Affirmitive Action...

Great Debates
101

Do I thnk racism is bad? Of course-- it’s certainly not good. It’s also pretty stupid. I also think marital infidelity is “bad”. Would I support a law against it? No.

I can see where you and I disagree on 2 fundamental points.

  1. I don’t believe that racism, in the private sector, should be illegal. I 'm guessing that you do.

  2. I don’t believe that gov’t should guarantee equality of outcome, only equality under the law. I’m guessing you won’t be satisfied until there is equality of outcome. In that case, you’ll never be happy with a capitalist system.

There is no one time magic wand to get rid of racism. But the gov’t cannot get rid of racism, either. What it CAN do is address specific wrongs done to specific people. It can do it’s best to make sure it provides it’s services no better or worse to any one group.

But back to your 30 million minority. Surely there are some Blacks (correct me if I’m worng, but I assume you are talking about Blacks) that make more than Whites at the same job. Do they get any restitution? Oops. There goes your class action… I guess you’re just going to have to go back to individuals. But then, groups don’t have any rights anyway, only individuals do.

102

Bob Cos – the book is something like 600 pages long, filled with charts. I heartily recommmmend it. It would be well to read it along with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. They give quite opposite POVs, which allows one to try and judge which POV is more accurate today. (Myrdal’s classic book is now quite old, but it’s still a fascinating read.) There are oodles of statistics in Thernstrom’s book – far too many for me to remember several years after reading it.

tomndebb – I have a lot of respect for you, despite what I see as your mistaken views on many subjects. Without reading the Thernstrom’s book, you know that you cannot judge whether their statistics are fair.

In answer to your question, I certainly remember a variety of economic statistics. I think there were education statistics. I cannot recall what other statistics the book included. The book certainly gives the impression that it presents comprehensive statistics, rather than a few selected ones. E.g., here’s a review from Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684844974/ref=pm_dp_ln_b_6/103-0474052-6820605?v=glance&s=books&n=507846&vi=reviews

That cite includes several other reviews. Of course, they don’t take the place of the book itself.

103

IANAL, but isn’t adultery against the law?

And who cares what you would and wouldn’t support? We make laws not based on people’s opinions but because society would be an unpleasant place to live without them. Obviously, people more wise than yourself believe that racial discrimination has far-reaching effects that can potentially damage society. History has shown this to be true.

Your argument is hella confusing. Racism (or discrimination) is bad but it shouldn’t be against the law, you say. People should be able to hire and not hire anyone they want.

If we’re going to allow all of these racist companies in your world, why not allow the other private businesses to use Affirmative Action? Aren’t both operating under their own rules, picking and choosing employees the way they want to? Why is AA exempt as an allowable policy? Why is racism okay but a system devised to address racism not okay?

(And actually, it isn’t against the law for a corporation to be racist. They are free to do whatever they want, they just won’t receive federal monies. So this particularly point is moot.)

104

If all we’re talking about is whether or not AA should be a voluntary choice or not, then we’re in agreement-- I think it should.

I was trying to delineate between gov’t action and private sector action. And yes, it IS illegal to discrimate in the private sector workplace. Companies are sued all the time because they “discrtimate” against minority employees or customers. Remember Denny’s a few years back?

Let me try to list what we agree on:

Outreach programs (that do not require racial consderations in the actual selection process) are fine.

Private sector VOLUNTARY AA is fine.

Now, how about gov’t AA which takes racial considerations into the final selection process. Do you think that’s OK? And here I mean someone getting extra points SOLELY for the color of their skin. Not because they are poor or had some know obstable to overcome, but just because they are of a certain race. Is that OK?

105

However, if they post all the statistics in the world and try to make the claim that there was a decline in economic achievement that followed and proceeded from the the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I can pretty well figure that they have engaged in the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy implied in the last paragraph that you quoted from Sowell.

I am not dismissing them out of hand; I was just curious as to the direction they ttok with their argument.

106

Right now it IS voluntary. So what are you arguing?

107

Yes it is.

From http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html:

The purpose of government is to protect its citizens. These laws protect citizens, helping to ensure that everyone has equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of property (or happiness). So why do you think they’re so bad?

108

So, you want to punish some white people because other people with the same skin color have money? You still haven’t answered that basic question.

