Don’t lump all of us “White guys” together and hold us up as a monolithic group. Those were different white guys. Don’t hold me responsible for the actions of other people. What you have described about black people not being able to get into certain schools or get certain jobs still happens today (though on a MUCH smaller scale), and I think it is reprehensible. Personally, what I think should be outlawed is having any question on application forms that have anything to do with race or sex (as Jman touched on). These two pieces of information should be irrelevant. Interviews should be given in person, face to face, but with a twist. Have a second “blind” interviewer that is behind a curtain and cannot see the applicant. Depending on the position, the surface of a person DOES matter. You wouldn’t want your receptionist to shower only every 2 months, brush their teeth twice that often, and wear garbage bags to work.
I have worked for a company that forbid a manager to hire another white male, regardless of the fact that no minorities bothered to apply. They actually had a point system for hiring. Every protected class a person belonged to counted as a point. Managers want to hire the brightest, but they also like to avoid discrimination lawsuits, so they compromise.
White skin was never a gurantee of success. YOu can say that all successful people were white men, but you can’t say that all white men were successful.
A- To say all whites are or were racist is an insult to all those that fought for the rights of blacks. The civil war was fought by whites to free the blacks. Those on the PC side would have you believe this is a white versus black issue and it is not. Whites have done more to help blacks than many blacks have done for their own people.
B- I cannot stand it when the PC crowd declare the purity of their motivations and the evilness and selfishness of anyone who sees things a different way.
C- So it was OK for blacks to whine when they were discriminated against and it is not OK for whites to whine when they are discriminated against?
D- In any case, does anyone think “positive discrimination” is making race relations better? As long as you have discrimination of any kind you are going to have bad relations between those groups.
E- Does saying “period” when you finish really make you right? I wish I had learnt that before!
Some people have said whites were actually fighting to preserve the union. Lincoln for one.
There’s a difference between having a harder time getting a scholarship and not being allowed to attend a university at all. There’s a difference between not being offered a job you’re qualified for and being dragged to your death behind a truck. Calling both of these things ‘discrimination’ and acting as if there’s no difference is hardly a fair representation of the issue.
At which universities are blacks not allowed to attend?
Well, next time I am competing with a minority for a job, I will just thank my lucky stars that I am not getting dragged to death behind a truck like all of these minorities are on a daily basis.
My God, Dumbguy! Could you please crank up the melodramatic rhetoric a few notches? I want to see if my head actually explodes…
I love it when people read every fourth word of something and then get in a snit. Sailor said “So it was OK for blacks to whine when they were discriminated against and it is not OK for whites to whine when they are discriminated against?” The use of tense was his. He was comparing discrimination against blacks in the past to that against whites in the present. And I was responding to him.
[/QUOTE]
**
I was using extreme examples to indicate that there is a huge range of degrees in what we’re casually lumping under ‘discrimination.’ Sure, the point was dramatic, because the differences are dramatic. I’ll take the ‘melo’ prefix to mean you don’t agree with me.
Who said anything about a daily basis? Strikes me as a little melodramatic to exaggerate my point like that. For the record, how often does it have to happen before it’s not just rhetoric?
What I want to know now is why my sig has disappeared and when did that happen. It still shows in my profile… hmmm… I hate these conspiracies…
I took your sig sailor. I won’t tolerate posters who don’t agree with me.
Mr.Zambezi offers;
" If nedds2Know and I walked down the street holding hands, we would balance perfectly"
No, Mr.Zambezi, I think it more likely that you would both spontaneously combust. 
Peace,
mangeorge
I think there are situations in which affirmative action is inappropriate, but a city police department is not one of them. The police force needs to be as racially representative as it can be of the community it’s serving. I believe history provides enough adequate examples of the alternative.
(That said, I agree it’s stupid to exclude white males solely on the basis of ANY previous drug use.)
Earlier I had started this thread asking if a White Entertainment Network would be considered racist based only on its name. There were some extremely interesting points brought up, mostly about perceived reverse racism in the form of scholarships and other areas. This topic, “Reverse discrimination”, already exists in http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=27265. in the Great Debates area.
