TheRyan, that’s exactly the point I was getting at in my OP. Why do think a quota is a bad thing? I know why I had. But, from the looks of it, you have not thought it through
It is ignorant to use the word discriminate in that context. Sure, it is an applicable use of one of its definitions, but the word is so charged with background that it is unfair to use it there, like that.
If your school needs to set “a specific goal” to change “the racial make-up” of your school, then that school, through its policies and the conscious and unconscious behavior of its administration members, has been an active agent of discrimination. To shift the blame onto a system and program designed to counter that institutional prejudice, and claim that the policy is racist or discriminatory, is, as I said above, ignorant and unfair.
TheRyan, that’s exactly the point I was getting at in my OP. Why do think a quota is a bad thing? I know why I had. But, from the looks of it, you have not thought it through
It is ignorant to use the word discriminate in that context. Sure, it is an applicable use of one of its definitions, but the word is so charged with background that it is unfair to use it there, like that.
If your school needs to set “a specific goal” to change “the racial make-up” of your school, then that school, through its policies and the conscious and unconscious behavior of its administration members, has been an active agent of discrimination. To shift the blame onto a system and program designed to counter that institutional prejudice, and claim that the policy is racist or discriminatory, is, as I said above, ignorant and unfair.
Not really. The point of having goals is that if people don’t have some rough targets to aim at, things often just don’t get done. I.e., the sort of affirmative action things like really trying for greater outreach, etc. don’t happen.
The Fortune 500 company I work for operates on the basis of goals all the time. I have to write goals; my managers have to write goals. It’s sort of a pain actually, but this is done because presumably they feel that it creates more incentive for things to actually get done. Do the goals sometimes set out objectives that turn out to be, say, technically unfeasible? Absolutely! And, then you have to explain why it was not feasible.
To not allow there to be any sort of goal-setting in AA is to allow discrimination (either overt or indirect) to be perpetuated, regardless of what you call it. Changing something’s name does not change its nature.
On a less confrontational note, The Ryan, the way I see it is this: AA is a careful balancing act. On the one hand, you have the need to remedy the underrepresentation of certain groups that exists because of past and continuing discrimination (overt or subtle). On the other side, you have the need not to do this in a way that explicitly chooses a clearly less qualified applicant over a more qualified one on the basis of race, gender, etc. Noone claims that this balancing act is easy, and there is now a huge body of law involving it.
The thing that frustrates me (and others who argue against you, I assume) is that you seem to be so against AA that I don’t see much evidence that you are interested in achieving any sort of balance. You just seem so sure that any attempt to remedy underrepresentation will result in “reverse discrimination” that you are willing to effectively allow the original (and continuing) discrimination to go unremedied. I do not see that as an effective or fair state of affairs.
Will there be cases in which AA leads to something that in some ways may be considered unfair? Perhaps. But, I think on the balance, it leads to much greater fairness.
When I was a physics graduate student and postdoc during a time with a very bad academic job market, there was a perception among many of my male peers that while qualified men were finding it almost impossible to get jobs, qualified women were having a somewhat easier time of it. (There was, BTW, no perception that unqualified women or even clearly less-qualified women were getting jobs, at least that I heard of.) Was this true? Perhaps. Clearly, many physics departments were under some pressure to hire a (often their first!) woman faculty member.
On the other hand, one has to ask why only some 12% of physics PhDs are women. And, if you talk to most such women, they won’t be shy in sharing with you some of the barriers, overt and less overt, that they had to overcome just to get to the same point as the men. And, finally, lest we really believe that those who had overcome these barriers clearly were having an easier time getting hired, a fellow male who is young faculty member relates the following: In a recent faculty search, his department made two hires, both to women and both, in my colleague’s opinion (which I respect) to people who were clearly the most qualified candidates. Despite this, one faculty member was quite against both these hires and was trying to put forth alternative candidates who were so clearly less qualified in the eyes of the other faculty that it almost got to the point of being ridiculous.
In a perfect world, any sort of affirmative action would be unnecessary and unwarranted. We don’t live in anything even closely resembling such a world.
Oh, grow up. You admit that I’m using the word correctly, but you object because you don’t like the “background”. You’d prefer that we all ignore the fact that this is discrimination, because most people are against discrimination and it’s more difficult to defend AA if you admit what it is. And when I disturb your fantasy world in which AA is completely fair and completely non-discriminatory, you call me “ignorant”. If you are for discrimination, at least have the courage to admit it. And if you aren’t willing to be honest, quit whining when others call you on it.
