rich white people get into good colleges because their daddys pay for gymnasiums.
illiterate football players get into colleges because their contribution to the team creates a positive cash flow for the college.
Poor minorities get in just because.
I’d say that makes things pretty even. It may not be morally right but its pretty fair.
you have to look into the circumstances where the poor minority comes from. If a poor minority student gets a b+ with hardly any books, crowded schoolrooms, no computers, has great extrcurricular activities despite being in a bad gang infested neighborhood then I think that beats the white kid with an A- from a rich community and all new books, computers and audio-visual stuff and having not extracurricular activity.
I see this unfortunate argument quite a bit. “Bush got into college based on connections, so I have no problem with getting in because I’m black/hispanic/female/martian/whatever. Tit for tat.”
Only problem is, the number of people who get admitted to colleges based on connections or monetary favors is tiny. Do you really think that half the students at Harvard bought their way in? Please. The vast majority of students at any college who don’t get in based on AA are there because of merit. In cases where interviews are required, maybe there are elements of physical attractiveness or simple charisma, but most schools don’t require interviews - they just look at you on paper. And on paper, all they can tell are your accomplishments, your grades, your test scores, and - in many cases - your race. Don’t have a cite for this - just an application of common sense - but I would say the number of students admitted to schools based on AA dwarfs the number admitted based on connections or favors. If you have evidence to the contrary, please present it.
I would agree with that. But I would also agree with the inverse - a white kid who got B’s in the ghetto should trump a rich black kid with A’s. Unfortunately, AA rarely looks at such situations (though I’ve heard of schools that do take into account the “hardship factor”). As far as AA-as-quotas is concerned, every black kid in America has it harder than every white kid. As such, the rich black kid would get picked over the disadvantaged white kid in a heartbeat.
Jeff
I would venture to say that most of the people I know are racist or anti-semitic to varying degrees. Most. I know that if they were in a position to hire, they would NOT hire black people ever. They would hire a less-qualified white person before they would hire a qualified black person. I believe this to be the prevailing feeling in the United States. Until people get to the point where color or cultural differences don’t feel like a threat, affirmitive action will be necessary. I guarantee if we dropped it today, blacks would be back where they were in the 1950s. Affirmative action is the watchdog for a socially ailing nation. We cannot be the nation we claim to be without it. Not yet. Sad but true.
**No, LOTS of people who are white get LOTS more money than people who aren’t white. As a matter of fact, examining both groups as a whole, where the only differentiation is race, the gap is enormous.
The vague statistics you’re having trouble getting your head around are the U.S. Census data (try following the link sometime). Let me help you out. As an example, blacks 18 years and older have a mean income of $24,624, or 70% of the mean income non-hispanic whites enjoy ($35,333).
Can you understand the implication of this gap? Do you understand that this is not anecdotal? Yes, this is bottom line data, and I’m sure there are different ways to slice the data to take out things like geographical biases. Feel free to give it a rip. But I do not believe you’re not going to find any study, survey or analysis that shows that minorities earn as much as whites, not when a substantial sample is used.
Stated another way, whites in the aggregate have a significant economic advantage. The fact that you may not be rich does not change that fact. Your current economic status is not hindered by being white, and statistically, it is most likely that it is helped, even if you’re not rich.
**Males over 18 have a mean income of $41,924. Women have a mean income of $24,120. So if they have more money, it is through vehicles like inheritances and joint property, not because of any income advantage society provides. Wanna try again?
**Yeah, right, I’m the racist in this thread. Gotcha.
Do you get it yet? Or do you want to keep believing that your narrowly worded question, which ignores broader issues and undisputed facts, actually somehow scores you a point?
Sorry, I didn’t realize you were the only one permitted to read other’s minds. I retract that statement.
Please mentally delete that superfluous “not.” And abject apologies for the dangling participle in the last sentence of my first paragraph. It won’t happen again.
I don’t support “affirmative action” beacause it is used to give someone an advantage simple because of the color of their skin. Someone mentioned the black student with a B+ versus the white student with an A where the black kid had all sorts of extra activities going on. Why bring skin color into it then? I’ll take the B+ guy who’s on the football team and works 20 hrs a week over the A student who doesen’t regardless of the race of either one.
But I won’t take the black student over the white one JUST BECAUSE HE’S BLACK.
So here’s 2 questions for affirmative action supporters:
Is there an outreach action that will satisfy you, but that will not take race into account when the selection process is actually taking place?
The point has already been made on this thread that AA makes it easier for educators to not fix inner city education. Also, AA automatically engenders negative feelings due to envy, etc., so it unfortunately tends to promote racism.
The company made sure that it invested recruitment energy at colleges with good programs that had large black populations or substantial numbers of women enrolled. They made sure that the recruitment team included one or more blacks and women, so that the kids being recruited would have the opportunity to question someone about what the company was “really” like. And there was a formal process of mentoring of all newhires so that there was not a hit-or-miss approach to showing them the ropes. (One of the frequently mentioned problem that minorities and women face in getting promotions is that they are frequently outside the “old boy” network and so fail to pick up on the internal unwritten rules that lead to promotion. A formal policy ensures that no one falls through the cracks.)
