Right now the logic for affirmative action for race is:
Racism reduces a minority’s ability to succeed by causing business owners not to hire minorities.
To combat this impediment of racism we will force them to hire minorities.
The problem with this is that it assumes that all people whom there is racism against need help. This is not true. There is plenty of racism against white people, but we all seem to agree that none of them need help.
The real problem is social discrimination or discrimination of the lower class. If we enforce affirmative action based on income, I think we would achieve our desired goal of ending racism and helping the disadvantaged minorities much more effectively.
The new logic becomes;
Discrimination against people with low income reduces their ability to succeed by causing business owners not to hire people from the lower class.
To combat this impediment of low income we will force businesses to hire people with lower income.
So the question really becomes which is worst: discrimination based on social class or discrimination based on race?
The most vivid difference in behavior is not between races, but between social classes. Most of society does not have a problem with Oprah, but they do have a problem with Eminem. Why? Because one of them acts like most of the lower class and the other like most of the upper class. Most people feel uncomfortable with people who dress and talk along with “street culture”. By street culture I mean the type of behavior that lets you survive in your lower class neighborhood but is unacceptable in middle or upper class neighborhoods.
Kids who grow up on the “streets” need protection from discrimination. They are the ones that learn to act a certain way in their youth that keeps them safe and sometimes even alive that they can’t easily forget about. To succeed in the business world, ruled by upper and middle class people, they have to learn to act like upper or middle class people. This is not a simple task that can’t be learned from their neighborhoods so that they can walk into a job interview acting like the middle class. This has to be done with lots of interaction with the middle class, which can only be achieved if we force the middle class to hire the lower class.
So, which is worst: discrimination based on social class or discrimination based on race?
I think classism is a much bigger problem in this country than racism. Racism, as it still manifests, is mostly a byproduct of this. People are still bogged down in talking about race because of differently perceived needs to redress the past wrongs and because those past wrongs have adversely affected class-distribution.
I would look to housing poverty and educational poverty. I would approach poverty and the social ills of this country with as much race-blindness as possible. The truth is there’s more poor white people. They are mostly rural. The poor black population is proportionally much higher than that of the white and is mostly urban.
While social policy in this country swings liberal/conservative/liberal as different methods have limited success and different regimes take power, we show a distinctive lack of focus and steadiness in handling it. Most of our studies are lattitudinal which means they take snapshots of an aggregate over time and this causes a lot of problems for correlating policy with results. Longitudinal studies require smaller sample groups as they follow the same set of folks for many years. The results are hard to interpret and most folks are blinded by the race rhetoric in my view.
Fix housing. Fix education. It’s going to take generations to fix the demographics. Affirmative action, in my view, accentuates race differences, divides culture and doesn’t solve the real problems.
I don’t see how AA can force any private company to hire one person over another. How do you force companies to hire people who come from lower income backgrounds, are not very well spoken, and don’t dress in the proper business attire?
Same why we force them to hire black people. I don’t know if AA can be applied to private companies though, I always thought it was only for public companies.
Just to prevent this whole thread from pitting one straw man against another, here are some facts about affirmative action in the US.
Affirmative action applies to companies that are federal contractors or subcontractors with contract value $50,000 or more. This would apply whether the company is privately or publicly held. There are additional situations where AA would apply to financial institutions, nonprofits receiving federal funds, constructions companies, and perhaps a few more that don’t immediately come to mind. So in essence the government is saying if you want our business, comply with affirmative action.
Affirmative action requires the subject companies to keep certain types of records and make them available for government audit. These records can be audited to ensure good faith efforts have been made to recruit and promote qualified women and minorities. Quotas, or requirements to hire women or minorities, can only be imposed on an individual company (not across the board) by a judge as a way to address previous wrongdoing by that company. Affirmative action does not create quotas as a matter of course.
