Let's debate affirmative action

Great Debates
241

So does a prospective seal. Either way, what is not the question. The question is whether AA is bad for Blacks- not EVERY Black person, not ANY Black person. Even that question is not the whole picture because other groups are ostensibly affected in one way or another; all it does is address whether this paternalistic argument holds water. Clearly as with any policy, there are winners and losers. The question is whether the losers’ losses a greater than the winners’ gains. Even if I accept these debatable studies as gospel, they don’t address the question above in even the most basic sense.

First, let’s accept some basic predicates. One, that more prestigious schools are generally held in higher esteem by the free market. Two, that they generally do a better job in educating people. Three, that the graduates of these schools are more talented, or are at least perceived to be more talented. Agreed? If so then we know that a fewer number of Harvard degrees/graduates are more “valuable” than a greater number of UNC degrees/graduates. In fact, I think the ratio skews more in favor of schools like Harvard for a few reasons. At the top, relationships and proximity to power matter more than competence, access to capital (which is more easily found in certain environments) is more utile than labor, and outliers (who are more likely to be at prestigious places) have an disproportionately great effect on our lives. Because of those factors and others, we have to consider the value of these degrees when trying to measure aggregate value.

Especially in light of the above, I am not even sure it’s always bad for the individual to go to the more prestigious school even if it means she is more likely to drop out (especially at law school where brand matters a lot in many cases). Sometimes failure is not worse than a minor victory. Besides, it not like we are short on lawyers, especially marginal ones. Whatever else this person ends up doing may be a better fit anyway.

Additionally, if the effects of mismatching are so obvious, why hasn’t the obvious feedback affected consumer choices or admissions policies? Why don’t we see both a dwindling number of marginally qualified Black students applying to prestigious schools, and why don’t we see these schools responding in kind? Why don’t we see Black students choosing to go to less prestigious schools when faced with a choice

You are missing the point. The point of the comparison was that you seem to be arguing that minimum standards that poorly align the capabilities of applicants with the requirements expected of them are inherently bad. The idea that mismatching, whether it is because of race, gender, religion, or low minimum requirements does a disservice to those on the margins. The seals have screening tests that are highly correlated with graduation.

So why shouldn’t the Navy raise the PST minimums given that those at the bottom are more like to flunk out? Again, if these people who don’t make the cut are demonstrably worse off for trying, why doesn’t the Navy raise the requirements? More generally, why do we accept any discernible difference in the failure rate of any distinct cohort?

First, I am not even sure what that means given both students have enough credits to graduate. Either way, the point is that most of the measures seem to stay the same, but one set of people leaves with a far more valuable degree and connections.

242

Why doesn’t the Navy give racial preferences in SEAL qualifications?

243

You appear to have assigned yourself dictatorial power to decide when one study “invalidates” another. Your reasoning for trying to cling to the Kurlaender and Grodsky study, which has nothing to do with affirmative action, while ignoring studies that directly look at the effects of affirmative action, is highly flawed. Let me lay it out as clearly as I can.

First, I’ve never said that “mismatch” is the only problem with affirmative action. There are many problems with affirmative action, some of which haven’t been mentioned in this thread. In my OP, I linked to articles by Richard Sander, Tanner Colby, Michael Lind, and Victor Davis Hanson. Only Sander’s article focuses on mismatch; the others don’t even mention it. Hence to claim that one can study the effects of affirmative action by studying only the effects of mismatch is wrong. To study affirmative action, one must study affirmative action. Luckily for us, many scholars have done that, as we’ve seen.

Second, mismatch is obviously a broad category. Students could be mismatched with schools in a number of different ways, and to varying degrees. As we’ve seen, when affirmative action is in effect, it leads to average black students trailing whites in the same school by 340 SAT points, which is quite a lot. Blacks trail Asians by an even bigger margin than that. So affirmative action produces a huge degree of mismatch. A study that dealt with mismatches of a relatively small degree would tell us nothing about the effects of mismatches of a much larger degree.

Which raises the question: for the students in the Kurlaender and Grodsky study, how far away were they from the average student at these more rigorous schools they attended? Well, I don’t know. Like so many of the papers that supposedly justify liberal policies, this one’s not freely available, so folks can’t read it and get the details. (Also, what was the sample size? What measures of student success were used? &c…) We’re just supposed to uncritically accept the conclusion, but one paper analyzing one case of mismatch between students and colleges does not prove that mismatch in all cases is a good thing.

