Yes - some people are racist. So what? The solution is not to make laws to address the problem of individuals The fact that there are people that are racists is no justification to create racist laws. Perhaps less leeway in sentencing and building more prisons. Or scrapping the war on drugs all together.
. So rig it more of course. At least when re-rigging the system don’t pretend that doing g so is not also racist. Because treating people differently based on race is the definition of being racist. Well not specifically but it’s a catch all for the idea.
It would not be on a “daily” basis in the real world. If situations change over time, a law (or other event or phenomenon) may become racist or stop being racist. Racism is not granite that never changes, it is a word that identifies actions or beliefs that harm one group based on a perception of race.
That is silly and does not even logically follow from your claim. On what basis would it be racist?
I suspect that laws that identify people by race may tend to be racist because such laws promote disparate impact.
Consider the original Executive Order promoting Affirmative Action or the way in which similar directives were implemented at General Motors and other corporations. (These were never laws, as such.) They called for efforts to be made to find and hire blacks to increase the number of black people. There were no quotas and no lowered standards for hiring. I actually witnessed this at one company. The way they set about doing it was to make sure that they visited black schools in their recruitment drives, noting that they were actively color blind in their hiring practices, and included black employees among the recruiters so that the kids at various schools recognized that there was a chance to be hired. As a result, they received far more black applications than similar companies in their area, hired the best of all the applicants, regardless of race, and wound up increasing the number of blacks in the company. Simply by increasing the pool of people who were aware of the opportunities, they succeeded in increasing their percentage of blacks in the company. They then did the same thing with women, again with no quotas or lowered entrance standards.
A law that prescribed that remedy could name races and sexes without being racist or sexist. Any white male that applied would still be eligible to be hired, it simply expanded the pool to include more people.
And as I pointed out, you are wrong? I mean really this is a fundamental disagreement on how the world should be ordered. I concede that our current jurisprudence allows for this type of analysis. I still think it’s bullshit.
But it could be on a daily basis right? The law as you state could change from being racist to not racist on a daily basis. This is unrealistic and absurd in practice, but the law as you describe would allow that. Any law that allows that is not a good law.
The process of treating people differently based on their race is racist. Full stop. If the status of a law can change based on the race of those impacted, then that process itself is racist.
What private businesses do are not really germane to what the government does. In any case, if the government were to implement such a program I would call that racist as well. All agencies operate with limited resources. Using those limited resources to further one race over another is racist. How is it not? Just because it favors a minority race does not mean it’s not racist. Shit, it could be good public policy (I think it’s not) but to say it’s not racist is just redefining words. At least be honest and say “it’s racist, but in a good way!” I would have no objection to that other than to say I think it’s bad policy.
Do you think education researchers don’t know how to control for factors like rigor of coursework? Seriously?
We actually have really good subject group emerge for this recently recently, as a growing number of selective universities are becoming “test optional.” There is some philosophy behind moving away from tests, but the real reason why it’s become such a trend is that it bumps universities up on rankings lists, as their “average SAT score” metric will reflect only students who felt they did well enough to submit the scores during admissions.
One can reasonably assume that students who chose to disclose their scores have high scores, and those who choose not to have lower ones. So, do the ones who disclose their scores succeed better than those who do not? Nope. The difference between the two groups is not statistically signifigant, either for GPAs or drop out rates.
The most important factor for predicting future success, in all cases, is high school GPA. Students with high test scores and low GPAs tended to do poorly. Students with high GPAs but low test scores tended to do well. This was found in a variety of settings, from very selective universities to local ones. GPA is what matters.
And it makes sense. Smarts is smarts, but it’s pretty worthless without hard work and persistance.
Interestingly, the non-submitters tend to be more likely to be economically disadvantaged, minority, or have a learning disability.
This is malign fantasy.
Provide any example of law that could change from being racist to non-racist and back on a daily basis.
The cocaine law could have changed from one to the other, but only if there was a massive shift in the demographics regarding who did or did not use crack or powder. Such a massive shift could not flip-flop daily. The reason that the law was racist was not that the situation changed daily, but that when the facts regarding the user population along with scientific evidence that refuted the earlier hoopla about instant addiction were provided a year after the law’s passage, Congress chose to not rectify the discrepancies in punishment. So we have over a year in which facts were ascertained by science and then a period of another seventeen years, or so, with that information being publicly available and increasingly reported, before Congress finally acted upon the new information. Daily? Piffle.