The implications of this gap are that whites on average earn more than blacks on average, not that discrimination against blacks occurs or that all whites gain any advantage at all. You have failed to provide support for your claims time and again, and repeating yourself ad nauseum without providing any real argument doesn’t make it so. Rather critically missing is anything showing that being white in and of itself confers an advantage rather than that people with the advantage happen to be white. In other words, you haven’t done anything to demonstrate that being white provides some advantage rather than that there are a lot of white people with money. Bill Gates may have truckloads of money, but that doesn’t make any difference when Bill Smith gets fired because the company doesn’t want to risk being called racist for firing someone who has more diversity checkboxes.

I’ve snipped out the big chunk where you keep repeating ‘people with white skin earn more on average than people with black skin, therefore people with black skin are being discriminated against’ since it’s irrelevant and simply highlights your lack of basic statistical knowledge.

You’re the one who advocates institutionalized discrimination against memebers of a particular race, so yup you’re the racist.

What I get is that you’re a racist who needs to take stats 101.

My simple question cuts to the core of “affirmative action” - how does penalizing one middle-class person in favor of another on the basis of how many rich people with the same skin color there are make any sense?

109

You have advocated discriminating against whites. You don’t want to admit that you’re a racist, but advocation of discrimination against a particular group on the basis of skin color pretty much answers the question for you.

110

**This is called a straw man, in case you’re interested. Please show me where I’ve advocated this. You are assuming, in contradiction to what has actually been posted, that AA = something very particular in practice and to most (if not all) of the pro-AA posters in this thread. You have yet to demonstrate it.

**(Italics added.) This is amazing. See the phrase I’ve highlighted. That’s not an implication, Mr. Statistical Expert. That’s explicit in the statistics. And, um, that critically missing piece that you’re searching for is the stats that show whites have an economic advantage. Most reasonable people would consider this a rather telling piece of data.

Are you actually arguing that a gap like this that exists across tens of millions of people where the only differentiation is race can be expained by…by what? Give it a rip. I’d love to see your theory as to what creates this disparity. Please. Enlighten us all.

**Straw man. Show me where I’ve done this. You may or may not be a racist, but you certainly don’t know how to debate.

**How old are you, pal? Did you learn your debating techniques on the playground?

This is called begging the question. Please demonstrate that the “penalty” is occurring and that this is what affirmative action is advocating. Otherwise your question is nonsense, just as it has been since the first time you posed it.

111

I believe that real equality under the law, when the law includes AA, would produce a roughly equal outcome. I think this is an important distinction.

112

Claiming that this is “a fact” is more than a little premature. You cite to three sources. In reverse order:

(1) a newspaper article about senators scolding bankers over disputed statistics. I’m sorry, but Sen. Alan Dixon is not a statistician; plays for political soundbites are not evidence. I also note that the article says that several banking regulatory agencies – including the Fed, the Treasury Department, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency – dispute the interpretation that the statistics in question demonstrate racial discrimination.

(2) an article about one loan applicant who merely alleges discrimination in their home loan application, an allegation denied by the bank in question. The complaint in question is ridiculous, too: for instance, she’s complaining about the bank running a credit check on the day of closing – but that’s a common practice, which is why most home-buying guides recommend putting off major purchases until after closing.

(3) A newspaper account of a study by an activist group (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)). This is the only really substantive piece of evidence you’ve provided. But there are problems here, too. First of all, it’s from an activist group, so there’s a bias – when was the last time you heard of a study from a reform group that didn’t find a need for reform?. Second, the study apparently did not control for the myriad of variables that go into a home lending decision: it just looks at skin color alone.

A study that does control for such factors is available at the Federal Reserve website. It finds that, when critical lending factors are controlled for, there is no disparity in lending between blacks and whites except for marginal applicants (i.e., those at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder). It further states that no conclusive answers can be drawn as to the cause of the differential among “marginal” applicants. To quote from the study:

(Emphasis mine)

We went through this same topic in a thread that died in the Great Board Crash. Suffice it to say that claims of widespread racial redlining in lending are not proven.

113

No, it is not. Grounds for divorce, certainly, but not against the law.

