PROVE IT. Prove that I “always” do this or that even one percent of my 1500 posts have done this. Hint: You can’t, because you’re full of shit.
You are a racist.
As recently as the 20th century, actually. There was a sizable sex slave trade in Chinese woman in the West, particularly in San Francisco. It was technically illegal, but since the official government position on the subject could be adequately summed up as “Screw the Chinks,” there was very little enforcement.
Nothing on the scale of African slavery, obviously, and it never had official government sanction. I’m not offering this as support or opposition to AA, just as an often overlooked chapter in our nation’s history. Also, it lets me brag about my great-great-aunt, whose bio I linked to at the beginning of this post.
I’m sorrry I didn’t realize the appropriate usage of the word whoosh. I thought it meant “you lost me”
I didn’t understand the point you were trying to make when you said “why don’t we indeed” after referencing those two posts.
In the OP you are complaining that Asian (affected minorities) are unhappy with AA. You then go on to admonish a poster for suggesting they should be offended and said “Why don’t we let the affected minorities decide if they are offended or not.” I believe the term you described to their opinion was repugnant.
The Blacks DID suffer horrendous racism, now they just suffer “pretty bad” racism and the historiacl legacy of that racism
I’m not sure what you are saying? The socratic method only works well in person and if you were asking rhetorical questions, the answers are not obvious to me (except for the the last sentence, which seems to imply that you acknowledge that your cultural (and likely social) background gives you advantages, now what if I took that cultural background and ground it into dust and made it illegal for Asians to learn how to read or do math for 400 years while creating a social paradigm that said that Asians are not human but almost another form of livestock. Then for another hundred years I pretty much let everyone continue to treat Asians like subhumans (although they can’t be owned, you can pretty much get away with hanging them from trees as a warning to any other uppity Asians who think they’re as good as everyone else). Now assume for the last 40 years Asians have had their rights and legal status more or less protected (and I don’t think for a minute that we have actually had equal rights for the last 40 years but for the sake of argument…) and given the same opportunities as everyone else but there is still lingering prejudice against Asians. Can we say “WTF, why can’t you Asians make it on your own, heck the recent immigrants that come from a country where the elementary school kids do algebra (not to mention the self selection involved in immigrating halfway around the world to start a new life in the USA) can make it within a generation”
Maybe we are talking past one another. I’m not supporting equal results in the workplace or quotas and I am mainly concerned about educational opportunity. I’ve been in almost entirely black public school in Farrockaway Queens and in almost entirely white schools in Bergen County New Jersey and I didn’t really notice a huge difference in native ability (kids in both schools picked up and understood new concepts at about the same rate), I did notice a HUGE difference in how much people felt education would help them. The kids in Bergen County believed that they could be doctors or lawyers if they studied hard and got good grades (heck their uncle was a lawyer and their mom was a doctor), the kids in Farrockaway didn’t beleive that education had any value because they were never going to get into or be able to afford law school or medical school, heck those jobs were reserved for white people anyway.
I know that a lot of people support the “If its a tie give it to the Black guy” form of Affirmative Action, there just aren’t enough close calls.
That statement is almost totally opaque to me.
And none of those rationales work. It’s still bias, no matter what you call it, and it’s still wrong.
A rose by any other name…
I was replying to a post that said that affirmative action was insulting to the recipient. I said why not let the recipient (affected minority) decide if they were offended. Somehow you interpreted that to mean, why not let Asians decide?
Opposing affirmative action is racism.
A rose by any other name…
Wow that was easy, I’ll just engage in all my arguments that way. I’ll start with the conclusion I want and stop there. Is there any circumstance that would justify affirmative action? How about kids from a poor economic background, can we exercise bias towards these kids? If so then why can’t we exercise the same bias for kids who have inherited (as a race) social injustices that have handicapped them in some way?
It may just be this thread but why do the opponents of affirmative action seem less articulate than other people I argue with on SDMB? Or is one of the most controversial policies of our lifetime so simple and clearcut that the people who oppose affirmative action can just say “Its wrong” and figure they’ve made their point.
How do you explain the fact that most Blacks were living in poverty until very recently, did they just like being poor cuz it helped them sing the blues?
Perhaps because they did not have, as stated previously, “a culture that values education and hard work”? Many black leaders revile Booker T Washington for saying that blacks should work to increase their socioeconomic standards before claiming the rights that they deserve. Asians, however, essentially took the BTW approach. They were no less targets of racism, as exemplified by the ordeals of the Californian Chinese immigrants during the early 1990s. The status they achieved today was through unadulterated effort despite racism, and it is profoundly insulting to coddle the descendents of another minority at their expense.
The ignorance towards racism against Asians is partly an effect of the somewhat foolish apathy of most Asians towards political action. While “minority lobbies” of various stripes make claims for including a minority-specific angle in history textbooks, there are few comparable Asian lobbies urging for education in Asian-American history.
Perhaps those who think that the values of an entire culture can be reduced to such an insulting statement are simply following in the tradition of their stupid, close-minded, racist forebears who poisoned society with the very views that AA is intended to combat. I like that explanation better.
