You can’t win. Either way, every time you try to use discrimination by race, or any other group characteristic, to “fix” past discrimination, you introduce a new unfairness. You either have to drop it, or take it to absurd extremes. It can never be fair.
The demand by QAULIFIED people is much smaller than overall demand. Noone is being pushed out of harvard and into Apex Tech. Its marginal.
Well, I can’t really disagree with you.
But it is exactly at the commanding heights of society that we need the diversity.
Legacy admissions in bother me too. If I had to choose between AA + legacy preferences or neither, I would probably pick neither because the distortive effect of legacy admissions is so dramtaic.
AA is not trying to give everyone the same starting point in life, it is trying to remedy a particular historical injustice.
I’m pretty sure AA applied to women. I don’t know if it does anymore, and if it does, it probably shouldn’t (at least in college admissions).
Then no.
This is a thread about affirmative action, not racism.
If you know what white privilege is then how can you say it has nothing to do with affirmative action?
/sigh they are not fixed the way parking spots are.
I thought I was being clear. I think admissions preferences for diverity’s sake is not AA.
So you’re saying that because we can never get it perfect we shouldn’t try to reverse the effects of past discrimiantion and just keep things the way they are now. How convenient.
We can’t have any preferences at all unless we take it to ridiculous extremees (despite the fact that we have been doing exactly this for decades)? Pfft.
It’s not just that you think; they are different concepts. See post 21.
I know, and that’s the problem. Why is one particular historical injustice worthy of fixing in this way while others aren’t?
Since women do NOT suffer from the results of past historical injustice any more than men do (since women and men are both the product of an equal number of men and women in our families), you can’t say AA for women has anything whatsoever to do with remedying historical injustice. That’s my point.
Then this conversation is over. I will not accept racial prejudice, ever, but especially in a conversation with someone who claims to want to remedy it.
Racial prejudice is wrong.
Whatever other viewpoints you may post with which I agree or disagree, this has to be the utterly silliest thing I have seen you post.
It has no basis in reality. Sexual discrimination has been much ameliorated over the last 40 years, but claiming that women suffer no more discrimination than men, particularly in an historical context, is simply not connected to reality.
It’s not silly at all.
Blacks today suffer from the discrimination imposed on their ancestors. They inherit it, so to speak, through poverty and similar disadvantages. Correct?
But women do not, because all women and men have the exact same number of male and female ancestors. One cannot disproportionately inherit the problems of female ancestors. If your mom was discriminated against, your dad wasn’t, and that’s true of everyone, male or female.
And I was careful to explain that I was not saying that dicrimination against women no longer exists NOW. I’m saying that the effects of discrimination against a female ancestor, unlike a black ancestor, cannot be passed on to future generations, unless perhaps you’ve got a few single moms in your recent family tree. A woman could not say “I deserve extra help because I come from a long line of women,” because she has an equal number of men in her family line - which is also the same number as men have in their family line anyway.
What I said made sense, you just didn’t get it. Hope you do now.
I get it and you are mistaken. The way that women were kept out of various occupations, for years, affects the number of women in those occupations, today, which affects their ability to enter those occupations, today. Is it a “genetic” inheritance? No. However, it is an historical inheritance. It is also fading, but is a long way from having faded.
It’s not an inheritance at all.
You could say society “inherited” attitudes toward women, perhaps, but that’s not what this is about.
This is about PAST discrimination against your ancestors that causes YOU to suffer from the effects - even if you don’t suffer from discrimination now.
In the case of AA, a school doesn’t admit more blacks as a way of not discriminating against them. It does so based on the idea that blacks are disadvantaged in qualifications for school because of past discrimination - you know, slavery and Jim Crow. (Unless they’re doing it for diversity reasons, which is different).
Women can’t inherit past discrimination from women in their ancestry, because we all have an equal number of women and men in it. A woman can’t claim that she has a disadvantage because of women in her family history suffering from past discrimination. There’d be no basis for an AA program based on that premise. That’s all. Nobody said discrimination no longer exists against women today.
Must… resist… snide… remark
When people say “the legacy of slavery and segregation” what do you think they mean?
I invited you to name another historical injustice that compares to slavery and segregation. So do you have one or are you saying that unless we remediate every historical injustice ever we cannot attempt to address the greatest ones?
OK. If you don’t think your race and gender have anything to do with your perspective, you are welcome to your opinion. You are wrong but you are welcome to your opinion.
Gesundheit.
You are back to pretending that the issue is genetic.
Women, today, have limited access to many occupations because women, yesterday, were barred from them and there are few to no women in a position to act as mentors or to provide promotions to other women. There is a reason that the phrase “good ol’ boy” is associated with networking so often. The situation is changing, but that has as much to do with Affirmative Action extended to women as it does to some miraculous change of attitudes among the men who dominate various industries and associations.
It’s not an either/or issue. In terms of the disparity in male/female occupational representation it’s quite plausible that it partially comes down to neural and hormonal differences between the s8xes (eg. Baron-Cohen, Kimura) as well as institutional & cultural factors.
No I’m not.
No, women today have limited access to many occupations today because they have limited access to them today.
You are still confused about my point. This is not about the history of discrimination. Yes, some past attitudes and standards have been carried into today.
This is about claims that someone can have a disadvantage - not due to current discrimination, but due to past discrimination against his/her ancestors. For instance, a black man can say he is poor because his ancestors were poor and weren’t able to pass wealth, skills or education to him. The legacy of slavery, etc.
A woman can’t say that, for reasons I’ve explained and I think you understand.
I am not claiming that there is no current discrimination. I am not claiming that current discrimination wasn’t inherited, culturally, from our past. I’m saying a woman can’t say “my ancestors suffered from sex discrimination and that’s the reason I’m disadvantaged as a woman.”
I find it strange, and horrible, that people who claim to want to end racial discrimination and its legacy not only want to continue to use it, but when such a simple moral statement that racial prejudice is wrong, they not only can’t accept it, they belittle it.
It’s even more interesting, and horrible, that it involves a white person saying that to a non-white person. Our ancestors spent centuries trying to get white people to accept that basic moral principle, and now that they do, it’s suddenly not wanted.
We obviously have more work to do.
And that is the fundamental crux of the problem. You can’t end racial discrimination until you end racial discrimination. A system that is designed to make us more race conscious rather than less is one in which racism will persist and possibly even grow.
The fundamental crux of the problem exhibited in this thread is that you do not seem to acknowledge that ending racial discrimination qua racial discrimination is not the purpose of affirmative action.
That’s indisputable. The question is, does it stand in the way? I say it does. One can argue that it’s a price worth paying, but I don’t think there’s any question that such programs promote race consciousness.
That’s just a tautology. Affirmative action is defined by race consciousness. No one has disputed that, either.
First of all, the nature of the purpose doesn’t change my statement. AA (or at least some forms of it) use racial discrimination. That alone makes it wrong, regardless of intent.
OBVIOUSLY the purpose of AA can’t be to end racial discrimination, since it IS racial discrimination.
Supporters of AA typically state two purposes: to give those suffering from the legacy of past discrimination a boost, or to promote diversity that is not present due to either that legacy or perhaps current, persistent discrimination. Neither are much of a difference from saying they are designed to end discrimination, or at least the effects of discrimination. The fact that many diversity policies almost always focus only on historical discrimination and not true diversity strengthens that (though I think diversity is the stronger argument for AA, since it is a long-run solution to eliminating racial separation and attitudes).