That’s a justification for socio-economic based affirmative action, not race-based affirmative action.
I’m a bit confused…isn’t the title of my OP that “SCOTUS should preserve race-based AA because we are not created equal” clear enough?
I have never held any position other than that AA for a race-alone criterion should be our public policy.
I think you you have been so indoctrinated that “racism” is an actual argument for anything that you can’t see past your own construct of it. You make a rapid and default assumption that if someone holds a position that SIRE groups are unequal for various potential outcomes, that person must be some sort of racist supremacist.
This is unfortunate, in my view, although it’s fairly typical for egalitarians to jump to this conclusion.
And yet when we look at our other social policies, we don’t label so aggressively. We don’t label those who want to make a space for the physically challenged “lamists.” We don’t label those who want to make a space for the mentally handicapped “retardists.” We accept those group differences, accept that accommodation should be made, accept that it makes a better world, and move on.
Yet when it comes to SIRE groups, all of a sudden we drop that paradigm and rush to defend an egalitarian ideal despite the fact that there is not a shred of practical evidence supporting that ideal.
In any case, w/ respect to AA, whether or not SIRE groups have different potential based on genes or nurture is not the point. The point is that, since no nurturing influence of any kind has ever normalized outcomes, we must accept those differences and make race-based AA social policy, sanctioned by SCOTUS.
When the egalitarians find their secret hidden nurturing influence and manage to correct it, then I’ll revisit my opinion. But in the meantime I want a society where every SIRE group has a seat at the table, even if they need a helping hand to get there. Right now, because we pretend that fixing opportunity will fix inequality, Universities and employers are crippled in competing for the best candidates. They aren’t (technically) allowed to take someone who has had great opportunity but still has marginal scores simply because he is black, even if he is the best available black candidate. It is bad policy to have shady backdoor vague work-arounds to end-run this situation.
Agreed.
While this thread is about AA, part of your premise is that, on average, black people are inherently less intelligent (and more violent) than white people. That’s the “scientific racism” part.
I completely agree that by the standards on this board, I’m a racist.
It is correct that I believe that SIRE groups vary in inherent average maximum potential for various outcomes, including certain physical and intellectual performance outcomes.
It is correct that the reason I believe this is an analysis of the available data.
It is also correct that I find any counter arguments based simply on an ad hominem attack that I am a “racist” unpersuasive to the point of whether or not my position has merit.
But my point in the above post is that I thought I made it clear from the OP that I support race-based AA. I support it for precisely the reason that, since SIRE group differences cannot be overcome by equalizing nurture/opportunity, the only way to get to a proportionately represented society is to arbitrarily mandate representation by SIRE group.
When we pretend we’re not looking at just SIRE diversity, and so therefore we can’t recognize race alone as a “proficiency,” then we make it much more difficult for Universities to compete for the best black candidates.
If I’m on an admission committee and I’m looking at a black kid who is the best black candidate I have, but whose parents are high-income professionals, I want to be able to take that kid, even if he’s been outscored substantially in his socioeconomic peer group by other SIRE groups. I want a student body that is SIRE-diverse, and I want it to contain the very best candidates within each group. I do not want to have to take some other black kid with crappy scores.
No need for modesty. There’s a whole world beyond this board who would feel the same way about you.
And a whole world beyond the board who would consider the discussion settled as soon as they heard “racist,” any uncomfortable actual facts unsupportive of egalitarianism to the contrary… 
But this is the “straight” dope, and not the “politically correct” dope (or at least it was back in the day when Cecil and the Reader had it), so I’ll just putter along waiting for facts instead of labels for any counter positions.
And while I’m at it, I’ll continue to support race-based AA, and support the Universities who want and need it if they want their student bodies to proportionately reflect the SIRE groups in our population while still maintaining as high an academic standard as possible.
I go to a very diverse school, and I appreciate the diversity. I have friends both inside and outside my SIRE group. I’m not sure if I can exactly express what I like about the diversity … well … I guess the mixed girls are attractive, and that sometimes homogeneity is boring. Also, at my school, what’s interesting is that the people from the SIRE that perform the lowest on average are at the highest levels of academic achievement at my school. Obviously, the sample size is small, so I cannot generalize and I’m not trying to disprove any massive study here.
I like the second view as well.
The OP is ignoring the fact that, even with wealth/education being normalized, the experience of being black in America is fundamentally different than being white in America, and that difference of experience is not wiped away just because one’s parents are well off or well educated.