Anyone else spot the irony in saying black people don’t value education in the middle of a discussion about black people trying to get an education? 'Cause I do.
I for one will never belittle the enormous sacrifice made by my parents when they emigrated to America to make a better life for me and my siblings, leaving behind everything they ever knew to go to a country where they didn’t speak the language and people treated them like sh*t, giving up virtually all their other hopes and dreams so that they might be able to realize their hopes and dreams for me. I am kind of insulted that you would try to characterize my support for affirmative action as denigrating their efforts. Do you think our parents would have had the same opportunities and social mobility if it hadn’t been for the like of Martin Luther King Jr.? Don’t you think that when the civil rights movement removed obstacles for Black America, they also removed obstacles for us as well?
I guess part of my argument is that Black America was never given an opportunity to develop a culture that values education and hard work because during those 400 years of slavery, the lack of social mobility combined with the death penalty for learning how to read may have created a cultural aversion to education and did not emphasize the possibility of social advancement.
How do feel about affirmative action for Native Americans? If you feel that they deserve a leg up and Blacks do not, then isn’t it just another way of saying that historical injustice is a legitimate rationale for affirmative action but the Blacks just haven’t suffered enough to warrant it (either that or you think that we have already done enough to correct the situation).
I am familiar with the racism against Asians and it is totally different, we have the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese internment, Yellow Peril (basic nativist racism to newcomers, especially when they look different), incidents like Vincent Chin, etc. There are about 5000 known incidents of lynching, 400 years of slavery, nearly a century of segregation, the ku klux klan, etc.
All the other reasons for affirmative action had some validity as well, but for me, the slavery, segregation, lynching, the ku klux klan is enough social injustice that the mere passage of time (and not even that much time) and the civil rights act is not enough to level the playing field.
I don’t understand how you intend to level the playing field by elevating one side over the other.
Stacking the deck does not make for a fair poker game.
Nope. Unfair advantages for different ethnic groups are necessary because their objective measures of achievement are below the levels of the general population, so wanting said advantage does not indicate valuing education. One might as well say that legacy applicants value their education more than others.
For the record, I don’t believe that any ethnic group deserves preference.
And I also view the development of a culture that values education as a laudable goal for African-Americans. But the way to do that is not to reward lesser levels of achievement, for if those are rewarded, there will be no incentive to improve. (Note also that under AA, greater overall achievement would not lead to any gains in admission rates, since preferences would simply be reduced once a more than “sufficient” number of minorities are admitted.)
This thread is kinda hard to follow, but affirmative action tends to be a very touchy subject for both sides, and usually ends up with everyone calling everyone else a racist, so I have a feeling this is about as good as it gets.
I’m an Asian male in college, and I support affirmative action. In fact, most of my friends who happen to be Asian also support affirmative action. I know very few Asians who are against it. Of course, that’s all anecdotal, which carries little weight around here.
However, a 2001 survey found that Asian-Pacific Americans were very supportive of affirmative action, so you can see that most Asians do indeed feel that affirmative action is a good thing.
When affirmative action programs were first implemented in the 70’s, Asian-Americans were indeed included and benefited greatly- to the point that in many colleges, Asians are disproportionately represented (at UC Berkeley, Asians are about 45% of the student body ). Thus we are no longer “underrepresented” minorities on most campuses and no longer benefit from affirmative action in most cases. However, we still often benefit if we are from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, and more importantly, from the increased diversity of the college campus itself.
I’ve heard all the arguments against affirmative action, and I agree with some of them, but I still feel that it is necessary. Affirmative action programs are not perfect, but they are at least an attempt to rectify the historically-imposed challenges on minority groups. I honestly just can’t look at the ethnic breakdowns of most universities without feeling that something has to be done to increase the numbers of African-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos on college campuses. Affirmative action is not the only thing that should be done- we shouldn’t just implement these programs, give ourselves a pat on the back, and say that racism has ended. Other things must be done as well; affirmative action, in my opinion, is one of them.
I guess this quote from LBJ’s speech sums up my opinions pretty well:
(taken from this site about Asian-American attitudes toward affirmative action)
You do realize that the UC schools abolished affirmative action, right? The increased percentage of Asians show that when admissions does not take race into account, Asians benefit, thereby demonstrating that AA hurts Asians. (It is true that California has a larger-than-average Asian population, but that alone cannot account for the disproportionate numbers.)
First off, Congrats to baronsabato for a very well written post.
But I still disagree with you. 
I have spent a lot of time in areas with poor people who are not black. When asked about their futures, the overwhelming majority hold to the idea of making it big somehow without very much work and in a temporary kind of way. Winning the Lotto is a big one. Or a record deal, or a sports contract. The idea that destiny will swoop in and save you is really popular.
My husband had this same mentality until a few years ago. He says that, in highschool, he didn’t know that people could own houses. Or that there were scholarships for him to go to college. He figured he’d keep working at Taco Bell until someone important noticed him drawing at the bus stop one day and handed him a contract to illustrate comics.
But then he thought about it some more, and realized that he was wasting his time and needed to do something himself. A bit of research, some time at the local JC, and here he is, manager of a print shop, with more and grander plans in the works.
