A racist/sexist answer. How does racism stop racism? Or sexism stop sexism? It doesn’t.
I don’t see why not. Many other groups in this country suffered bigotry and discrimination, including Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Italians, and Irish. All these groups reached equality and acceptance without the “benefit” of affirmative action.
Absolutely. But, many of us think that in today’s world, AA is more part of the problem than a part of the solution. A big percentage of AA acceptances do not graduate. How can that be good for them?
Making sure that inner city residents have access to effective schooling is the real solution.
Seeing as how blacks have been in this country since before the Revolutionary War and they are still quite marginalized, I’m thinking (as I always do) that equality and acceptance for this group isn’t going to come through osmosis.
On the other thread, we’re talking about other groups who have benefitted from AA and why they don’t get as much press as black people. Like white women. december, do you think AA has benefitted white women? Do you think they could have come this far without it? If it’s been a success for them, why not for black people?
Can we have a specific percentage–as well as cite–for this?
I don’t think AA is either racism or sexism. This is the type of argument that seems crazy to me.
Jews, Italians and Irish benefit from white skinned priviledge, in the 50’s they could drink from “white only” fountains and patronize “white only” establishments. The Asian situation is a different one, they have a large amount of community support which helps them in addition to not being of African descent.
The real solution is to have a large public relations campaign for as long as it takes to alter the effects of the public relations campaign that led to Black people being viewed in the way that they are i.e. the other, sort of human but not. Definitely not like us. If this country truly embraced people or color as their own, you wouldn’t have underfunded schools and white flight from communities of color.
Equality and acceptance will primarily come through the effort of black people like you, just as equality and acceptance of Jews came through the efforts of people like me. I recommend the book, AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE: One Nation, Indivisible, by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom. It’s a fairly long, scholarly, fact-filled study, but it’s pretty easy reading. One thing their statistics demonstrate is that civil rights and black prosperity were progressing faster during the period 1948 - 1968 (?) than from then to the present. One can argue that blacks by their own efforts made faster progress than when they were aided by extensive Great Society programs.
FWIW I think AA in employment has benefited white women and has benefited blacks. I think AA in education has been irrelevant to white women, who already had access to top level education. I think AA in education has helped many black people, but overall I think it has done more harm than good for blacks. Obviously that’s a debatable proposition.
Yes.
As I said, I don’t give AA credit for the success of white women.
I guess it depends which definition of racism one uses. Dictonary.com defines racism as “Discrimination or prejudice based on race.” Giving a preference to blacks does not indicate prejudice based on race, but it does constitute discrimination based on race.
December: Was there an actual breakdown of graduation rates at U of CO for AA recipients? I know it’s hard to define who is and who isn’t an AA recipient, but just being black doesn’t mean you got AA. What was the graduation rate for whites who had SAT scores 200 pts lower than average?
Sorry, I do not know.
December well it does, really. Not directly, but the only reason for such a thing, would be that the group had an actual disadvantage. Now, you could say that we need affirmative action because the judges for schools are racist/sexist. I have never seen any proof of this, however, or even heard it as an argument (except perhaps several years ago, but it’s not really a plausible argument now, which is why I haven’t heard it). Maybe I’m just close minded, but I can only see one other reason, which is the argument I’ve heard, just disguised. And that is, that race/sex DOES matter as to how well students do on tests, and with grades, and other things which are measured and compared for college admissions. I’m not a racist, or sexist. And I don’t believe other races are stupider than whites. Or that females are stupider than males. BUT. Apparently we need affirmative action to equal the odds, which suggests that African Americans, and other races helped by affirmative action, and females, can not live up to the same standards. Oh boy I’m off on a tangent. Ok, point. Affirmative action IS racist, and sexist, because it assumes that certain races, and sexes, need help to get into college, or whatever they’re being measured for. Which means that they’re not equal, which is a prejudice. Maybe my logic is screwy, but I don’t see how affirmative action can be called non-racist or non-sexist (in situations where it’s used for sex and race).
That was aimed at monstro AND December. Mainly monstro, I got confused.
Well, where to start?
First of all, what, no apology for essentially calling me a racist based on absolutely no evidence?
Second, what the hell does the variation among Spanish-speaking countries have to do with the price of tea in China? Even with my rather more than “passable” gringa-Spanish (I am frequently mistaken for a native speaker, by native speakers), I know there is a certain amount of dialect variation in Spanish. In my years of experience in court interpreting, it was extremely rare that one Spanish speaker would be unable to understand another because of accent or dialect variation. We had interpreters from five different countries, and witnesses from every country on Earth (it was Immigration Court, after all), and a slang or regional term would pop up here and there, but hell, that happens even among native English speakers within the U.S.