114

As I understand his argument, he wouldn’t have a problem with a company voluntarily instituting AA on its own (i.e., as a decision not influenced by government-imposed antidiscrimination rules). Indeed, if AA increases a company’s market competitiveness, a company would be wise to institute such a program. It’s the notion of a government mandate – whether that mandate comes from statutory law, court decisions, or strings for government funds – that he’s bothered by, because the government is under an obligation to treat all its citizens in a colorblind fashion.**

This is patently false. A racist company would face civil rights complaints from minorities it either failed to hire, fired, or created a hostile work environment around, and would pay the resultant damages therefrom. I’m not saying that is a bad thing, just that the federal money “carrot” is not the only issue at play here.

115

And just to address tomndebb’s repeated protestatations about outreach programs:

No one objects to outreach programs. No one. Not Ward Connerly, not me, not anyone. No one has any objections to making extra efforts to find qualified people in the minority population. That is a laudable plan. It is a good thing.

The problem is, AA proponents play “hide the ball.” When challenges to AA arise, they bleat on about outreach programs, without acknowledging that no one is challenging the outreach programs. Every attack on AA has been an attack on either full-on quota systems, or de facto quota systems.

I have some firsthand experience with this. I earned my law degree at the University of Texas. At the time I was there, the 5th Circuit ruled on an appeal in a lawsuit brought by Cheryl Hopwood challenging the law school’s admissions practices. The 5th Circuit held UT Law’s admissions process unconstitutional. I was in the last class admitted under the affirmative action regime struck down by the court, so as you can imagine the facts of the Hopwood case were discussed frequently when I was a student.

The facts that emerged at trial were as follows: UT Law would take applications and sort them into three categories. They were:

  1. Presumptive admit
  2. Additional consideration
  3. Presumptive reject

Students whose undergraduate GPA and LSATs were high were put in the first group, and automatically admitted without further review. Similarly, students with low GPA/LSAT combinations were put in the last group, and were sent a rejection letter without further review. Students with borderline GPA/LSAT combos were put in the middle group, and admission officers would look at other factors (essay, personal factors, socioeconomic background, life experience, etc.) in making admission decisions.

The crucial fact that came out in the Hopwood case was this: Black and Hispanic students were automatically admitted with scores that, had they come from a white or Asian student, would have yielded an automatic rejection. That’s right: they didn’t just get bumped into the “additional consideration” group, but rather all the way up to the “presumptive admit” group.

That is not an outreach program. That is a quota system, any way you slice it, and a quota system that significantly lowers the bar for admisson to minority candidates.

Yet AA proponents still managed to accuse opponents of trying to dismantle outreach programs. That is fundamentally dishonest.

Perhaps the obvious unstated premise should be stated: when an AA opponent talks about ending AA, he or she is not referring to outreach programs; he or she is only referring to those programs that are either quota-based or that act as de facto quotas.

116

You are simply making up this little falsehood.

This is as disingenuous as the “hide the ball” people.

There are a number of people who pretend that outreach is not AA. They then claim that all AA is discriminatory (because they have carefully eliminated the non-discriminatory parts for the purpose of their discussions).

There are also people who argue that even outreach programs are discriminatory.

117

Please. What outreach programs are under attack? Prop 209 was not about outreach. Neither was the Hopwood case. Neither was the UMichigan case. Neither was Adarand.

AA opponents have to use the term “AA” instead of “quota” because otherwise their opponents will simply say “oh, but we just hate quotas; AA isn’t about quotas, it’s about outreach” while simultaneously defending programs that act as de facto quotas.**

Such as? I’ll admit I shouldn’t have been so absolutist in my comments – maybe there are some fringe elements that would oppose pure outreach programs – but the mainstream AA opponents certainly do not, at least so long as the outreach programs do not operate as de facto quotas.

PS: My 1,000th post! Can I enter the secret cabal now?

118

I have seen them attacked in two places: in private industry and in “philosophical” discussions such as this one. (The government does not have much in the way of outreach, to begin with, so there is little public debate on that issue.)

119

I’m curious. I do not like quotas in any context, but if the issue is one of de facto quotas and not de jure quotas, what is your objection to them, since the government would not be writing laws to favor one population. specifically?

120

The objection is the same as the objection to literacy tests in the Jim Crow South: the de facto system is designed to accomplish what cannot be accomplished explicitly.