I, for one, find that asking anyone about race, sex, religion, or political beliefs, on any type of application, is wrong.
A persons race, sex, or, religion should have no bearing on employment or education and the reasons are self-explanatory. But here is my 2 cents…
It is IMHO, that Federal, state, county and local governments would serve us better if its hiring practice followed these guidelines, rather than trying to make itself reflect the population make up.
As a school administrator, I would like to see that everyone has an equal chance for an education. Eliminating the race, or sex, quotas that exist in the system can do this. A student who strives and achieves an academic proficiency should not be passed over because a law mandates a quota.
As an employer, I would only want the best person for the job, based on experience and/or education alone. There are laws protecting people against discrimination.
I know…I must be stupid…I just don’t understand how anyone can even ask these kinds of questions. Perhaps for a young white male just graduating from high school, not having actually seen what blacks used to be like then maybe…
But I lived through it. I can remember the civil rights movement. People were killed, white and black just so black people could vote! Vote for God’s sake, something that is so basic to who we are as Americans. I can remember “whites only” bathrooms and fountains, especially here in the South. I can remember being in 3rd grade and there were only 4 black kids in my elementary school. I can remember how silent and miserable they looked. I can remember their hand me down clothes. They weren’t getting an education, they were terrified, fish out of water.
Even today, black farmers are still engaged in a law suit with the United States government. Why? Because they were not considered for farm loans the same as whites. Most of these farm families have been struggling on their land for generations! Did the government do this to them? No, individuals working for the government did this, but the government should now rectify this problem. That is how quotas are started.
It would be fine with me if all of this were not necessary but it is. Even asking these kinds of questions, white scholarships, white TV, reverse discrimination, shows me that the person has absolutely no sensitivity to the still ongoing hardships of minorities in this country. These people have been living side by side with us for generations. They helped build this country, literally. Yet for over a hundred years they were not afforded the same liberties or opportunities as the rest of us. Do we owe them something now, generations later, I say a big damned yes! We as a society owe each other, we owe it to each other to do our best to see that every American has the opportunity to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If some of us need to be protected in order to achieve this then it is the right thing to do. IMHO a society is only as good as the compassion it shows for it’s most needy.
Need2know
I don’t see how a color-blind admissions policy to colleges hurts anyone. It lets the most qualified applicant get accepted. It puts no priority on color at all. The way things are at the top universities in the country, a white person has a large disadvantage in the application process. That’s that facts…it USED to be the other way around, and AA served its purpose, allowing minorites into the universities. But now, the opposite is happening, and we should try to get it to be EQUAL…not just good for minorities, or whites.
I have a close friend, who is Native American. She had good grades in HS (3.8), decent SATs, but not outstanding, and a couple clubs, but no major activities. She was accepted to Harvard with a FULL RIDE SCHOLARSHIP. While she’s a very bright person, there are a LOT of people who were not accepted to Harvard that had better qualifications, and were white. She ended up not going there…(Went to Cornell…how I met her), but she was accepted just the same.
In high school, I applied to Princeton. A person I know also applied to Princeton. I had a 4.5 GPA and was valedictorian of my class. He had a 3.6 and was 42nd in his class. I was a 4 year varsity letterman. He didn’t do sports. I had a 1340 on my SATs. He had a 1300. I was in the band, German club, did 2 years of flood relief in St. Louis, Oddessy of the Mind, etc. He was in the Spanish club and his church youth group. I was rejected. He was accepted. I am white; he is black. Tell me…is he more qualified than me? You may think this is just sour grapes, but it’s not. I’m extremely glad I didn’t go to Princeton. BUT…the point is, it’s not really fair. Can I say definitively that he got in because he was a minority? No…but from looking at the facts, it seems to be the only thing possible.
I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with having a diverse campus. I’m an electrical engineering major, and in my major, I am a minority…by a lot. I think it’s great…but I also think that the color of your skin, your ancestry, your sex, and your beliefs should have NO bearing on your acceptance to college or your hiring at a job. It just doesn’t belong.