One of the issues that I have with Affirmitive Action (and one of the reasons I think it has been under severe attack) is that it tries to cover too many groups. Affirmitive Action was designed to help black Americans overcome the hardships imposed by slavery. It was an extreme solition to a group that had been extremely disadvantaged and required such a solution. It was not intented, nor should have it have been extended, to women and other minorities. A Mexican immigrant should be no more entitled to special status than an Irish or Polish immigrant. As bad as women have had it in America they were never reduced to a slave class. Affirmitive Action should benefit black Americans only, anything else and it is overreaching and it loses its moral imperative.
Eh, I’m going to push for better education towards lower income demographs. Or better yet; maybe a revised ciriculum.
For instance, I think the lower class demographs need to be taught more about finacial resposibility, the importance of maintianing a good credit history, etc. Teach them to be able to see “Save $50 a week, a year from now you’ll have $2600” This, in my opinion, is what seperates the classes. I think the middle/upper class folks are better able to “Look down that road” than the lower class; who seem to have a proclivity for living in the “here and now.”
This is something I’m going to have to think about before posting in any meaningful way, but I did want to share something I heard from a comedian regarding the above: “I never judge people by the color of their skin,” he said; “…I judge them by the color of their teeth.”
Yeah because all people from lower class backgrounds are rednecks with yellow teeth and big floppy straw hats.
I think AA should be applied to both race and class. I think that whether your life is more negatively affected by your race or your class depends a lot on geography and local culture; for instance, I think a poor person without a lot of connections would have a harder time getting a job in the Northeast US than a middle-class black person. In the South, though, where racism is still blatant and rampant, race is probably a more important factor. It all depends on the circumstances, but yes, I think class should be taken into consideration when it comes to AA. Many colleges do this now, awarding more points to poor students on their applications and helping to level the playing field.
One thing to remember is that AA does not only seek to repair the damage of racism but also attempts to level the playing field wrt those connections that often have more to do with whether you get a job than your merit. Poor people and people of color have less access to those connections since their families have had less time to make them. It only makes sense (to me anyway, and other AA advocates) that we attempt to cancel out cronyism on all levels, not just race. Personally I think AA is more important as a leveling tool than a reparation; one of the goals of AA should be its eventual obsolescence, because everyone will be treated fairly despite their race/class/gender/disability. That day is so not here yet, but we can hope.
Do you have ANY fucking IDEA how hard it is to save $50 a week when the minimum wage pacheck decreed as fair by your Republican masters amounts to $200 a week? When come back, bring reality.
I don’t believe this is correct at all. AA was designed originally to quickly move people who had been systematically shut out from certain professions into these professions. It is true that blacks were a very visible class of people who were shut out of the educational and employment marketplace, but the same was true of other racial minorities such as Latinos and Native Americans, and it was also very true of women. And in some parts of the country, legislation very similar to Jim Crow laws existed to exclude these other minorities.
I disagree with your characterization of the reasoning behind AA. AA doesn’t force anyone to hire minorities. It allows employers and educational institutions to expend extra effort to recruit minorities that they might not spend on recruiting other types of employees who they have ready access to. It allows them to use race as one factor among many other factors in the determination of hiring and educational placement. What you’re describing sounds like a quota system to me.
Furthermore, it’s not racism per-se that reduces a minority opportunities. It’s how that racism manifests itself structurally in the economy. AA is an attempt to rectify these structural barriers and fulfill a societal need by allowing minorities to move into positions which they were shut out before.
That said, I do believe AA is a solution for the wrong problem. I think AA has been wildly successful in its attempt to create minority professionals, and I think it achieved the goals it set out to. However, I think there are actually more significant problems which need to be adressed, and if we adressed these, then AA programs would be irrelevant.
In the US, IMO, there are two structural problems in the economy: unequal access to education and unequal access to capital formation. These problems tend to burden the poor the most. That burden falls most on the inner city poor and the rural poor, who span every race/gender/ethnicity/etc. What we should be doing is bringing up every school to the level of the the best schools in the country and providing some mechanism for poor people to start businesses. We have the SBA, but I believe many of its rules make it impossible for poor people to use as a viable way to start a business.
