Is there anybody here who really supports affirmative action by race? If so why do you support it? Is there any rational reason for it?
Yes.
Systemic discrimination.
Systemic discrimination.
Why don’t you tell us what YOUR view is, Qin? Or better yet, concentrate on the other threads you have going.
Try this, Qin. For 100 years my family has been systematically stealing half your family’s income. Every paycheck, half is deducted and given to us. Every tax refund, every lottery win, every interest or dividend payment – we got half. A few years back, we came to the shocked realization that this was wrong, evil. So we stopped doing it. That means that you and I can compete on equal footing now, right? Except that my family is twenty times richer than yours, on that hundred years of ripoff – which we did not give back.
And here in Kudzu County, Jim Bob done got named Federal funds admijistrator, and of course he gave all the contracts to Good Ol’ Boy Conszxtruction, just like always. And Miz Pearl’s wholesale business, of course she’s going to supply the Federal offices here with all the supplies they need – why, her family’s been in the business since 18 hundred forty and two! And Rufus Washington Construction, proudly African American owned and managed? Well, they can build the Black Baptist Church and pave county route ten, just like always. Ramasakhara’s Wholesale? Let them sell to their own people.
Getting the picture now? Affirmative action works to ensure that the tax moneys all of us pay get spent evenly among all of us, not those who have an in. And too, it makes sure that those who were systematically shortchanged in the past are sure to have a leg up.
For how long and from how long ago?
Cause I come from a long line of women who weren’t allowed to own property (among other things), and I’m also a goodly chunk Native American and I doubt I need explain where I got shortchanged there.
Do affirmative action programs not generally benefit women and Native Americans?
That’s funny. I also support Affirmative Action but for the exact opposite reason. I’m oppose systemic discrimination and I think Affirmative Action diminishs systemic discrimination.
I believe Implicit is saying the same thing; they support affirmative action programs as a remedy for past (and/or current) systemic discrimination.
None that I have ever been made aware of.
Do companies hire a NA before a Caucasian? I’m not sure where to even get numbers on things like that.
I’m sure that many of them do. But a few years ago a Sixty Minutes interview revealed that more women than men were qualifying for Harvard (undergrad, I think) and that affirmative action was having to be used to keep a balance of men.
This bit of info made me smile. When I entered college, women weren’t admitted to Harvard.
I generally support AA, but I find it hard to believe that anyone doesn’t know that large companies and schools go out of their way to attract NAs.
You haven’t seen the place on employment applications where they ask your race so the the govt can track companies to see how they are doing in terms of attracting, hiring, and retaining minority workers. You don’t know that colleges and universities look at the racial (and other) background of applicants and recruit minority students?
When I did recruiting at colleges we were told to put a discreet “UR” at the top of a resume to designate an underrepresented minority. That could be Latino, Black Native American, or a woman (not a ton in engineering).
I do. Hard quotas, the whole* schmeer.* This country needs to be forcibly integrated, because left to their own devices, Americans will balkanize.
I also think we should give tax credits to interracial couples.
Of course the whole thing should be abandoned once the races are scrambled & we can’t tell the line anymore, but we’re not quite there yet.
I think that there’s a rational reason for it in that most of the hiring is still done by white people. Human nature is such that we tend to like to be around people who remind us of ourselves. We marry people who are like us, and we tend to connect with people who are like us.
So even a person who is probably not anywhere near racist might give an edge to the applicant who is kind of like him or he relates to.
They did a study once, where they took resumes with the same qualifications, and sent them out. One set had obviously white names like “John” and “Mary”, while the second set had obviously black names like “Jamal” and “Shequita”. The didn’t send them to the same companies because the gig might have been up.
Guess which resumes got the most call-backs?
But here’s the problem with that position.
Affirmative action for blacks? Sure. They got a crappy deal from the moment they were brought over here in chains.
But what about Asians. Not really the same long history of discrimination, most are only here for a generation or two, and they do really well, without affirmative action programs. One California college tried to limit the number of Asians because they were crowding out everyone else. Should they get affirmative action?
So maybe instead of looking for another government handout (because they’ll just mess it up), African Americans need to look at what Asians are doing right. (First hint. Asians do not have a 65% out of wedlock birth rate!)
Yes, in particular situations
Because it is corrective of systemic imbalances brought about by decades of Apartheid
Yes. Power and resource possession becomes entrenched, and the only rational way of dealing with it is some redress. There needs to a (limited) period of counter-weight to balance things out.
And to teach Whitey a lesson.
What’s wrong with a graded scale of affirmative action? Some limited AA for Asians, and more for Blacks, and even more for Natives (or less, I don’t know how they stack up in the Oppression Bingo)
I know. I was making a joke.
“Can I sign you up for my dollar walk?”
“What’s the cause?”
“We’re collecting money for childhood leukemia.”
“Then I have to say no. I’m against childhood leukemia.”
As you might guess, I was a million laughs around the office.
One thing about AA is the potential problem of people lying about their race. Generally, that hasn’t been much of problem. Your plans would ensure it became an enormous problem. So, how do you propose that we prove what someone’s race is? Actually, South Africa had all sorts of ways to do that a few decades ago.
No, because it’s absurd.
Why should every institution or profession perfectly represent a cross section of America? Should I go out of my way to hire cacausian or Black computer programmers because my office is overrepresented by Asians?
As a Jew, should I get special treatment because of the centuries of hardship my people have endured? Or do we not count because we tend to be a well educated and successful minority?
I don’t even really understand the theory on how it’s supposed to work anyway. Is the thought that if you let a certain percentage of blacks and hispanics or whoever into top schools and top companies, it will trickle down to the rest of their ethnic group?
Well, Turnip, when I was working for a company administering a Federal grant for a municipality, we were expected (by the Federal regulations) to either ensure that at least 5% of the grant was paid out to a WBE (woman-owned business enterprise) and 2% to a MBE (minority-…), or document efforts to recruit such businesses that resulted in no willing bidders. We ended up using a WBE landscaper for site restoration and documenting out the MBE after the Black- and Seneca Indian-owned plumbers we’d offered opportunity to bid on site plumbing declined as it was too far from their home operations area.
So I take your point, but yes, women and Native Americans are included in Affirmative Action.