If you don’t understand my linguistic refutation in the second paragraph, I’m sorry, but I don’t see what’s unclear about it. You’re going to have to elaborate for me. And as for your comment about equating the black experience with the Hispanic experience, well, I think you’re simply reading things between the lines that I just plain haven’t written. I made no attempt to equate the black experience with anything at all; I didn’t even address the black experience. I didn’t think there was a requirement, even in GD, to address every point raised in a given thread.
All this, of course, has practically nothing to do with the issue of whether AA, Hispanic or otherwise, is a good idea, but I just feel the need to clear it up. Apologies to any who may feel it’s a hijack.
Eva:
I hope you don’t think I called you a racist. I did say that it was a “somewhat racist” assumption that Hispanic surnamed people speak Spanish. Anyway, it is never my intent to call anyone a racist.
The Hispanic variation I was referring to was cultural, rather than linguistic. Pureto Ricans and Mexicans may speak the same language, but they don’t have the same culture.
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on the whole issue of how best to get non-English speaking students in med school.
In this excellent column, Sowell says that
This article persuasively lays out the case that AA does more harm than good for black students, far better than I could. I hope you will read it, monstro. If you have the time to read the entire four part series, you can get it through his archive.
Well, my point was that especially if we are debating legal issues which will potentially turn on very specific word choices (definitions of race, affirmative action, preferences, and the like), we should be very, very careful not only in choosing our own words, but in evaluating the specific words that others have chosen.
As someone who is primarily a linguist by education, and who has spent most of her career working in the legal sector, I choose my words VERY carefully. I never mentioned anything about how to define who the potential beneficiaries of affirmative action policies might be (such as deciding who is Hispanic by looking at last names, which is patently ridiculous; last names are a TERRIBLE indicator of racial background, as they generally indicate only paternal descent, or in the case of a married woman who has taken her husband’s last name, her husband’s paternal descent. In any case, Latin America is chock-full of people who have immigrated from other places, such as Europe and the Middle East, and have kept names that reflect their historic origins; plus, Hispanic surnames have spread all over the globe as well – I had an Indian friend in college with a Portuguese last name, which was a remnant of the historical Portuguese influence in Asia). As far as I know, as a practical matter, institutions which have affirmative action policies pretty much accept the self-designation of those who would like to benefit from them, i.e. if I tell the school I’m Hispanic or Native American, there’s probably no mechanism in place for the school to check that.
Anyway, back to the OP. In an ideal universe, all kids would start out on an equal footing in terms of educational opportunities. They don’t, for numerous and complex reasons. Some of these reasons correlate with race, and some don’t. Puerto Ricans have some characteristics in common with Mexicans, above and beyond language, that they don’t have in common with people who grew up on the mainland of the U.S. An example: there is a Spanish-language version of a standard IQ test, which is used among Spanish-speaking populations in the U.S. In one of my prior professional lives, I used to help administer such tests, and believe me, the Spanish test had entirely different questions on it than the English test, and the results were normed completely separately. Basically, all the cultural references were changed to ones that would be valid in a more or less general Latin American sort of way, to whatever extent this is even possible.
Eva:
I agree that surname is not a good indicator, especially Spanish surnames. Here in CA, there are lots of Filipinos and 99% of them have spanish surnames.
Anyway, the OP actually was about whether or not diversity improves education, not whether or not any disadvantged groups should be targetted for AA. My point all along has been that I see the “diversity improves education” mantra to be a thinly veiled tactic to do an end run around whether minorities should receive preferences in college admissions. There seems to be no scientific proof that “diversity” improves education.
In my ideal universe, all kids would start out with the best possible educational opportunities.
When you bring up correlation, you’re moving toward treating people as pieces of a group, rather than individuals. Regardless of averages, individuals with unlucky educational backgrounds deserve help. My prosperous, advantaged, mixed-race cousins went to Princeton and Yale. That did nothing for the many poor kids attending ineffective inner-city schools, who aren’t even learning to read.
So then **december, ** what’s your idea of a workable solution for college admissions that would both be fair to all involved, and would effectively control for all major factors that affect academic achievement? Are you saying that you’re really a secret Marxist, and it all comes down to economics?
Like it or not, we are all members of various groups.
Perhaps we should make something else an admissions related thing. Something that actually measures disadvantages better. Race really is a bad way of doing it, so is sex. Rather innacurate, racism and sexism aside. Perhaps wealth? That is shown to affect education of students more, at least that I’ve seen.
How do you propose to meaasure wealth, especially over time?
Example: when I was about 10 years old, my parents divorced. This had a VERY significant impact on the financial circumstances of the household I was raised in, and also meant my educational and enrichment opportunities changed very significantly over the course of my childhood.
