It is, but what is possible determines how long we debate.
Sports too?
The Mbuti and the Igbo have the same basketball potential?
Males and females have exactly the same football potential?
Your post smacks of a naive idealism that is woefully overwhelmed by real life. Sure, progress is being made, but its slow, plodding, and systematic bigotry still abounds. Hell, if a Republican wins in 2016, progress will again be set back years, maybe decades.
Quotas are the easiest, fastest way to force progress where it needs to be. Gays didn’t get their right to marry by winning a bunch of votes, they won court cases and THEN people began seeing them as normal people. Similarly, would you have told MLK that he shouldn’t march or boycott, that he should just work hard and maybe someday he’ll be allowed in the front of the bus?
Its been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act, 40 since Title IX. And we have only a fraction of minorities and women in positions of power. But maybe if they worked hard and don’t complain, in 2065 we’ll have 8 black CEOs among the Fortune 500 huh?
No, not sports. I purposefully didn’t mention that. Where there is a very specific physical requirement for a sport then particular body types and genders are going to be hugely disadvantaged in some cases.
I was responding to a question about leadership potential.
Your post smacks of not actually reading either what I’ve written…or worse, what you’ve written yourself.
What part did quotas play in same-sex marriage? and what does the MLK comment have to do with the points I made?
worst of all, in your reply you’ve snipped the part where I say exactly what action I’d take but going by your post anyone would imagine that I’m saying nothing needs to be done. Is that the impression you are trying to give?
Just to jump in - potential is irrelevant. Actual merit is.
Let a woman try out for football. Maybe she could win a spot. Maybe she’s the biggest damn woman you’ve ever seen. Or maybe she’s the best punt kicker. Whatever - it’s opportunity to prove merit that counts. That’s how you actually measure “potential” rather than guessing at it.
Quotas didn’t play a role in SSM but the larger point was that waiting for the population to change their minds is slow, unjust, and sometimes fruitless. The same force of law that something like AA forces upon people is analogous to gays winning in court but not at the ballot box. Sometimes, people are wrong, but they are too stubborn to admit it and so the government needs to force them to change. How it relates to MLK is obvious: blacks marched and demonstrated, they boycotted and sat in, and society changed not because eventually white people stopped being racist but when armed guards escorted schoolkids into classrooms or bankruptcy forced bus companies to capitulate. That was a hard won victory, filled with many losses but it was necessary. Who now except the racist say that minorities should have waited and pushed for change “the right way”?
Now we face a less overt but equally insidious systematic bias. Its not “in your face” so most people don’t see it, and there are those who use that lack of obviousness to deny it even happens. But it does, and that’s why we need quotas like AA. You can’t combat this bigotry with the same tactics useful 50 years ago.
I read your reply, you want to provide equal opportunities for under-represented cultures but your problem is you also say you want to do this “regardless of skin color”. That’s a contradiction. Now you may have meant that you want to help the poor, and indirectly minorities since minorities are more likely to be poor. I don’t disagree and I support all programs to help the poor in any way. But beyond that, when it comes to rich CEOs and people in positions of power who are actually making the decisions that disproportionately favor whites in the first place, they tend to be white males and it is their trickle down decisions that create such hardships for minorities in the first place. Those demographics among the Fortune 500 companies won’t change simply because you help the poor, or they will change so slowly that 50 years after the Civil Rights Act we have 4 black CEOs. I’d love to help the poor, but how long do you think it’ll take for one of them to become a CEO or be put in positions of power? Its much easier and faster to just do a quota system.
And you continue that you want to widen the talent pool, which is great until you realize some of those same problematic people in power are trying to shrink it for minorities. Minority districts get targeted first for budget cuts, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes like in Alabama right now blatant and overtly. Minorities are held back because laws target them like disproportionately harsh drug laws, or harm their neighborhoods so they cannot thrive. Sure, eventually they’ll get better just like blacks are a lot better off now than after Recontruction, after the turn of the century, after the Civil Rights Act, but how much longer do you want this “waiting your turn” to go on? If you were black, and maybe you are I don’t know, but would you be willing to wait decades so that maybe you’d see more people like you represented in local governments, on school boards, or positions of power? You wouldn’t feel resentful if every time you were told “not now, not yet”? I’d be fucking pissed, and quotas are the most immediate rectification of that problem
Let them try out. Just don’t fudge statistics and standards until a fantastical proportional outcome is achieved.