244

I could list plenty of possible reasons. First, the liberal media and the universities themselves aren’t exactly rushing to make sure that the facts about the effects of affirmative action are widely known. Second, the general message that students (of all races) get from their parents, teachers, and advisors is generally to attend the most prestigious possible school, rather than to think carefully about which school is best for them. Third, 17-year-olds (of all races) are not exactly perfect at assessing their own skills and the academic challenge posed by a certain university.

I mean, does anyone ever go to college with the expectation of dropping out?

245

Not really. Note there is no consensus on the matter, and independent evidence of the deleterious effects of mismatching are far conclusive. It’s not a matter of picking one study over another, it’s saying the jury is still out, so maybe lets not act on assumptions that do not present conclusive evidence or intuitive sense. I thought this was clear when I granted the study legitimacy for the sake of argument.

This point is just wrong. If you think mismatching is the problem, it doesn’t matter how it occurs unless you think the mismatching caused by AA is somehow different from that that occurs for any other reason. If that is your argument, please explain why a Black and White kid with similar deficiencies will suffer in different ways as a result of their ability, and why that is their fault.

Again, that is not what I said. I said you argument that AA is wrong for that reason is flawed. I have (several times) granted you can make other arguments against it if you’d like. Given that that is the only argument justified with a quantitative studies, I think it matters a lot.

Are you alleging the study I linked to and others do that? If not, why don’t you link to those studies as opposed to just randomly speculating.

You can buy the study if you are so invested in it. I am not sure why you think a paywall is such a burden.

That’s the thing about markets though, you don’t need reasons, just facts. Facts a university definately has, and facts a prospective student can easily find. If Harvard accepts 80 Black kids on year, but only has 40 in their Sophomore class, then clearly something is going wrong. Additionally, if Harvard sees these kids dropping out, which is clearly bad for their image regardless of the student’s race, they could adjust their outreach and policies to prevent such kids from being accepted. Harvard gains nothing by admitting kids they know won’t graduate. Why has nobody acted on this information?

As a professional working in education, I can categorically say this is false. More importantly, few kids apply to schools they definitely are not qualified for based on how they compare to the current student population. That process along is based on kids choosing schools that are a good fit for them.

True, but being admitted to a school is a mutlifactorial thing. You would need school advisors and counselors who are paid to do these things, and whose school would suffer for having numerous student drop out, drop the ball. You’d have to see professional journalists who cover education to have dropped the ball. You’d have to see admissions officers at universities fail to make the connection, and to properly evaluate the student. PLUS, arents and students make the same mistake. I suppose all that can and does happen on occasion, but why did NOBODY catch it until now, several decades after AA began?

246

Lance say it half a dozens times and the first time anyone else uses it, you start moderating? Can I call him racist (or his attitudes and opinions racist) or will that get moderated too? How about these:

Well I guess you got that last one.

And all this after he was moderated for calling me a liar. I didn’t realize you got one free bite with that one.

247

I don’t sit on these threads hoping to post Mod notes. I told EVERYONE to stop when I saw that it was beginning to be a theme. Now you want to complain that I told everyone to stop?

If you begin calling posters names, you will get a Warning.

Then pay more attention. I am not in the habit of handing out Warnings on that infraction when a Mod Note will halt it.

[ /Moderating ]

248

Yeah its too bad you still don’t understand the difference between racism and racial discrimination. They are not synonyms no matter how much you want them to be.

So some preferences, policies or programs directed strictly at blacks is OK?

You’re white, right? If you don’t see the social advantage of that then I suggest you look at the link about cognitive biases (particularly social biases) that I linked earlier. Noone is looking at you and seeing ONLY a white male, I recognize you are an individual (I wonder if you recognize members of other groups as individuals). But, all other things being equal, white males have advantages in society and blacks have disadvantages in society. Do you disagree?

A lot of is disparity can be traced back to slavery and segregation. So after half a millenium of negative racial discrimination against blacks, you are all up in arms because of a few decades of positive racial discrimination in favor of blacks, right?

Whose measuring stick do I use to determine who has been a victim of racism in the past than the same measuring stick the victimizers used. Why should I adopt a different measuring stick? Whats wrong with using the same measuring stick that was used to mete out the injustice?