Once the recruitment process was completed, hiring was based on merit.
I’d say that AA will not be needed when the following groups can repeat their “twin paired” studies and not find that offers made to whiite men were more frequent and financially better than offers made to other applicants:
Turner, Fix, and Struyk Opportunities Denied, Opportunities Diminished, Racial Discrimination in Hiring
Cross, Harry et al. Employer Hiring Practices: Differential Treatment of Hispanic and Anglo Job Seekers
Yinger, John. Lessons about Discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics from the Housing Discrimination Study
Turner, Margery, Raymond Struyk, and John Yinger. Housing Discrimination Study Synthesis
(Cornell’s CSI group and one other group conducted similar studies with the same results just a few years ago, but I have not been able to find the publications on the net.)
Counter question: given that women and non-white people are denied employment, promotion, and housing at higher rates than white men–even when their qualifications and/or finances are better (see the above studies and other similar ones), what do you suggest that society do to rectify that situation? Or do you simply feel that as long as white guys have theirs, that’s just tough for the rest of society?
Sowell’s stuff doesn’t answer the real world behavior I see every day, where a manager will promote only people who fit a particular completely accidental criteria, and I don’t mean just white males either. Whichever physical attribute of the person the manager chooses to focus on, and I could give you examples of every concievable type, you will find that the people they promote and the people they hire almost uniformly fit that, whether it be gender, ethnicity, religion or even sexual orientation. It used to amaze me that you could do this in NYC, which has every type of person on the planet living and working in it, but it doesn’t anymore. But just think of the effort it takes in the face of such a diverse workforce. Almost every manager I’ve ever met thinks it’s worth the trouble, though, if you follow their deeds rather than their words.
I have seen a single exception to this rule, that is, someone who promotes solely on the basis of merit. By now, I’m quite confident that I could easily go through the rest of my career without meeting another one. And no, that exceptional person didn’t promote me, just to get that out of the way. And the career of this person has been stalled for at least a decade. Very sad, but unfortunately true.
Of course this just means it’s completely hopeless. This stuff happens even with AA, and frequently AA is the vehicle used to justify the hiring and promotional pattern. I’ve never seen blacks benefit from it, though. It probably happens somewhere, but somehow I’m never around when it does, despite all the lurid tales of woe I’m relentlessly subjected to by allegedly aggrieved parties. Must be something in the wine I drink with dinner every night.
Society (and I assume you really mean government) needant do anything.
No government agency should discriminate, period. Government opperates on public money, and must treat all citizens equally.
What a private company does is it’s own business. Frankly, any company which limits it’s talent pool for recruits will put itself at a competative disadvantage. If XYZ corp only hires Hispanic females and discrimates against everyone else, then ABC corp will eat XYZ’s lunch by casting a wider net and hiring from the overlooked pool of short African-Americans, transgendered Asians, disabled homosexuals, and the occasional white male. A little humor there, but do you get my point? Corporations which discrimante are hurting themselves.
No one says that life is fair. If you can’t get a mortgage from Main Street Bank because you’re the wrong race, go to South Street Bank. If that doesn’t work, go to Statewide Bank. Everyone has to take responsibility for his/her own welfare. Can’t get a job? Well, goddamit, create your own job.
College is mainly what you make of it. I’ve done a lot of hiring, and I never put much emphasis on what school a person went to. I want to see what they did with their education and weather or not they were the kind of person who could “get things done”. But a lot of people are lazy and will take the shortcut of hiring the guy from Harvard instead of the guy from UMass. And maybe the guy from UMass has to hustle a little more to get a job. So what?
When race isn’t taken into account in this country by a large number of people, neither AA nor outreach programs will be necessary. Since even you took race into account in your post, we’re not there yet.
When racism isn’t rampant, and when we provide better (grade/middlehigh) schools and scholastic opportunities for those who currently benefit from AA. Many of us think these go hand in hand. If you want an actual date, I’d say if racism was all but eliminated today, with the exception of a few fringe nutcases who will probably always be with us, within 20-30 years AA would no longer be necessary.
Interesting concept. First we use the government to ensure that people cannot get equal educations, equal opportunities for work, or equal housing. Then, at the end of a few hundred years we simply say, “Ooops. We goofed. No more barriers. Go out and be equal–even though you are starting from a point well behind the original makers of the law and we have provided lots of additional weights to carry–but government should play no part in rectifying the abuses that it was used to impose.”
And when all the banks conspire to the same practices? That’s just tough, too?
OK.
I’m not even much in favor of direct government intervention, but I find that approach a bit cavalier.
(And, no, I do not mean government when I say society. I believe government does have a role to play, but that it should not be the primary agent except in rectifying injustices that it has been used to perpetrate or in ensuring that anti-discrimination laws are followed.)
