It’s a difficult thing to do. But does that let the guy off the hook about making the assertion and not at least qualifying it? I think any of us is willing to accept that CT may have been a beneficiary of AA, but you also have to understand that the OP was using the “fact” of being a beneficiary to slam CT for now being opposed to AA. Frankly, I don’t see what one has to do with the other, but it’s a piss poor argument as it stands.
Bricker doesn’t deserve this pitting. Just MHO.
Pretty sure this wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this particular construct. Amish Doper, IIRC.
I believe that CT got his current position in large part because he’s a conservative black guy (does anyone really deny this? I hope not). So I do think it’s interesting that he is so strongly against Affirmative Action, when I think de facto Affirmative Action helped him get his job. I might mention the rich irony if I was in a debate similar to the one the OP was engaged in. How can one not mention it?
But I agree with you that the OP wasn’t making his case very well and that citing Holy Cross wasn’t a wise move.
A consensus seems to be forming. I recommend that the OP make a sacrifice to the jackal-headed god Anewbies, then go, and sin no more.
How sad to be so adroitly summed up in a nutshell or, reading between the lines, a nutcase. I bet Bricker feels that he has more substance than that.
Nah, definitely the Khan Noonian Singh School of Malediction and Imprecation.
That understanding is in error. I am not fully persuaded that the people who promulgate that belief have not done so deliberately to taint all Affirmative Action, but the reality is that quotas and lowered standards were something that occurred only after AA had already been in increasing use for nearly a decade.
Recruitment and outreach are exactly AA–particularly as it was originally implemented.
From the citations I have seen, so far, dennis gallagher’s claim suffers the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. We simply do not have enough information (presented thus far) to know whether Thomas would have attended Holy Cross without the new recruitment program.
Did he only learn about Holy Cross as the result of new advertising that Holy Cross placed in heavily black locations where they had never advertised, previously?
Was he or his grandmother persuaded to select Holy Cross because of information that they only encountered because of the outreach?
Did the recruiting information make a point of presenting the school as particularly attractive to black kids?
If one of those or similar conditions were met, Thomas would have benefitted from AA (which would not mean he was required to support it in all its manifestations for the rest of his life). If Holy Cross was targeting kids in black schools on one side of town and Thomas was living in another part of town, (or if neither he nor his grandmother ever saw any of the outreach, but heard it was a good school from an employer whose kid went there or a white classmate whose sibling or cousin went), then AA would have played no part in the matter.
Yikes! Sorry. I really need to work on my reading comprehension. […embarrassed grin…]
If I am a Democrat, and a Republican pulls me from a burning car* and saves my life, I can be personally grateful to that person without necessarily agreeing with his political causes. I don’t see a problem with that.
If the argument goes, “Any black person who has ever in the slightest way benefited from Affirmative Action must forever thereafter support it,” then I’d have serious reservations. It would make AA seem like a politically motivated program specifically designed to spread a political viewpoint and increase voters, instead of doing mumble mumble mumble that it was meant to do.
*Or if a Republican gave me a dollar for the Coke machine, or if a Republican gave me a birthday present, or if a Republican sold me a used car cheap. Name your favor.
I’m not sure there’s a big gap between “we don’t know he would not have been admitted as a white student” and “we don’t know that we’re not all just brains in vats.”
Both claims are true, in some sense. But we don’t know both things because they are both unprovable.
Take Yale Law School. With a notoriously small, competitive class, YLS simply must draw lines on the basis of factors other than academic success. Of ten people with the same academic credentials, five might be rejected because of subtle soft factors like the reputation of their undergraduate school, their extracurricular activities, or their proficiency at horseback riding. It is therefore impossible to look retrospectively at Thomas’s academic credentials and determine whether he would have gotten into YLS. It is *unknowable.
*
Nevertheless, we go on believing that we aren’t brains in vats and that Clarence Thomas received the benefits of affirmative action. While one cannot assert that Clarence Thomas is a beneficiary of AA, it is a safe assumption.
[I think the much better argument is that his having benefited from AA should have nothing to do with the legitimacy of his opinion about AA. Even if he benefited, he didn’t choose to have the institution exist.]