Because there is a difference between discriminating against whites and discriminating in favor of blacks. FOR EXAMPLE: Asians did not impose slavery on Blacks in America, they did not enforce segregation against blacks in America and yet the PREFERENCE given to blacks works just as much (if not more) against Asians today as it does against whites. And yet a large minority of Asians support affirmative action for blacks. Why is that? How is it that Asians are able to look at AA and not view it as a loathesome form of discrimination against them. Its because we are not blinded by white privilege, we are kind of off to the side a little and can see things form a more objective perspective.

So this is not an attempt to punish you for what your ancestors might have done, it is an attempt to remedy injustices inflicted on the ancestors of blacks in America. In fact this is not about white people at all and the fact that so many white people think its about them is an example of white privilege.

Because there seems to be a lot of outrage at we aren’t eliminating AA from the same people who don’t seem to be saying a fucking word about eliminating the advantages that whites have over Asians in the admissions process. They all seem to have one thing in common, they are all blinded by white privilege, things that work in their favor are only natural and just the way society works while the things that work in other people’s favor is discrimination against them.

White privilege is just a easy phrase to explain a common set of cognitive and social biases that white people suffer. But EVERYONE suffers cognitive biases.

For example in an thread about an asian dude that sued harvard for discrimination, everyone tried their best to justify why it was OK that Asians were getting better test scores, GPAs and extracurriculars and losing out consistently to whites with lower test score, GPAs and extracurriculars. All the non-Asians basically concluded that Asians were cookie cutter applicants that basically came off an assembly line. Monstro (a black woman), even made the comparison between cookie cutter high achieving asians that seemed to have the same formula resumes (good grades, good test scores, some level of achievement in music and sports) as opposed a black girl with a rough exterior but a heart of gold. I pointed out to her that she was expressing Out-group homogeneity - Wikipedia when she can so clearly see blacks as indivudals (because she just happens to be more familiar with their stories) but think that Asians are a homogenous group of overachievers. I think she immediately saw what she had done because she stopped posting to that thread.

I’m just saying that it might make sense for you to try to be as self aware and engage in a little bit of self reflection rather than see any advantage that anyone else has as discrimination against you because whites aren’t the only ones disadvantaged by AA.

How so? Did racists once try to give benefits to white people to counter the effects of 500 years of bad shit being imposed on them by the rest of society?

So is your complaint the AA is not individually tailored enough?

That some blacks deserve more or less AA than others?

There is more commonality in the black experience of Cory Booker and the child of a black sanitation worker than there is in the political experience of Cory Booker and any of his white colleagues in the senate.

Yeah, I agree its bullshit but that is what they are being forced to do. I personally would prefer a specific point advantage for blacks and Native Americans because it would be clear, transparent and objective. It could be scaled back with much more transparency and precision than the subjective mumbo jumbo they have today.

Well, for much the same reason they don’t have it in many professional sports despite the history of racism there (do you really think that the percentage of black NFL quarterbacks over your lifetime is reflective of the talent of black quarterbacks during that period?). The road to a good military career is not as fraught with speedbumps and roadblocks as the road to college is for a black man. For the most part you don’t have an under-representation problem in the military at the enlisted level and the officer corps is more inclusive than the C-level suites at large corporation or the dorms at top universities and consistently getting better. On the other hand, blacks are woefully underrepresented at top colleges and universities.

249

I’m assuming I can’t say the things I bolded above either.

250

The moderator is simply making adjustments for the benefit of the less numerous side in the argument so that the powerful side doesn’t have all the advantages. You of all people should be in support of that.

I don’t really mean that, I’m just needling. The moderation here has always been fair.

It’s interesting, Damuri, that you see a distinction between racial discrimination and racism. I do understand your point from a strictly technical perspective, since not all discrimination is based on hate. Yet if discrimination is not motivated by hate, yet illegal, who would not call it racist? We live in a world where certain arguments about political issues create suspicions of racism, even on subjects that aren’t even about race, like the health care law, or law enforcement. Yet people who discriminate with the endorsement of the state are not just non-racist, but more enlightened than the rest of us, since they put their fingers on the scales of justice to balance things out?

The most offensive part of the idea is that discrimination(when it was evil) was 90% government’s fault, so now the government uses discrimination(when it’s good) as a means of recompense? And further, forces people who would never discriminate to discriminate because of what the government did?