So, you agree that the cocaine/crack laws were racist, since they had an impact based on the sociologically defined race of those affected? Then why are you challenging what I posted?
Now, you are just being silly. You are pretending that any situation in which the word “race” appears is racist, but that the identical situation that does not include the word race is free of racism.
In the earliest examples of Affirmative Action, nothing furthered one race over another. It merely removed barriers for a race that was already harmed by social practices, (and previous laws), and encouraged inclusion. Simply broadening the pool of candidates for a job does not harm any individual.
We are back to LBJ’s analogy. You want to believe that simply removing constraints is sufficient to rectify a situation caused by those constraints, so that a man who has been hobbled by chains to the point his muscles have atrophied and he is weakened by the sores on his ankles has just as good a chance in a race as the man never so hobbled and we should never take any action to help him recover his muscle mass or heal from his wounds because that would be, (in your odd view), “racist.”
I am not a fan of AA as it has developed over the last forty years, but you have a simplistic view of the world and language that makes no sense.
Are you saying that it’s not theoretically possible or it’s not possible in reality? I agree with the latter, but not the former. Whether or not it’s daily, monthly, annually, or something else (I used daily for hyperbole) - the fact that a law can be at one point considered racist and then at some future point no longer be considered racist, or vice versa, turns the meaning on its head. If the determination of whether a law is racist is subject to change, that determination is worthless. It aims for equality of outcome rather than of opportunity.
I think the powder vs. crack laws had a disparate impact on different racial groups. I do not think the laws themselves were racist. I don’t believe in disparate impact analysis as meaningful to determine if a law is racist or not.
If it’s silly to think that to be racist, a law needs to identify some race that is affected, then sure, I’m silly. I happen to think it’s the only way to approach the analysis and achieve a consistent result and any other way is absurd, but hey, different strokes.
Without commenting on the positives of broadening the pool of candidates for a job, it is most certainly true that broadening the pool harms all other candidates already in the pool. Each individual has less of a chance of getting the job. I must be missing something because that seems rather obvious. If I’m the only one applying for the job, I have a much better shot than if 10,000 other people applied, all other things being equal.
If there is an individual that has been harmed by the racist laws and practices of the past then they deserve recompense. How long would you say that the past injustices warrant special treatment? But at least this approach is bordering on being forthright. It admits to being racist - though couches it in a positive light as a remedy for past wrongs. It is still racist none the less, but for a good cause, right?
If individuals need assistance because of structural disadvantages, poverty, injury, etc. then I support that assistance in some form. What I don’t support is assistance because you’re Black, or Hispanic, or artificial barriers because you’re White, or Asian. That’s AA today and it’s racist and should be abolished.
Do you have some specific cites for this commonly-advanced contention so I can decide whether or not to challenge it?
Among the flaws of the studies I’ve seen is that “success” is poorly defined, and employer hiring preferences for the “successful” group are not examined.
Say, for example, you want to look at success rates for your minority-preferenced admissions who did not submit their low entrance exam scores. Turns out they get jobs. But if they get jobs because college educated under-represented minorities are highly sought after in the business world because of race-based preferences, that success is not driven by an equality of quality; it’s driven by race-based preferences on the part of employers. Or if success is measured by income and down the road most kids at a given university end up piddling around somewhere in the middle class like the rest of us, what you are “measuring” is the fact that most hardworking people with a modicum of ability can make their way in the world. That’s not a statement about how to get the best students. It’s a statement of how society works.
I don’t think grades are meaningless, but grades across institutions–and within institutions, across courses and teachers–are not particularly meaningful in determining relative ability.
There is a reason schools hang on to standardized tests, and it’s not tradition. It’s because standardized exams do closely correlate with a student’s ability, particularly in STEM fields where it has been impossible to drive proportionate representation without race-based preferences. Beyond that, cases like Ricci v DeStefano demonstrate what happens in the real world of success when standardized exams are used to rank qualifications.
Give me a University made of up students with superb SAT scores along with great recommendations/grades, and I’ll put up my success rate against the University composed of students with great recommendations/grades and crummy SAT scores any day, by any measure of success…except where subsequent hiring is allowed to make special consideration for the students of the second University.
This is precisely the dilemma U Texas is facing in their Fisher case. They can get the top 10% from any school, including mostly black Houston high schools. But what they want are the top black students, period. And those come from much better schools and better neighborhoods and better backgrounds. However within their peer groups, the black cohort underperforms whites and asians, and so U Texas needs to be allowed to make race a separate consideration.