I disagree with the implications of this comment, both in theory and in practice. Which group am I a member of? Caucasians? Jews? Actuaries? Bald men? Straight Dopers? Conservatives? Retired people? There’s no limit to the possible criteria for grouping people. AA assumes that a few criteria are more significant than all the others: black, Hispanic, Native American, and female. AA doesn’t even consistently assume that race is a key criterion, since it treats Caucasians the same as Asians.
I reject all that. Intellectually, I have more in common with Thomas Sowell, Amalya Kearse, and David Blackwell than most blacks. (Although I don’t mean to put myself in their class.)
From a practical POV, group success means nothing to the individual. My wife’s graduating class at Wellesley included David Rockefeller’s daughter and a Kellogg heir, but my wife had no money. The wealth of her fellow students meant nothing to her.
AA works so badly that it’s easy to come up with an improvement. Bear in mind that more often than not, a college is doing no favor for a sub-standard student it accepts. As we have seen, over half of them do not graduate.
You can’t hope for perfect equality between individuals. The best one can seek is something reasonable. I prefer that state-run universities accept on merit in an objective way. They are in effect giving tens of thousands of dollars to each accepted student, so they shouldn’t play favorites. IIRC one of the midwest state universities used to accept all in-state applicants and give them a year to show what they could do. After a year, they would flunk out those who weren’t doing well enough.
But, the more important area is in El-Hi education. If a high school senior is functionally illiterate, it’s too late to help him by admissions preference at college. IMHO school vouchers offer the best hope for immediate improvements in inner city education, although many other steps are also needed.
All of the above. The real question is which of these groups is relevant in terms of correlation with potential academic achievement. (Bald? Well, probably not. Doper? Maybe. Conservative? Let’s not go down that road.)
I think there are criteria which are far more important than anything that has been mentioned so far in this thread, but which would be either impossible or senseless to quantify. How do you quantify a child’s love of learning? A parent’s determination to encourage/push a child to succeed? The intellectual environment in the house where the child grew up?
Some things to think about:
My sister and I grew up in the same house, with the same parents. We are only 2 years apart in age, and our parents offered us more or less exactly the same opportunities in terms of artistic and intellectual enrichment. They read to us when we were little, encouraged us to do well in school, offered us the chance to participate in outside activities in the arts, etc. Yet my sister was never academically inclined, posed constant disciplinary problems, was a C/D student in high school, flunked out of college after her first semester with a GPA of .8 on a 5-point scale, and has never finished her B.A. I, on the other hand, was always pretty much a straight-A student, got full-tuition grants to a competitive private university which I finished in 3 years thanks to 24 semester hours of AP credit and summer classes, and went to grad school on my own dime. Sometimes differences in academic achievement have nothing to do with available opportunities.
Another example: a dear friend of mine grew up largely in a single-parent, public assistance-dependent, non-English-speaking household, with an alcoholic, abusive, and largely absent father and a mother who never worked until he was an adult (although she is rather an intellectual in her native language, which probably has something to do with the later part of this story). His mom, due to cultural misunderstandings/differences, didn’t enroll him in school until he was seven, and when he started school, he spoke no English except for a few words learned from Sesame Street. His formative academic years were spent in the Chicago public school system, which (outside of a few magnet schools) isn’t exactly a beacon of academic excellence. Yet he managed to graduate from a competitive suburban high school, was on the honor roll for most of his last two years (after his father died, things were much improved for him), worked most of his way through college after his scholarships ran out, and is now working his way through grad school.
I don’t quite get your point here.
Why do you say “more often than not”? Very often, especially with highly selective schools, most of the rejected applicants would have done just fine if they’d been admitted. With a school like Harvard rejecting 90%-plus of its applicants, do you really think none of the rejectees would have been able to cut the mustard academically? Obviously, it’s counterproductive for a school to accept clearly unqualified applicants. But AA doesn’t generally contemplate accepting unqualified candidates; it’s about bumping some candidates who aren’t quite as qualified as some of the majority group candidates up the acceptance ladder.
As for your last point above: it’s somewhat misleading. What proportion of freshmen overall never graduate? At my freshman orientation, I was told “look to your right, and then look to your left. Out of every three of you, one will not graduate.”
What about private universities? And what about the idea that most people attending state universities are in-state applicants, so that if they’ve had a substandard education until that point, one might make the argument that that very same state has failed to educate properly a large proportion of its own residents?
As for your last point above: are you saying that you approve of the M.O. of “accept ‘em all, and let the academics sort ‘em out”?
Agreed. But that’s outside the scope of the OP.
That’s hardly the point. AA in general doesn’t contemplate offering opportunities to unqualified people, merely offering extra “points” to people who might well be able to hack it at the school, but aren’t as qualified in objective terms as some of the majority group applicants.
Also outside the scope of the OP.