This is all just IMHO, of course, but I think the large portion of what is keeping most American blacks poor is a failure to recognize that there are opportunities or that these opportunities are worth taking. I think this is so because it is the problem that I witnessed in poor people who are not black. Are most African Americans poor as a lingering result of slavery and racism, quite possibly. But, the tools for helping them are already there. The money for scholarships, the grants to start small businesses, the night classes, everything. And these are things that are often available regardless of skin tone. The effort needs to be in showing everyone where to find these tools. We waste our time when we look at college admissions numbers and gnash our teeth when one or another minority group falls slightly, even when their scholastic representation outstrips their presence in the surrounding community. We waste our time artifically inflating those numbers with programs like Affermative Action.
I now stand flinching for the attack.
You know, this sounds all nice and fine and has a nice PC ring to it, but the fact is that blacks, on average, do not value education as highly as most other groups. Not addressing this pretty much guarantees that the poor performance will continue. Now, my guess is that the reasons are largely socioeconomic. Generally, the people who value education more are the educated. The educated make more money and remove themselves from the inner cities. This leaves poor urban areas (though not exclusively) with a high density of uneducated people, which perpetuates the problem forward.
I read some research a while back that made it clear that the education problem was indeed cultural. Asian immigrants come to the U.S. holding education in very high esteem. After they are here three generations, their attitudes match those of the larger population. Abigail Thernstrom and her husband have researched the racial disparities in education extensively. One simple indication she found that determiines how well a student will do in school is the number of books in the child’s home.
One thing that is important to keep in miid is that AA is discrimination. That for every child it helps, it hurts another. So one thing that we should make sure of is: is it absolutley necessary? The fact that Asians have managed to make the benefit moot shows that it is not.
I do not think that this means we should just do nothing. The cycle of continued poverty of black urban areas is sad and unfair to the children. Education, historically, has been the ticket out of the ghettoes, and that idea was embraced by parents. We need to convince today’s parents of that same idea. One thing that I think is extremely helpful is the idea of charter schools. They give those parents who do value education an opportunity to save their kids from a horrible situation. The more kids in these neighborhoods who then do well and go to college and become successes, the more contact the neighborhood kids will have with real examples of success through education.
This problem both infuriates and saddens me. But to have a meaningful discussion, we have to be able to portray facts as they are.
I largely agree with the spirit of your post, but I would like to respond to this.
When people attribute the legacy of racism to the economic disparities of blacks to the mainstream population, it is not to excuse or pardon it. The reason I state this is that I often get the sense that many people think its a copout to point to past events when explaining current social phenomenon. When you write “quite possibly” after rhetorically asking whether racism has led to African-American poverty, I get the feeling that you doubt that it really has. But then that makes me wonder: If a long-standing history of socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement at the hands of racism is not the ultimate culprit for today’s disparities, then what else is?
Not knowing opportunities and other tracks for life is a symptom of poverty. It goes without saying that such ignorance also leads to poverty, but its a mistake to see the relationship between these two things as only unidirectional. In many ways, what you’ve described is much like obesity and the lack of exercise. Being sedentary leads to overweight and being overweight leads to being sedentary. It’s a positive feed loop. We have to look outside of the loop to figure out why the loop exists in the first place.
Downplaying the role that historical racism has had on today’s disparities in favor of attributing it to “opportunity ignorance” still begs the question: why are A-As disproportionately affected by “opportunity ignorance”. When it comes to Affirmation Action, why shouldn’t it matter that this disparity falls along ethnic lines due to actions and attitudes that were supported by our government?
I agree with the idea of devoting more resources towards helping all poor people. But I don’t think its wrong to target interventions towards groups who disproportionately fall within the poor demographic. Poor whites generally have to deal with classism and the basic travails of poverty. Poor blacks have to deal with the same things, plus the self-esteem issues that come with being physically and culturally marked as a stigmatized minority. Poor white kids may not have a plethora of successful role models who look like them present in their immediate surroundings, but at least they are no strangers to the existence of white doctors and lawyers and writers and scientists and presidents and CEOs, etc. Poor black kids look up to atheletes and rappers, not because they don’t value education and hardwork, but because these are who they disproportionately see when they turn on the TV.
Part of the problem facing poor blacks is that it is harder for them to break out of “opportunity ignorance” precisely because they only see limited examples of successful black people. So even if they were given glimpses of what the world has to offer, the unfortunate thing is that it would still be difficult to convince them that that these are realistic options for them if they are only exposed to white homeowners, white professionals, white college grads, etc. Their outlook is a product of both generational poverty and generational exclusion from a predominately white, mainstream society.
And this is why I think that if we go about the problem of helping the poor, we can’t accomplish this by treating all poor people the same way. Race does matter and pretending otherwise will not make it stop mattering.
Fact, eh? Well I never. Doubts persist, however; it couldn’t be that the education to which poorer urban kids have access actually has less value, could it? Or are we ruling out the idea that maybe a run-down inner-city school really does provide less value than an Ivy League feeder academy?