That’s the point. Affirmative action based on race assumes she needs special favors simply because of her race.
Affirmative action based on race is based on race, not gender or SES. Read the title of the thread.
No, it wouldn’t be fair; it would be pretty ridiculous. Race isn’t based on state of residence, and neither I nor Harvard nor anyone else views race that way.
Do you have any studies where you actually know what the SAT scores are, and don’t make any assumptions?
Because we already know that students admitted with lower qualifications tend to drop out more, and take longer to graduate when they stay (cite, cite, cite). So I would need to see a little harder data than has been asserted so far.
High school GPA might be as reasonable a predictor of…college GPA (especially the first year) but college GPA is not exactly a measure of “future success.” Weak students with great high school GPAs who take weak college courses to make good college GPAs because they are smart enough not to take rigorous courses are hardly a measure of success rates.
We need race-based AA so we can correct for performance differences. Getting rid of standardized tests won’t fix the disparity problem.
Maybe I missed it, but can someone summarize the argument AGAINST this SCOTUS decision? That is, what constitutional provision disallows the people from voting against race-based admission policies in state schools? I mean, regardless of the goodness or badness of the idea, if the people vote against it, what’s the problem, constitutionally?
But I can see you are laying the foundation to start moving those goalposts. Are you really trying to argue that college GPA and drop out rate is not an appropriate measure of success? I can wrack my brain, but I can’t think of any more appropriate way to measure that.
It’s okay to be wrong sometimes. You are wrong about a lot of things, but you are pretty specifically wrong here. The College Board is well aware of this problem, and they are working on a massive reformulation of the SAT to transform it in to a more content-focused assessment rather than an IQ type test. An IQ type test is a nice idea, but success at anything is only partially a function of raw intellegence. College admissions types have pretty much proven that non-cognitive qualities like determination and time management are key to success, and they are working hard to develop assessments that can capture that.
Depends, is AA there to help actual people trying to go to college, or is it there to superficially alter diversity demographics? Is it there to help the people affected by institutionalized racism, or is it there to alter the racism itself? It seems much more constructed to do the latter than the former. And for “name” schools it seems to be going beyond that to try to specifically target the demographics of the “elite”.
This is a factor for many people.
So?
OTOH I suppose my argument could also be used against me, and say, why do minorities want to go to white schools where they will encounter prejudice rather than minority schools where they can excel.
I guess my point here is, AA is fine to combat racism of admissions preference, but it’s not going to do much of anything to combat the second hand racism of being historically disadvantaged.
You are not making whatever point you believe you are making. “Opportunity vs outcome” is a judgment on a law’s intent. It has no bearing on a law’s actual effect on society.
I realize that. You have made it clear that, in your opinion, a law is racist if it mentions race and it fails to be racist if it does not mention race.
I find that to be a pointless distinction. It elevates the word “race” to an idol to be worshipped or shunned, regardless of any actual effects that a law including or excluding it produces.
By your logic, the poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses imposed during the Jim Crow era were not racist. They never mentioned race, at all.
If you truly believe that, then we have no common ground for further discussion.
Now place this statement in the context of Jim Crow voter laws.
An applicant’s chances are only reduced to the extent that other superior candidates apply. If you are comfortable with supporting a method of selection that routinely excludes persons who just “happen” to be members of one section of society, we will simply have to disagree. Broadening the pool does not harm any group; it simply changes the range of potentially eligible candidates.
So you support reparations for slavery and Jim Crow? Interesting.
I have not proposed special treatment for any individual. Go argue that straw man with someone who has.
Nah. You just have a bit of logosalatry regarding the word “race” that does not appear to be supported by facts or logic. I do not support quotas or set-asides. The claim that all AA is racist is false; it requires a declaration that Jim Crow voting laws were not racist while insisting that outreach efforts that do not lower standards are racist. You worship the word race; I do not.
Your declaration that the presence of the word race makes something racist is, indeed, silly and without foundation. It ignores the actual meaning of the words racism and racist.
There is no such argument, I actually asked the same question earlier to no response. I presume it’s because there simply is no sound legal argument against this ruling, and that on a board that usually isn’t comfortable with being in agreement with the rulings of a conservative majority on a particular SCOTUS case I think the thread is instead about whether or not race based AA is good policy (which is specifically not what the constitutional question was about.)