Jman
Need said
Yes, equality of opportunity is a great goal. But what you are talking about is equality of outcome forced through staed enforced programs. THat is a very different animal.
Compassion is different than money, is different than a loan, is different than free tuition. I can have compassion for a minority applicant who is woefully underqualified. But I don’t have to give him a job to be compassionate.
IMHO, the problem with the financial disparity that we see is the result of certain minority groups simply not showing up. I can’t hire blacks if none apply. THere has to be some level of personal motivation. Or should I be required to go out and pull resume’s out of their ears?
Dumbguy: you used the word “allowed” when talking about blacks going to college. Saying that they aren’t “allowed” is different than saying it is difficult for them to get in.
And the dragging death of that black man was indeed one incident.And it wasn’t discrimination, it was racially motivated murder.
People who want to created federal laws based on one incident scare me.
Steve-o wrote:
That’s appalling. That truly is an unacceptable example of
reverse discrimination. There is a big difference between expanding opportunity for everyone and closing the door to majority applicants in the name of ‘fairness.’
Mr.Zambezi wrote:
Again, that’s an asinine decision by the HR department who don’t comprehend what affirmative action is all about.
Quots and affirmative action make me uncomfortable, too, but we all know that without AA, educated black guys could not get good jobs because white guys would only hire white guys. As you pointed out, Mr. Zambezi, not all white men were successful, but all successful people were white men.
I’m a white guy, too. For six years I lived and worked in South Korea. In Korea, there were bars and restaurants I was barred entry to because I was white; every white guy I knew who had a Korean girlfriend got into fights with Korean guys for screwing their women. I know in a small way what it’s like to be discriminated against, to be cheated by merchants and abused by an employer and the police don’t help, because non-Koreans are always wrong in Korea.
That’s the situation black folks faced in the US until the very recent past.
Mr. Zambezi, do you really feel that white guys are being discriminated against? When was the last time you saw a white man being lynched by a crowd of black men? How many more black CEO’s are there than white CEO’s? How much richer are black people than white people? Where are the prosperous black suburbs and the poor white ghettos? I suspect that Mr. Zambezi and his friends resent any successful blacks in America.
What do you call it when a white guy has to have higher credential than a black man to get the same job. Wasn;t that what blacks faced not too long ago?
Well, I haven’t seen black men lynched by white men either. I have seen more whites killed by blacks than vice versa. Don’t bring up acts from 80 years ago to justify current actions.
first of all, current CEO, for the most part, started their careers 30-40 years ago, so current CEO makeup reflects that time. THere are currently more women enrolled in college than men. I predict in 20-30 years you will see sexual parity at the CEO level, but you will probably not see black/white parity. I will get to that in a minute.
Well, I live next to a poor white ghetto. I bet that there are more poor whites than poor blacks. ANd the wealth of blacks as a whole may have more to do with their own culture than it has to do with discrimination. Do you remember that 60 minutes episode about how Recen black immigrants from Africa and the Caribean are far more successful than American blacks? How can that be if it is purely a matter of discrimination based on color?
to the contratry, I want more parity so that I don’t have to be lambasted and discredited for being white. I didn’t get where I am simply because I am white.
As I said before, the black community has not been showing up. If they don’t apply for jobs tehy can’t get jobs.
Come to think of it, if they don’t apply, they can’t be discriminated against.
First off, let me say (write) that I do think that the police force should be (at least somewhat) representative of the community it polices (this goal should not supercede the goal of hiring quality police officers). The problem is, when they use a program that makes it easier for people with the desired skin color or genitalia to get hired, what do you sacrifice? If you reduce the hiring standards for any group, the police officers that are represented by that group will be sub-par, while the police officers representing the group with higher hiring standards will most likely be better officers. Most of the original standards were set for a work related reason. They were set to help ensure that the police officers that were hired to protect our community were ABLE to do their job in a proper manner.
Another thing that I remember was that they had made the reading, writing and math tests easier (for everyone, not just “minorities”). These tests were a joke. I guarantee I could have passed them when I was in the third grade. Going into it, I figured they would be on the sophomore-or-junior-in-high-school level, and was shocked when I began the tests. The math test consisted of problems such as:
12+32=?