Who knew that when I was in charge of hiring for the restaurant I managed that I was breaking the law for not discriminating? It’s a good thing my staff just happened to be diverse, otherwise I could have been in trouble.

251

If you attack the argument, rather than the person, there will be no Moderating action.
If you cannot see the difference, you should probably avoid making any similar statement because you are likely to step over the line.

Any further discussion of this topic should be taken up in ATMB.

[ /Moderating ]

252

Explain the difference - or why it matters. Is racial discrimination somehow less wrong?

I wouldn’t include “preferences,” but sure. The problem with preferences is that they aren’t aimed “strictly at blacks” - they also hurt whites.

If you see me as an individual, you cannot apply what you observe about white males in general specifically to me. That’s racial prejudice.

Of course white males IN GENERAL have it better. Duh. But one cannot logically infer that any given individual white male has benefited from that, or the he’s responsible for it. This is anti-racism 101.

After half a millenium of racial discrimination, I’m up in arms about racial discrimination.

Aside from the fact that this would a) perpetuate the racism those people created and b) have hilarious side effects, such as giving a racial preference intended for blacks to someone who is by all normal measures white, the point is you shouldn’t need a measuring stick at all.

(More to come).

253

This is exactly right. Assuming that someone who is white has been benefitting from society while a black person has not will be correct more often than not, but not always. It makes no sense to give a black person with all the advantages yet another hand up, while kicking the white guy off the ladder because another white guy was mean.

And as I said before, AA as it has usually been implemented has tended to handicap rich whites not at all. Only poor ones. It’s a nice way for rich liberal whites to assuage their guilt while not actually paying any price.

I’m also noticing an awful lot of mixed kids getting counted as black for the purposes of preferences. That’s a good one. I’m in a mixed-race marriage. So that means even though I’m middle class and my “black” kids will go to good schools and live in good neighborhoods, they’ll be handed more benefits on top of that. Thanks America!

254

There are endless sources of past disadvantage or advantage besides race. Those factors distort the racial factor, because they make some whites less advantaged than others and some blacks less disadvantaged than others. That alone is a huge problem for a racial preference policy. But then there’s the fact that all those other factors are ignored on their own terms. If we want to fix disadvantages, shouldn’t we try to fix all the others? By not doing so and focusing only on one, we reinforce them. Yet if we try to account for all other disadvantages, we push the policy to the point of absurdity. We’d have to have a long checklist of characteristics, historical events and personal histories for the applicant and his/her ancestors, going back who knows how far? And then quantify them into something useful.

Now for some history. Its easy to think of all the many other disadvantages besides race one can have or find in the past that mitigate race. But even the idea that whites had no disadvantages in the pre-Civil Rights South is mistaken. Poor whites - particularly rural or mountain folk, or “white trash” - not only didn’t share in the wealth or power held by wealthy, more establishment whites, they were victimized by some of the same policies targeting blacks. They were often disenfranchised by the poll tax and literacy tests, for instance. Sometimes it was incidental - just a byproduct of the zeal to keep down blacks - but sometimes they were deliberately targeted for political reasons, much like today’s voter GOP-sponsored suppression efforts target more liberal voters, white or black.

These whites by no means suffered as much as blacks. But they didn’t enjoy white privilege as fully as establishment whites did. They were very poor, and had little political power or access to good education. In fact, some lived side-by-side with rural blacks and felt more kinship and alliance with them than with rich whites, which is another reason the establishment was happy to suppress their vote.

And that’s just scratching the surface of history to find all the different ways people have disadvantages in their backgrounds. Which is why people should be judged as individuals, not by their family tree or race. You know, the basic reason why racial prejudice is wrong. (It feels kind of weird needing to explain why racial prejudice is wrong to people here whose goal is to end its effects).

255

Where did this most offensive part of the idea come from?

Are you also “needling” here, or is this really your conception of how race affects opportunity?

256

That’s confusing.

As I think of it, An AA policy is the means, not the end. AA can be used to remedy discrimination or to promote diversity.

No, it’s your answers that do that!

Really.

AA is not about black and white. You actually wrote that.

Exactly - so should we give preferences to them?

If not, you’re now the one ignoring a past disadvantage.

If so, how? How much weight does it get? And what about the hundreds of OTHER possible factors? Do you ignore them?

