it openly when they thought they were among people who would not object. When I objected (to them), I was told that they would simply deny their statements and that I would not be able to prove the claim. When I broached the subject with personnel, I was told that they were fairly sure I was right, but that these managers had successfully thwarted an earlier questioning and that my testimony would not change that.
You may take your claims of conspiracy and try them on someone else.
If “institutionalised racism as long as it’s directed at one certain group” does not identify “whites as a class,” then just who were you speaking of? And if the AA against which you complain is not that based on quotas, against what are you railing? Do you think that outreach programs are racist? In what way? How could an outreach program possibly “punish”* anyone when it merely provides assistance without providing barriers?
Yeah, I know you want to “get away” from the word that you used to prompt this exchange, but it was the source of our particular interaction, so it needs to be mentioned in this context.
No, the sins of our fathers have little to do with it (except for the attitudes they pass on to the next generation). The disparities that affirmative action legislation seeks to remedy exist here and now.