While it may be hard to save $50 a week, there are many financial concepts that poor folks know nothing about, or have no idea how to use them to their advangage. The poor need to know these things even more than the rich, since they have so little money to start with, wasting it is tragic. Poor folks piss their money away at Check Cashing and Rent-a-Center places, where your value per dollar is super low, yet they dot the landscape in poor neighborhoods, never to be seen in wealthy areas. If they understand how bad a deal things like this are, and are taught how to take advantage of better deals, you’ve helped stretch the little money they have.
WRT AA, I think that good education and job training will do far more to level the playing field than AA could ever do. There was a recent thread about black engineers, and how there are almost none of them. Well, very few black kids are choosing engineering as a discipline, get them on the right path in High School and this starts to clear itself up. You can’t fix this in college or in the workforce through government programs, it too late by then.
Initially, Affirmitive Action was solely for Black Americans. It has since been extended to included anyone and everyone other than a white or asian male. To me, it’s lost all of its moral and political imperative and it should be scaled back to the original intent.
Also aside from that, one has to ask the question:
How is it that a full grown adult puts themselves in a positon wear they are only making minimum wage?
Sure, there are plausible exceptions but for the most part, children aren’t being motivated properly or taught properly the importance of higher education, setting goals for oneself (and acheiving them), discipline and responsibility.
I mean geez! I have to believe ANYBODY can go to college. Money couldn’t possibly be an issue. Hell I’m a white boy from a fairly rich family and even I qualified for student loans to go through college. I mean damn! I even managed to get Uncle Sam to not only loan me money for tuition but also to loan me money for groceries and rent! I didn’t even have to work FCOL! I did work mind you, but I only did so for beer money…
I can only imagine if I were a minority or handicaped I could have probably been qualified for even MORE loans. Half of which I probably wouldn’t even have to pay back.
I agree with this as well. Poor people tend to get terrible use of their dollar. People making $10 an hour or less pay check cashing places $5 - $20 a week just to cash their paychecks. Combine that with Rent-A-Centers, high interest credit cards, pawn shops, lottery tickets, and expensive service places like laundromats, then you have a disaster in the making.
I don’t support many government programs, but I would love on-going financial education seminars and maybe even with practical financial counselors available to the poor and even mandatory for some types of government assistance.
A different take on the OP is that AA was to help minorities ‘equalize’ themselves in society, The program was fundementally flawed though because it did it by pointing out the differences, making them more noticable to society, not less.
People respect people who get where they are on their merrits, and look down upon those who don’t deserve to be there. Therefore minorities helped out via AA are going to be looked down on (even if they weren’t helped by AA, the appearence is there).
Giving someone a position higher then they deserve will also discourage striving for it, which could destroy the motivation of some of the minorities, so they might be workign sub par, which again gives the image that the minorities are not as good.
Yes, but which $50 of the $75 you bring home every week after rent do you save? And you can’t possibly think that bad credit managment is soley a poor phemonmenon. The middle class are far more likely to need this sort of intervention. You can’t even get credit if you are that poor.
Any number of ways. If you happened to graduate from college in California around 2003, you would have experienced the dreaded dot com bust. This means that suddenly the lucrative computer jobs you spent college training for were suddenly no longer there. Furthermore, the entry-level labor market in all markets was flooded with the dot com refugees who now no longer commute out of the bedroom communties you live in. These dot com refugees were largely people who worked in other fields before computers, meaning that for every entry-level job you applied to, some guy with ten years experience in the field was also applying.
And when you’ve got loans to pay off, you’ve got to take whatever job you can get. And when you take any job you can get, it can take a while to save enough to move to a better job market.
Kind of a specific example, but that is just one of the ways in which a full grow adult who has done everything right can end up making minimum wage.
Plenty of poor people have an education. And not everyone has access to student loans- any number of factors, from not knowing they exist (it happens, especially to immigrants) to your family refusing to co-sign can screw you.
My guess would be (and even sven kinda mentioned this already) that in any given area there are a finite number of non-minimum wage jobs available. When the number of adult workers rises above the number of “good” jobs, you end up with ‘full grown adults’ making minimum wage. It’s pretty insulting to insist that adults not making salary are somehow not motivated/disciplined or the sort.