That claim is compltely without basis. The fact is, blacks are less qualified for university admission than whites are. In these PC days, it has become blashemy to admit it, but it’s true. Blacks get poorer grades, do less well on the SAT, have lower IQs, take fewer advanced courses, and are less likely to be able to afford college. Overall, blacks are less likely to be able to graduate from college than are whites. Is this their fault? Perhaps not. But it definitely is not the fault of the universities, and to demand that universties accept responsibility for a situation they did not create is ridiculous.
The only thing “unfair” about it is that it hurts your position. Sorry, truth isn’t determined by what is politically expedient.
The purpose is irrelevant. They are quotas whether you call them that or not.
Of course I want a balance. I just want a different one than you.
Are you really so single-minded that you think that AA is the only way to remedy discrimination?
What does AA have to do with remedying dsiscrimination? Discrimination against whites doesn’t “cancel out” discrimination against blacks. It just doesn’t work that way. If the KKK burns down a black church, is burning down a white church “remedying” the original arson?
If you pay attention to jshore’s posts, the possiblity that you would never find someone advocating racial quotas is one that you will not have to worry about.
And, if you pay attention to The Ryan’s posts and try to respond to them in a reasoned way, it seems that you are just wasting your time. I give up…I’m outta this thread. I just see no evidence here of any desire to have a reasoned discussion on this issue.
Jb_farley, black(hispanic) women will make more than white women and alot more than white men. How is this fair? Increasing the diversity of the workplace IMHO is not a good enough reason for racism. Though since its completely impossible to get two equal canidates. So the idea is unfeasable anywais.
Asmodean, I have no idea what you are saying here. Black women are hispanic women? And they will make more than white men? When? Says who?
However, you do bring up a good point (not sure quite how, yet). It is completely impossible to get to equal candidates. It is completely impossible to get two equal students applying to a school. What does that mean? That the people doing the hiring and the admitting are practicing a form of discrimination. Yes, that’s right. Whether there is affirmative action, or racial quotas, or anything. They are given a large pool of people to choose from, and discriminantly throw away the majority.
So discrimination, having nothing to do with ability or lack thereof, goes on every day. And the government is laying down guidelines, saying there are somethings you cannot reject an applicant for. Why? Because there is a social mandate that racial, sexual, or religious discrimination should not exist in america.
How can you tell if such discrimination is going on in a business or school? A good piece of evidence would be if the company is racially or sexually homogenous, or close to. Now, it is racist and discriminatory to say this company should be less homogenous? Oh, that’s right, TheRyan, because black people are dummer. Where was the cite for any of that?
I’m sorry. You and jb_farley have such similar names and positions that I got the two of you confused. I meant to say that it is obvious that jb_farley is for quotas.
jb_farley
You’re just determined to misrepresent my position, aren’t you? I’m not sure what your goal here is. If it is to reinforce my perception of supporters of AA as irrational bigots that consider any disagreement to be a form of racism, you’re succeeding.
I din’t compare the two. Are you completely unfamiliar with the concept of an analogy?
analogy- resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike : SIMILARITY b : comparison based on such resemblance
compare- to represent as similar
I work for a medium-sized company (4000 or so employees), and twice that I know of, we were unable to hire a certain person in our area because our HR department told us we couldn’t hire another white male at that time. Also, managers’ evaluations (and by extension, bonuses) are based in part by how many minorities they promote to various positions. So, there is monetary incentive to promote based on “minority qualification.” We also have a minority procurement program which seeks out minority-owned businesses. I’m reasonably sure we don’t have any specific quota of business to send their way, but we do have to give reports to some federal agency to show that we are not excluding minorities from our supplier lists.
Is your knowledge of words limited to what you read in a dictionary? An anology compares relationships. I was saying that the relationship between AA and remedying discrimination is similar to the relationship between burning down a white church and remedying the arson of a black church. I was not saying that AA is similar to burning down a white church.
xenophon41
Mind explaining why your post in the 209 thread makes you find this funny?
jb_farley
Some of it is the fault of racists, and some of it is no one’s fault at all. Sometimes bad things happen and there’s no one to blame. Trying to find someone to blame in those situations just makes the problem worse.
exactly. Most of the problems AA is trying to counter are the fault of no individual. Most of them come from institutional racism, general conservatism (behavioral, not political), or social inequalities.
So how in the hell can you get off saying schools are not to blame? All parts of the system are to blame. It is a corrupt system. I don’t care if the people hiring people who look and talk like them are racists; that’s beside the point. I take deep offense, however, to people who perpetuate racial problems in the name of “fairness” .
The system is bad, racist. It is already discriminating against minorities and women. If you are defending the systems as they stand, and especially if you are arguing that AA should be dismantled, you are advocating de facto discrimination.