In most cases of course, the conservative and liberal justices rule together (something those who only follow the SCOTUS out of political interest do not know because they aren’t interesting cases politically and often not legally either), because they are ruling on strict and unambiguous matters of established law. So it actually isn’t the case that most liberals have a problem with how guys like Scalia or Roberts rule on most cases (or Ginsburg and Sotomayor for conservatives), because most cases are not controversial and there is broad agreement on the bench and there would be in the public at large if the cases were well known.
In this case, we have a situation where the law is also fairly unambiguous but it touches on a political issues. Scalia said it best, and his position is nigh-unassaible by logic:
When it comes to the contentious political cases that come before a court, often times the justices are going to behave according to their political interests. We’re all in grade school if we do not believe that happens. But despite how often he is vilified, Scalia is an example of a justice who has a legal view that tends towards extreme conservatism but it’s a true legal view–which means when the rules of that view conflict with Republican political positions Scalia rules according to his legal view. Because of how conservative that legal view is, and how conservative Scalia’s political view is, he will never get anything but the deepest ire from liberals. But he’s arguably the one person on the court who has most frequently gone against his known political positions.
Kennedy of course is a moderate (or a moderate today, he was a mainstream conservative back when he was appointed but the conservative sphere is far more conservative now than then), so harder to predict politically, Roberts, Alito, and Breyer are all pretty obviously the type to go with their political preferences. But Roberts can surprise you sometimes, in this case Breyer has surprised us. If I had to guess between Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer which might buck their politics over a reasoned legal argument, it would have been Breyer. Sotomayor and Ginsburg while smart, accomplished women, are the political ideologues who will never rule in line with their legal principles when it conflicts with their ideology (they are essentially the liberal version of what liberals claim Scalia is–in truth there are other conservative justices who deserve the heat and not Scalia.)
Breyer’s argument is also very strong in this case, he simply notes that there’s no real argument that Affirmative Action is definitely allowed, but that doesn’t mean it is required. His point is correct–while yes, allowing the referendum result to be overturned would not “require” affirmative action, but leave it up to the public schools to decide on themselves, that is a distinction without a difference. If you say that it is unconstitutional to ban Affirmative Action you are saying the government “must suffer it” and that’s close enough that I think Breyer’s point that it isn’t constitutionally “required” is also quite on point and valid.
I guess I don’t need to post this since Martin Hyde has already said it doesn’t exist, but I guess what the hell. And in response to his typically measured and bloodless commentary, I’d ask Martin what Scalia’s “unassailable” logic says the result in this case should have been given that the political process cases weren’t overturned. If you’re going to prop up Scalia’s rhetoric as the word of our fucking lord, you might as well read it while you’re at it.
The Equal Protection Clause.
There are Supreme Court cases from not that long ago, and which have not been overturned, that held that it is unconstitutional to enact laws that will subtly distort governmental processes in such a way as to place special burdens on the ability of minority groups to achieve beneficial legislation. A statewide ballot initiative that prevented a school district from carrying out its own voluntary desegregation busing program was struck down under this rule.
The argument here (and the holding of the lower court) was that the same rule applied to this referendum. It was a deviation from the normal political processes that determined how university policies were enacted, and it had the effect of burdening any minority group from receiving beneficial policy treatment – if they want affirmative action they need the legislature or the electorate to pass it, not just the university.
Again, there is no argument. You’re trying to improperly extend the scope of Washington v. Seattle School District which was a case with materially different issues at play and thus inapplicable to this one. You’re either legally deficient in your understanding of the issue, or like Sotomayor you are trying to misrepresent the constitutional situation due to your politics.
FWIW the controlling opinion in this case was extremely critical of Seattle, which itself is a nonsense ruling based on politics, no better than Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson. But that being said, the key point of Seattle which doesn’t apply here is a case of specific injury, and thus Seattle never properly had anything to do with this case at all.
In Kennedy’s summation of this case, he notes that in the Seattle and previous cases very similar to it, States had passed new laws that were specifically injurious to minorities to attempt to take away decision making powers on minority issues from the appropriate decision making body. In this case, instead the electorate was simply coming to a new decision about those laws. Unlike the laws in the previous cases which were specifically targeted, this referendum simply ended a previous practice through the political process which is how the practice began in the first place, and further, unlike in previous cases where the State was passing a referendum in response to a local school board decision, in this case the State level is always the level at which colleges have been regulated and overseen in Michigan by both the legislative and executive branches of government.
You didn’t answer my question. Me (as imagined by you, since all I was doing was answering John’s question) and Scalia must have the same politics, then, right?