28-17=?
5X3=?
21/7=?
10+A=17 A=?
They were all multiple choice, and there were only two of these problems that involved solving for a variable, so even if you missed all (read both) of them, you could still easily pass the test. The reading and writing testes ( :D… I liked the typo so much, I kept it) were just as absurd. It is important for police officers to be able to do these basic functions very well, as reading and writing constitute over half of the time spent on their job. It is also important for another reason. Getting convictions. If proper, coherent documentation of any crime is not recorded by the responding police officer, it is going to be tough if not impossible to get a conviction.
I would assume that part of the goal of having the police force match (racially and sexually) the community it polices would involve having the “higher ups” in the force also be as racially and sexually diverse as the community. If “minorities” are brought into the police force via reduced standards, who do you think will perform better on the advancement tests (should we have different standards for the advancement tests?)? The higher up you go, the more reading and writing you will do. What about those “minority” individuals that could have met the original hiring standards? They are going to be stigmatized by the lower hiring standards for whatever “minority” group to which they belong.
My suggestion? Remember, the problem was not that HPD was passing over qualified “minority” applicants. The problem was that there were very few “minority” applicants in the first place. Instead of lowering standards to accommodate the small pool of “minority” applicants, increase the size of the pool of “minority” applicants, and keep the standards the same for everyone. Advertise heavily in areas with high concentrations of whatever the desired skin color or genitalia is. Start a PR campaign that involves going to schools (especially elementary schools) on “just for fun” visits. Bring a police dog, and invite kids to come pet the dog. Tell the kids about what a police officer does, and give a staged demonstration of what the dog does. There are all kinds of things that could be done in this vein that would not violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 / 1991, and would help to increase the “minority” applicant pool.
One of the principles of our culture is individual responsibility. You do not punish people for what others may have done. This is not Cuba or China where if you defect they will punish your family.
Needs2know, discrimination is already illegal but you seem to find it acceptable to punish a certain group of people (whites) for the discrimination (which may or may not exist, but let us accept it for the sake of argument)of some of those people. I do not find that acceptable, but let me assume, again for the same of argument, that it would be acceptable. Then, if you are consistent the following should be acceptable:
In Washington DC most street crime against whites is done by blacks. These acts are already illegal and if the perpetrator is caught he will suffer the weight of the law. But now we extend your reasoning and we pass a law that restricts the freedom of black males (age 15 - 35 if you like) by setting a curfew, or restricting them from certain neighborhoods or whatever.
Is this acceptable to you?
Mr. Zambezi wrote:
I would never dream of lambasting you for being white. I’m a white guy, too. I also know that we live in a sea of privilege that we take for granted. I grant that attempts to make America a fairer place have been clumsily applied and it’s certainly unfair to discriminate against qualified white applicants. Racist hiring is wrong, no matter who does it.
But think about this, without affirmative action, do you think that a white employer would give a black applicant the time of day, let alone a job, no matter how qualified the applicant may be?
As much as I hate to agree with you, you do have a point about the collective lack of success of American blacks as opposed to West Indian immigrants, but that properly belongs in another thread.
In addition, you can’t say lynchings only happened 80 years ago. Wasn’t James Byrd, Jr. dragged to death by white men? Was that not a lynching?
Sailor, Needs2know was not advocating class discrimination against whites, so your analogy is illogical.
I am very far from the PC crowd, but I also see that white men as a class still retain power and wealth in this country and are far from being a persecuted class.
Racist hiring is wrong but affirmative action is ok? I read this as: racist hiring is wrong, but government sponsored racist hiring is ok. Maybe I misunderstand, but I thought that affirmative action WAS racist hiring. As for a white employer giving a black applicant a job… The goal of any business owner is to make money and stay in business. The best way to do that is to hire the person who could do the job the best. Anyone who would not do so is a fool (and a criminal who should be punished), and will most likely not be in business very long if they are prone to making such irrational decisions. We don’t need affirmative action. What we need is for the government to ONLY get involved when an employer violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 / 1991.