Done!
Now that you and I agree, we just have to convince the rest of the world. Should be easy. I’ll work on it this weekend and get back to you first thing Monday.
And we force lasting change by legislation for equality and improving opportunities for all.
All you seem interested in is ticking a box to say
“X group is y% of the population and therefore should hold y% of position type z”
I think that is a horrible way to run a country or any organisation. Quotas are the antithesis of equality. Enforce and legislate for equal opportunities, don’t mandate equal outcomes.
The rest of your post needs addressing as well, I shall do that in time.
The above was pushing for change in “the right way”. Remember I suggested legislation and tough enforcement.
Says you. Businesses and organisations are powerless in the face of sheer talent. None of them are going to cut off their nose to spite their face. You do the ground work to enable the disadvantaged to be represented at the ground level and then talent will out eventually and permanently.
No it isn’t, unless you think that unrepresented cultures and communities are all of one skin-colour type. An article in the Guardian todaystates that white british pupils are the least likely to go to university. I think that is cause for concern regardless of skin colour.
I don’t doubt that.
And it may be that they need to die off or be run to ground with equality legislation enforcement before the culture changes.
And easier and faster does not necessarily give you a lasting solution. You could legislate tomorrow for a CEO quota and the day after proclaim “equality” whilst missing the bigger picture that there is no underpinning structure to sustain it.
And you seem to ascribing a fantasy level of consistency and even-handedness to those you promote via quotas. i.e. that they are likely to be far less discriminatory than those they replace. I see no reason to believe that. Unless there is some genetic predisposition that I’m unaware of I think a black CEO is just as likely to be self-serving arsehole as a white one.
none of that is solved by a quotas
I’ve never used the phrase “waiting your turn”
If all the while my opportunities were being improved and my worth being reconginsed and talents being developed and my social mobility being improved then I would not give a flying fuck what the colour of the leaders are.
No, quotas give the* illusion* of rectification.
OK; thanks.
I was not sure which subset of genes you thought nature had exempted from evolving…
But not men try out for sports reserved for women, right?
The only reasonable way to approach gender is to accept that genders are genetically distinct from one another, as a group average. We should therefore be permitted to segregate sports by gender.
I think there is a compelling interest in doing that.
I just don’t think there is a compelling interest for race-adjusted participation in sports, even if a the “average genetic-difference” argument remains the same.
Do you have some data to back this up? Scholastically, asians (on average) outperform whites and blacks (on average) with minimal correlation with opportunity; blacks (on average) underperform whites and asians even when given superior opportunity.
In many sports, blacks (on average, so I’ll stop saying that every time) outperform whites and asians even when given less opportunity.
So I think the solution needs to be race-based intervention for academia–which drives so much success in our society. The compelling interest is a balance of representation for success–iow, “diversity” is a reasonable good here.
I am wondering if there is a compelling interest in race-based intervention to drive diversity in sports, and I’m just not sure there is, although I have trouble articulating why I feel so differently.
Wrong.
No, that’s not reasonable.
Why?
And why not do it for other genetic differences, such as…race? What’s stopping someone from declaring that whites just can’t cut it against blacks in basketball, so we need a whites-only league?
Why not?
I can’t possibly know whether any racial groups have an inherent genetic advantage regarding academia. My only concern would be that all should be given equal opportunity and be protected from discrimination. Then they will reach their full potential whatever that may be.
in some sports. I’m mentally ticking off the major sports in my head and not seeing a huge racial bias.
You may wish for a balanced representation, I’d be delighted if that was the outcome, but I don’t think such interevention shoudl take the form of quotas.
I find it easy to articulate that I find quotas for either sphere equally distasteful.
I don’t want a straight 1 to 1 correlation, but I can see that 4 black CEOs out of 500 is a problem. That’s the reality, how do you change that? If you say give people equal opportunities and equality will follow, how long will that take? In the meantime, as the power structure is still occupied by the same people, us minorities are just supposed to accept that? And more than that, do you expect people who are in power to simply cede them without a fight?
