The problem there is that you remove the motivation for K-12 students to excel. If you know that all you need to get into college is a B average and some luck, why both taking AP classes and getting an A+ in each of them?
The problem with ‘good enough’, cliche as it may sound, is that good enough never is.
Her name was Abigail Fisher, and the Supremes declined to hear the case
Affirmative Action has failed over time as a general priniciple. There are plenty of times where it has leveled the playing field for individuals, but in most cases it’s a band-aid applied to people who are suffering severe blood loss from chronic social issues that haven’t been resolved. A few extra points applied to people who have had substandard education prior to college isn’t going to produce an enduring societal change. Affirmative Action hasn’t redressed past discrimination and barely redresses current discrimination.
Broadening the scope of Affirmative Action in a way that doesn’t use ‘race’ as a means of discrimination as **John Mace **suggests would be a positive step, but still inconsequential in the end unless the general issues that isolate the poor and dispossessed from the mainstream of opportunities are somehow addressed.
The case John Mace was quoting from was one in which the Supreme Court struck down individual school districts’ efforts to voluntarily enact desegregation measures. I don’t think there was any question of the federal government stepping in to specially favor anyone.
The University of Michigan, which is not the federal government, presumably also wants to voluntarily enact affirmative action policies. More broadly, it’s really a semantic debate over “favoritism” vs. enforcing equality, and - what I think is the interesting point - it’s one that has been going on since a time when (hopefully) everyone agrees it wasn’t special favoritism to try to protect civil rights, but an attempt to end brutal disfavoritism. It’s always made me leery to think that almost the exact same argument that was used to defeat the original civil rights legislation and to support Jim Crow is still used (increasingly successfully) to defeat voluntary affirmative action.
That is pretty much the whole point of Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation, BTW.
It hurts black people but it makes liberals feel better about themselves which is the actual goal.
The mismatch effect hurts minorities who supposedly benefitted by affirmative action, but affirmative action also hurts minorities who did not need it. College benefits its graduates by signalling to employers that the graduate was smart enough to get in to college and teachable enough to pass the classes. When you meet someone who graduated from Stanford it tells you that the person was smart enough to meet Stanford’s high criteria for admission. However when you meet a minority who graduated from Stanford we all know that the criteria for admission they had was much lower. Thus the signal of having graduated from Stanford is worth less for minorities. Since there is no way to tell if the individual benefitted from affirmative action even minorities who would have been accepted without affirmative action have their degrees diminished.
If the Supreme Court had ruled that the people of Michigan can’t eliminate affirmative action from their state government, that would seem to be the same thing as saying that they are required to have affirmative action.
Am I the only one here who wondered why there would even be a race-based Alcoholics Anonymous?
I am? Oh. Sorry.
College enrollment is currently 57% female, I don’t see the extra 3% making a huge difference.
Can you quote the part of the decision that would require states to adopt race-based AA?
He means the white people of Michigan would be required to have it in their state because they couldn’t get rid of it. The intervening step – that the university could choose to implement it or not – doesn’t matter to his analysis because he can safely assume that it would do so.
But that is the whole point. Excelling at K12 is not correlated with excelling at college. If someone really wants to learn, they will learn without the carrot of beating their fellow students.
I see, but you’re surely aware that during Reconstruction the Federal Government absolutely did, as a matter of policy, do its best to “raise up” Freedmen which specifically meant treating them preferentially. This was in a very just scenario too, as they were literally people who had been enslaved just a few years prior and were in good need of special treatment–which I’ve reiterated as a valid policy decision.
Alright, I understand that, but what I’ve said is that when there is a policy of granting favoritism to a specific race it’s something that is a valid realm of public policy. This means that it is something for the legislature to decide on one way or the other. The University of Michigan is not a private organization, it’s part of the State, like most public schools of higher ed it has operational independence in that it is overseen by a somewhat autonomous board who appoints its President. But I think it’s entirely valid policy for the State of Michigan to say, “we don’t want our public schools doing this, so we’re going to specifically require they not do this.” I don’t see a compelling argument for the Federal government to say otherwise, and the Sixth Circuit’s opinion that prohibiting affirmative action violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is/was a worrying piece of jurisprudence as it is literally saying a law that does what the 14th explicitly requires actually violates the 14th.
As for your argument about Civil Rights, you’re confusing Civil Rights and affirmative action. The arguments against Civil Rights were completely invalid, because they were arguments being made to support laws that specifically harmed given minorities in the form of poll taxes or tests, segregation laws, miscegenation laws or etc.
I actually don’t even see where the same arguments are being made, racists used to argue that you could have “separate but equal”, John Roberts and others who have argued against Affirmative Action are instead arguing that there should only be equality before the law, even when that means not treating minorities preferentially.
Public universities are part of State government, would you propose State government should be allowed to execute oversight over schools it has chartered and established? Especially in the area of admissions.
Anyway the tldr is, “States should be able to preferentially treat disadvantage minorities, situationally, based on public policy concerns. But those policy concerns should be governed by the State government, so if the State government decides to stop doing this that should be their right.”