So, Tom, let me be sure I understand what you are saying. Are you saying that AA was originally outreach, and did not necessarily involve lowering standards? And that the lowering standards was a later development in AA? If so, couldn’t someone have benefitted from the outreach, and still be against lowering standards without being a hypocrite?
Quaker, I think. If it were Amish, it would be Ich pitte Sie. 
No, he was the most qualified candidate that Bush Sr could find. He told us that-- don’t you believe him? 
Absolutely. I take no position on Thomas’s views of AA, (it has been too long since I have read his own words on the topic and cannot recall whether he has opposed only quotas and lowered standards or has joined the group that slurs AA based on later developments).
My only concern (in general discussions) is that too many people, today, insist that AA always implies lowered standards, leading to opposition to outreach programs that I believe are still useful. I have seen outreach programs specifically opposed on the grounds that they are “AA” only to discover that the opponent is objecting to lowered standards when such lowering was not part of the program.
I’m sorry, my first question was towards you, and my second was more general, sort of directed to the OP. It seems to me that a person might be in favor of AA as you have described it, and still abhor the idea of lowered standards.
I wonder if there are a lot of people like me, who aren’t sure exactly what AA involves, and how one can tell when they involve lowered standards, and when they don’t.
I can’t speak as to the reliability of this site, but here is a claim that gets more to the heart of the OP’s claim:
This is a cite that would have reinforced dennis gallagher’s arguement, had he used it. But he didn’t. Bricker’s criticisms of the cites actually offered were entirely justified, AFAICT.
No, that’s not right, but it’s easy to get confused with all these lawsuits. There were actually two cases involved. *Gratz *was a case involving the undergraduate program which used a numerical point system that gave minorities extra points towards admission. The court ruled 6-3 that such a system was not “narrowly tailored”, and was therefore unconstitutional. *Grutter *was a case involving the Law school, where race was used in a much looser way (ie, not a numerical point system). The court ruled 5-4 that such a system was constitutional.
I just thought I’d gather up my hoop skirts and sally on in here to stand on the side of the Jackal.
Nothing quite burns my hide than arguing a point and someone else proving me wrong. Especially if their logic is flawless. Even if their delivery of said logic is flawed.
When I see all the good ideas turned in to bad ideas due to implementation, I often wonder how the hell any one can come up with an iron clad good idea. Affirmative Action, Political Correctness, Religeous Tolerance and so forth. I even think the evil do-gooders could (forum check) fuck up a rule as simple as “Don’t be a jerk.” Which, as far as I’m concerned, should be a constitutional amendment, or just the constitution itself. I will admit the lawyers would be the first to throw in “unless you are a lawyer.” because really, they get a pass from most folks on that one.
That describes my position. I have never favored lowering standards since the result harms the individual and the institution.
Each policy (and its actual impolementation) needs to be studied on a case by case basis. (A policy that states “We will take white applicants with a score of 20 and black applicants with a score of 15” should not require much analysis.)
A place I worked had an active AA program in one department. Rather than going only to large schools to set up their recruiting booths, they deliberately made an effort to go to career day events at schools where there was a large minority component, being sure to send black employees with the recruiting team. No one got hired without going through the same fairly rigorous interview process (and no one was accepted for an interview with poor or mediocre grades), but by taking steps to affirmatively seek black applicants, they included more blacks in the recruiting pool and wound up with a higher peercentage of black employees than similar companies in the same region.
Gerstenberg implemeted a similar program at General Motors in the 1960s (several years before the first quota was imposed on any program). He did not insist that anyone be hired because of their race or sex, but he did insist that each department demonstrate that they had made an effort to find minority applicants. (Once the applicants were in the system, of course, a lot of disgruntled managers gamed the system by simply finding ways to exclude them from hiring, but with the outreach program, more minority applicants were aware that GM would at least talk to them, giving more of them a better chance of getting in somewhere in the organization.)
Good catch! I would add that the recent SCOTUS case involving school districts use of race in assigning students to particular schools shed some light on whether or not CT opposes all forms of Affirmative Action. From his concurring opinion in that case:
So we know that in certain circumstances, Thomas is willing to agree that race based programs are constitutional. I couldn’t say whether he personally favors such programs in those circumstances, but that’s not something one can generally conclude from a ruling on a constitutional matter.