Just about everone in the US can say, by going back to some point in history, “my ancestors were slaves or serfs or some such underclass”. Yes there were bad things done by governments in the past. Should we then commit another wrong by discrimiating against the so-called privledged?
Your example of the outreach program was a good one. I could totally agree with it. But I doubt that even 1% of AA supporters would be happy to stop there. Do you think they would?
What, then, do you mean by society if not government? Society is a collection of individuals. Do you mean, what should we, as individuals, do? I think it’s great for individuals to work in “minority communities” to improve schools, give kids positive role models, etc. Don’t do business with corporations that you think treat people unfairly. Organize a boycot if you have the inclination.
If you look around, our society is zooming past the whole racial issue. I don’t have the figures off hand, but I’ve seem several articles recently about how interacial marriage is rapidly increasing. Look at how many mixed race people there are these days. That trend is not going to reverse-- it’s going to accelerate.
Information flow is instantaneous now. The mortgage example is a good one. Get on the internet to get a mortgage and no one will ever know what race you are.
And yet they’ve always existed, while producing megatons of wealth. It’s cute to say that bigots only hurt themselves, but when those bigots are living in the lap of luxury at the expense of others, it’s hard to really believe that.
Besides, you act as if such rampant discrimination has never taken place. Guess what happens when the government takes a laissez-fare approach to racial discrimination? A whole segment of the population is under-employed, under-educated, poverty-striken, negatively stigmatized, and feared by the rest of society. Sounds sorta like what happened to black Americans during the 20th century, doesn’t it?
I’ve found that bigots don’t need AA to be racist. I’m sure that back in the 1960s, people were afraid that integration and civil rights legislation would promote racism, and tried to put the brakes on those two things for that reason. Imagine if people had accepted their argument as a valid one. I’d be picking cotton right now.
If we’re suddenly going to shift public policy so as to appease racists, I’m going to renew my passport and get the hell out of Dodge.
I’m not sure if I follow Sowell’s arguments. He seems to think that because he got into Harvard, there was no racism or discrimination barring others. I don’t think AA supporters would deny that all individuals of an oppressed group are helpless without the program. So what’s his point?
But we are not talking about some hypothetical past injustices to remote ancestors. We are taliking about injustices done to people who are alive, today, many of whom are young enough to be years away from retirement. The “everybody has oppressed ancestors” argument is irrelevant to the discussion. The last Jim Crow laws were only repealed (or forced into suspension by the Feds) fewer than 30 years ago. Several unions maintained their exclusionary policies into the 1970s. The officers of Texaco were caught plotting active discrimination fewer than five years ago.
This is not some distant event.
And, as I have already noted, even while I oppose quotas, I find the claims of “injustices” visited upon white males to be greatly exaggerated. I am sure that some few have been truly victimized. (I believe you noted that life is not alway fair.) I believe the vast majority are completely unaffected and that some rather small number are inconvenienced, nothing more. When I was bumped out of positions for jobs, I had no trouble finding others. I have never encountered a white guy who simply could not get an education or find a house or a job because he was white.
So where does Your state put the whities like me. In the garbage? Am I not granted anything??? No work for me? A not exicting non-person?
More seriously:
In Finland and I think in the other Nordic countries too, it is forbidden to even ask about the race (in an application, or any other form; in case of primery interview by telephone, etc.).
Also if You need to employ someone, it is forbidden to mention “woman” or “man” eg. in an advetisement in a newspaper.
You should write: “We are looking for a secretary for our… The person should have following merits…”
Or truck-driver = person.
Or logger = person (I mean the forest-work felling down trees, I am just not sure about the word).
We are all “persons”.
And I know a femal logger, a female truck-driver and have myself worked as a secretary, co-ordinating 6 firms.
Here in Russia they can’t think a guy as an secretary, but when I tell that a secratary (in west) is a person that has to know 3 - 4 languages, has to be highly educated, usually spent more years in an university than the Big Boss, and usually is next to the Boss when (s)he is away, they begin to get the idea.
Naturally there are secretary-work where they have no power at all, but I call them typists.
Sorry for side-stepping.
**Do you mean is there an outreach program that addresses entrenched racism, a program that does not even consider race? Hard to picture.
When statistics like the following evaporate:
**Again, as Tom has pointed out, there simply isn’t any evidence to support the notion that whites are now the aggrieved class, that minorities enjoy some advantage that has placed them as a class in position better than whites.
I tend to be a numbers guy, so I don’t respond well to hand wringing on either side. I still await someone’s satisfactory explanation as to why these economic disparities continue to surface in census after census if it is not attributable to an unlevel playing field. And if the numbers do reflect that, why minorities should just shut up and stop whining. Don’t their families deserve to be as happy as yours? Don’t their children deserve the same opportunities?
Why should minorities just accept their lot in life? I wouldn’t. I’d be royally pissed. Oh, wait. I already am.