I guess for one I need to research the law to find out if it covers private schools (which if it does, I disagree with.) But broadly, would you two concede that if there was no law prohibiting say, segregated schools but the State Schools Commissioner could choose to segregate schools at his leisure then in fact the State of Michigan would be allowing segregated schools because it had no law prohibiting them, but instead left it to the discretion of a State Schools Commissioner (who might be a racist or not, depending on the individual.)?
Public schools may be independently governed and even largely independently financed, but they are not separate from the State of Michigan. For that reason the State of Michigan has a vested interest in requiring those schools to adhere to its public policies. Again, imagine a scenario in which there was no law prohibiting segregation (basically a world where Brown v. Board had never happened), wouldn’t it make sense for Michigan to be allowed to pass a law explicitly prohibiting its public schools from segregating as a matter of public policy?
I would think so. With Affirmative Action there is no constitutional bar to the practice like there is with school segregation, so to me it then becomes a matter of policy. We can either have our schools practice it or not, but it’s valid for the State to get to impose restrictions on its schools. Since States only exercise indirect control over most public universities (typically the Governor of the State appoints the Board of Trustees/Regents/etc and the State controls a small portion of the budget), it can in fact make sense for legislation to be required to restrain the actions of the schools to comply with public policy.
That’s exactly the kind of public policy that Texas adopted with a piece of legislation mandating the public colleges in Texas give open-admissions to top-10%ers from Texas High Schools.
My question to John Mace wasn’t a challenge to your opinion about public policy or about this case in particular. You’re entitled to it.
Well, not just the “white people”, but I thought he was saying other states would have to implement race based AA if they didn’t already have it, not just Michigan.
That isn’t the issue though. The issue is not whether the legislature can enact such decrees via the legislative process, but whether the public via referendum can prevent the government from using certain criteria as a means of decision making while allowing them to retain others, in addition to whether shifting a decision on a public policy issue from one level or branch of government is unconstitutional if it disadvantages minorities. It was mostly a referendum on the political process doctrine (dealt with in cases in 1969 and 1982) and partly on whether race matters.
First, we are not talking about Affirmative Action, but rather preferences given based on race, color, sex, or religion in admission to colleges, jobs, and other publicly funded institutions. Affirmative Action and racial preference are not the same thing.
And being Black doesn’t?
This is the majestic equality fallacy (“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread”). Treating everyone the same sounds good in theory, but quickly breaks down when context and desired outcomes are considered.
Her dissent at it’s core is basically a rebuke of the notion that such a ban doesn’t disadvantage minorities, and a caution that such referenda can be a backdoor means to subvert representative democracy by replacing it with direct democracy that is often subject to mob rule that shuts out minority opinion.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Well, not just the “white people”, but I thought he was saying other states would have to implement race based AA if they didn’t already have it, not just Michigan.
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It seems to be the case that he doesn’t think that’s what he’s suggesting. It’s bled over from the last couple of pages of the other affirmative action thread, where I asked adaher the same thing you asked ITR:
[QUOTE=adaher]
If Michigan can’t end affirmative action through the democratic process, then that means they have to have affirmative action.
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[QUOTE=ITR Champion]
I don’t understand your problem with the language. The people of Michigan voted, clearly, to end all government affirmative action in their state. Liberal groups sued, hoping that the courts would rule that the people could not be allowed to end affirmative action in Michigan. The state Supreme Court took that position, which would have meant that the state of Michigan must have affirmative action even after the voters chose to eliminate it.
Are you of the opinion that the Michigan government should be forced to have affirmative action even after the people vote to completely eliminate it?
[/QUOTE]
As far as whether or not he means white people, agree to disagree.
The issues are one and the same, States that have allowed for a referendum process have simply extended legislative power directly to the people. Anything it is constitutionally acceptable for the legislature to legislate on, it is constitutionally acceptable for the public to vote for via referendum. Although personally I think referendums should be abolished as a matter of State law as it leads to bad government.
They are the same in all ways that matter.
No, I do not think the color of ones skin affects their ability to take tests. I believe Chief Pedant who started the thread is an adherent to that school of thought. I do believe that in the United States, blacks as a group will perform much worse on tests but this is do to socioeconomic factors (disproportionate numbers of single-mother families, low income etc) and not the color of the skin of the test taker. Much of these socioeconomic factors are due to hundreds of years of discrimination, ghettoization and etc, which is why I think some degree of public policy rectification is acceptable.
You weren’t responding to me specifically here, but her dissent was actually a fit of poor jurisprudence and demonstrates Obama has put a race-obsessed person on the bench who sees fit to overturn referendum results not at all based on the constitution but based on her desire as to how the law should be, which is precisely what is not supposed to be the role of the judicial branch.
I don’t really care if my doctors, lawyers, engineers, or technocratic bureaucracy are representative of my community. I want them to be the best they can be, or at least that I can afford. If it turns out that Indians and East Asians take over everything, good for them. White people had a good run. I’ve already seen people argue white dudes need AA. It is to laugh.