I don’t see why that was was the right way and AA is not. My position is that things like quotas overlap with equal opportunity. Forcing schools back then, and businesses now to take in minorities are analogous, only back then we forced black kids into schools to make them more diverse with guns and soldiers, and now we would force minorities into business with laws. How is that different? I could argue that “the right way” back then was enforced quotas.
Then explain why we have so few minority CEOs. Explain why minorities are overrepresented in jails or among the poor.
Your problem is you don’t see systemic bias. You’re right, few businesses will blatantly say “I will hire this unqualified white guy to do the job and not this highly qualified black guy”, but they will say stuff like “This guy has a black-sounding name, I’m not going to call this guy in for a 2nd interview” or “This white male is assertive and decisive, I’m giving him a promotion. I’m not giving it to this woman because she’s bitchy and shrill”. That is bigotry many people don’t even realize they have. No amount of equal opportunity is going to change that, or it will change it too slow to matter
They are not one color, but they are more colorful. And while whites are also the top demographic in terms of sheer number of poor people, its simply because there are more white people in total. Proportionately, blacks and other minorities are overrepresented. That’s why I favor targeting them for these assistance programs. Its easier and more efficient to solve a problem by targeting the problem areas
Waiting for people to die off is not a realistic way to solve that problem, its essentially ignoring the problem until it goes away.
The legislation is self-sustaining. Just like how forced desegregation created a new normal for people to get used to 50 years ago, such a robust effort should do the same with businesses if history is any guide. That’s not a dream, it has happened in the past and we are living in the aftermath of that decision. Do you think people thought that the Little Rock Nine were sustainable? Troops had to protect them for a year. I don’t care what racists think about forced integration. They will have to get used to it.
This is 2 different arguments. One, no, forced desegregation was not more discriminatory than the policies they replaced and AA now is not worse than the policies it replaced. I consider them the same, so I will not separate the two.
Two, you might get the same type of personality in a minority CEO than a typical white male, but you probably won’t. The hope is that as people become more integrated, the systemic bigotry that goes unsaid in so many interactions will also disappear. There have been loads of study on this. When little black girls play with white dolls, they grow up thinking white is the standard of beauty and they feel uglier themselves. The only overt time I’ve heard something like this mentioned was in Justice Sotomayor vetting prior to her confirmation, where she said that “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” I loved when she said that because it shows an understanding of why diversity is important. The black CEO’s experiences growing up will probably be markedly different from those of his white counterparts. That will probably shape his leadership in unforeseen ways, most likely promoting diversity and the richness of multiculturalism which is beneficial to all except the group in power.
Says you. I tend to think that if we had a larger number of blacks and minorities in office, in positions of power, then the egregiousness of the law coming down harder on them would be lessened.
You don’t have to use it the exact phrase to advocate policies that support it. You just said it may be better to wait for these old white male CEOs to die off than to make waves and maybe get them to hire a few minorities. That’s the dictionary definition of waiting your turn.
And if they weren’t being improved and your race or gender was getting the short end of the stick in assistance, would you still feel that way?
There is no illusion if I’m on some board of directors making decisions. That’s real, tangible progress, one that may take decades to fulfill for many minorities if we do not help them. I want progress and change and help for minorities now, not 10 years from now, not when my children reach adulthood, NOW, because the injustice is happening now and I’m not willing to wait a generation for it to be corrected.
you argue your corner in a rational way but I can’t see us coming to agreement on the subject of quotas. Putting anyone into a position based on skin colour, gender, sexuality, religion, nationality etc. is absolutely abhorrent to me and I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument for doing so.
You see quotas as evidence of “progress and change” I do not. A proportionate CEO demographic put in place artificially is not progress at all.
I think we both want programs and legislation in place to increase the opportunities of the disadvantaged, however, I am happy to let those programs bring about change naturally and allow the status quo to change over time. We are going to have to agree to disagree.
I guess so. Nice talking to you
This wold put an end to women’s sports. You can get a low-ranked male tennis player and beat the Williams sisters. Etc.