Why? That’s not a rhetorical questnio and it doesn’t indicate that I disagree – I’d like to hear your answer to that question because I think it would shed more light on this.

You simply cannot have a fair, or workable, policy that ends up relying on such subjectivity or vagueness.

257

No, it’s your conception. By the logic of racial preference, his children are as disadvantaged as a desperately poor orphaned black kid living in the projects.

And he probably has a better idea than most of the rest of us about how race affects opportunity.

Adaher, I wish you had been around earlier on this thread with this bit of information about your family. It would have made it awful awkward when someone played the “you just want to perpetuate your white privilege” card.

258

Okay, let’s explore THAT one:

That doesn’t prove that preferences don’t discriminate against blacks. It only proves that some Asians approve of racial preferences. So what?

Explain how you can have a policy, in a situation with limited resources to hand out (there’s only a certain number of jobs to fill, or slots to admit college students, for instance) where you can discriminate in favor of blacks without having any impact on whites. I’ll wait.

Perhaps, but it DOES punish some whites. It’s not the right remedy.

Of course it’s about white people too. When there are limited resources, like I mentioned above, the only way to give a preference to blacks is to exclude some whites who are otherwise qualified. To simplify, if you can admit 100 students, and you admit 20 blacks instead of ten, that’s ten whites who lose out (ignoring other races for simplicity’s sake).

  1. You don’t really know what most of those people have said or believe or the outrage they’ve expressed.
  2. It’s completely irrelevant anyway. Arguments for or against a policy have nothing to do with how the arguer feels about other issues or how strongly.

Remember, we have to consider the argument, not the person (and I apologize for violating that rule in this thread).

I don’t believe that. So how about you ask me what I actually believe and not the thoughts you put in my head? As for other people, they aren’t here. Go debate them if you want.

Sure, including you.

And some of us are capable of being aware of them too. If we weren’t, we’d have a whole lot more racists in the world.

Okay. But this isn’t that thread, and I didn’t post in it.

Um, how is that different from what you’re doing by invoking cognitive bias, or even AA policies!!!

Wait - you’re saying that one shouldn’t see advantages others have nothing more than racial discrimination? Really? That’s what AA assumes!

[QUOTE]

So AA does harm whites (I thought you said it didn’t), but it’s okay because it harms others too?

No, that PEOPLE deserve to be judged as people, not race.

And?

See, this is your problem. You can never be objective, because the policy itself isn’t. The more you base your policy on large, simple factors, the more unfair it is by ignoring the rest. The more you try to include all the factors, the more subjective implementing the policy becomes. You simply cannot judge people fairly either way.

SHOULD we have racial preferences for quarterback jobs? Or coaching jobs? Why or why not?

You didn’t answer the question, you just repeated the status quo back to me.

Bull. The military has a history of racial segregation, and there are still incidents today. You can’t just declare the problem doesn’t exist.

If true, how exactly did the military manage to overcome under-representation WITHOUT racial preferences?

259

At this point I think we’re just going round in circles. Suppose I grant that liberals do believe, truly and deeply, that racial preferences in college, law school, job searches and everywhere else are a good and necessary way to address the disadvantages faced by blacks. If that were true, then I’d rather expect that liberals would be very keen on making sure that it does, in fact, help blacks, rather than hurting blacks. And I’d expect that they would evaluate affirmative action programs very carefully to make sure that they were having the desired effects. If faced with a large pile of research documenting that affirmative action harms blacks, I’d expect that they would at least show some concern for the matter, rather than just clinging to a single study that wasn’t even studying affirmative action.

260

The answer to this is fairly simple. It’s true that in an ideal world where no one cared about race and a university’s goal was only to provide each student with the best possible education, the university’s interests would lie with recruiting students who would graduate, and the university would try to avoid accepting students who were likely to drop out.

We don’t live in that world. Universities have many reasons to recruit students who are not a good match for them academically, even if it means a higher dropout rate. Some student athletes get recruited because the sports program is such a big deal, when they wouldn’t have a chance on academics alone, for instance.

And in this real world that we live in, universities may face big problem in the court of public relations if they don’t have sufficient numbers of every race. They may be harassed by various special interest groups. They may even be sued. Given the circumstances, it’s entirely understandable that a university would admit students of a certain race who were not well matched with the university academically.