I’m not saying you’re a racist. I’m saying you’re wrong. There is data that shows the existence of an achievement gap- whether in education, test scores, economics, or crime statistics. You (and others) make a hypothesis that the explanation for that achievement gap is different genetic tendencies among the races. That’s as far as you’ve gotten- more data about the existence of the achievement gap (which is apparent to all) says nothing about why the gap exists.
Your hypothesis is testable. Find the genes/alleles for intelligence and criminality, and find the average prevalence of these genes/alleles in different races and ethnic groups, and show its predictive power by demonstrating that criminals and low-testing individuals have (or lack) these genes in a greater or lesser degree than the general public.
Short of that, all you’re doing is saying again and again “the achievement gap exists”. Without genetic evidence, you’re just making a hypothesis- and that’s it.
Let’s just dust this old thing off, shall we?
The early 20th Century called, they want their racist, pseudo-scientific claptrap back.
Indeed, you are, but what makes you different (presumably) is that you’re offering a substantive solution without the self-masturbation of “BLK PPL R DUM!!11oneone”. For what it’s worth, thanks for making our monthly hate-on-the-blacks thread a more intelligent and less ominous than usual. No, seriously. Thanks. Now I find myself agreeing your conclusion but the route you get there is too tortured for me to get on board.
The issue for me is local, state, and federal government’s insistence pestering me about my race on every damned document there is. No matter if it’s filling out a census form, standardized tests (how’s that for stereotype threat?), university admissions, and even State IDs. It would be great if the U.S government as well as private industry would stop badgering and begging black people to identify themselves at every roadbend. As for Affirmative Action, it’s just another promise of the Civil Rights movement that white people could not keep; I think Napoleon said it best “Promise everything and deliver nothing” - that adage ought to be emblazoned in subscript on the American flag. It’s clear that support for it is dying nationwide - let affirmative action die and let history judge the majority accordingly.
- Honesty
ENOUGH!
EVERYONE will stop the “racism” hijack.
We’ve been over all that stuff before. This thread had a particular thesis that is either supported by evidence or is not supported by evidence. Stick to arguing the data and stop trying to derail the thread.
The following comments are particularly out of line, amounting to nothing more than threadshitting, (although they are not the only comments that are out of line):
Anyone, (not just Ibn Warraq), who feels the need to continue the hijack or feels that they need to get in a couple more snide remarks may take them to the Pit thread already linked.
[ /Moderating ]
I may be incorrect, but think the motivation behind the capture of SIRE groups is that we can’t fix what we cannot measure. So if we want to find out if any given SIRE group is underrepresented, we have to capture that data element.
Certainly one approach would be to stop capturing it, but then wouldn’t any employer who dislikes a given group have no incentive whatsoever to hire them? I have always assumed the capture of SIRE category is driven by champions of the under-represented. I certainly don’t think it’s an effort to intimidate…
I get it, by the way, that any of us who think that populations do have inherently different gene pools and therefore different average outcomes are seen as hate groups. I’m saddened by that. Aside from the stupidity of assigning “hate” as a automatic label, it strikes me that our society seems to value athletic achievement over intellectual ones. I see more of the population obsessing over “them Bulldogs” than I do obsessing over the Nobel laureates for science. So it’s not clear to me why I get castigated more for assigning high performance for asians in STEM fields than I do assigning high performance for blacks in many athletic endeavors. I’d say the average joe I meet would rather get an autograph from Michael Jordan than Michio Kaku.
Honesty,
Thinking about your comment about recording SIRE group all the time reminded me of some work I’m doing with a teacher in Virginia, who is complaining about their waiver to the No Child Left Behind act.
This link will get you the numbers, but basically current proficiency rates for the Annual Measurable Objectives on the mathematics exam are listed (they are 45 for blacks and 82 for asians, with other groups falling in between).
If no SIRE groups were collected, Virginia wouldn’t be able to identify where to spend its efforts. So would that not be a net negative, despite the discomfort the data presents?
True, just as scientific evidence proves white men have exceptionally tiny penises.
As one well-known white woman once said “choosing to fuck a white guy when you know over a black man is like choosing to drive a model-T after your dad offered to buy you a Ferrari”.
I’m certainly glad that my mom avoided anatomically inferior white men and my life would be worse if she didn’t.
I would bet that wealthy well-educated blacks are much more likely than wealthy well-educated whites to have parents who come from a socioeconomically troubled background–and present wealth and education aside, the psychological effects of that background are sure to affect the children.
There are also cultural issues at play here, most notably studied in John Ogbu’s book about affluent white and black families in the same private school.