Don’t you dare call those who are trying to do away with this discrimination “bigots”, at least not while spouting out unintellgible drivel about “Blacks get poorer grades, do less well on the SAT, have lower IQs, take fewer advanced courses, and are less likely to be able to afford college. Overall, blacks are less likely to be able to graduate from college than are whites”, without cite or reference. Tell me how summarizing all of that as “Black people are dummer” is in any way inaccurate.
And don’t get on a moral high about your debating skills when your arguments consist of misunderstanding everything said to you, and then twisting your misunderstanding into a Bizarro version of logic (“Me think act which stop discrimination is BAD!”). Soemthing along the lines of :
TheRyan: Discrimination against whites doesn’t “cancel out” discrimination against blacks. It just doesn’t work that way. If the KKK burns down a black church, is burning down a white church “remedying” the original arson?
JB: comparing hiring the first black executive a company has had to burning a white church.
TheRyan: I din’t compare the two. Are you completely unfamiliar with the concept of an analogy?
JB: analogy- resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike : SIMILARITY b : comparison based on such resemblance
TheRyan: An anology compares relationships. I was saying that the relationship between AA and remedying discrimination is similar to the relationship between burning down a white church and remedying the arson of a black church. I was not saying that AA is similar to burning down a white church.
See, Ryan, this’s what you do when you use an analogy. Don’t worry, I din’t get this outta one of em dictionaries. You compare one thing to another. You say “Look at these two things- see their relationship? It’s a lot like the relationship between these two things! And that means the first of the first things is comparable to the first of the second things. And, wait a second! The second of the first things is like the second of the second things. My GOD this is mindblowing!”
You dig?
If you say that hiring a black guy for a job instead of a white guy is like burning a white church to remedy the burning of a black church, then you are saying that hiring of the black guy is like burning a white church. Remember that whole X:Y:b thing from high school?
Read a fucking book, and then criticize my knowledge of words.
jb
: Is your knowledge of words limited to what you read in a dictionary?
I never said that schools are not to blame for social inequalities. I said that they are not to blame for blacks not being as well prepared for college as whites. Would it kill to actually pay attention when you’re reading my posts?
Your position is that if a school has more whites then blacks, then it must doing something wrong. You’re not willing to bother looking at whether there is some reason beyond the school’s control; you just automatically assume that it has a problem.
Well, that’s a rather sweeping generalization, isn’t it? Garabage collectors are to blame for racism? ISPs are to blame for racism? You ask me for cites on such obvious facts as “blacks get poorer grades”, and expect me to take on faith that every single portion of society is to blame for racism?
So it doesn’t matter whether or not someone does anything wrong; simply being a member of a racist society makes one guilty?
What you’re talking about is not people perpetuating racial problems; what you’re talking about is people allowing racial problems to continue. There is a big difference.
So nice of you to tell me what my position is :rolleyes:. What will it take to get through your thick skull that just because I don’t like the measures taken against a situation, that doesn’t mean I approve of the situation? Are people that oppose the emnargo agaisnt Cuba in favor of Castro’s regime?
I have never done so. I have implied that you are bigoted, because you are. I disagree with you, therefore you refuse to listen to me. In your OP, you said that we “have to” follow your advice, and that anyone that doesn’t if “fucked up”. Do you seriously believe that someone that calls anyone that disagrees with them “fucked up” is not a bigot?
What, you actually want a cite? Are you really unaware of these facts? Or have you decided to ignore them because they are inconvenient? If you really insist on cites for what every well informed member of this society knows, see my next post.
Well, for one thing “dummer” ISN’T A WORD. If you meant to say “less intelligent”, then you are implying that I believe that the intelligence is logically equivalent to the above items, an implication that has no basis in reality.
“Kettle, you’re black.”
Any examples of this? No, of course not. You have no need to support your claims.
How many times do I have to explain this? There were four items in the analogy: AA, dicrimination, the KKK’s arson, and the burning of a white church. Count them (assuming you’re capable of such advance skills), FOUR! Why do you think that you can reduce my analogy to two of the elements, and retain its meaning?
No, it means the relationship within the first pair is comparable to the relationship within the first pair. Why can’t you understand this? I was trying to show that AA does not cancel discrimination. This is a statement about the relationship between AA and discrimination. To illustrate this point, I brought up the fact that burning down a white church does not cancel out the arson of a black church. This is also a statement about the relationship between the two items. My conclusion was that the two relationships were similar; that is, in neither case does the former cancel out the latter.
No, that’s not how analogies work. 3 is to 1 as 6 is to 2. Does that mean that 3 is equal to 6? Of course not!
Yes, I do. Obviously you don’t.
X:Y:b is completely different from X=a.
b thing from high school?