The Supremes are sending people to AA now? I thought that was just something that local judges did to keep the jails from overflowing.
“Could you sign this so I can show Justice Breyer that I was at this meeting? He’s a real stickler and I need to get my driver’s licence back.”
I’d like to track the discussion back to the problem that Universities have: They need to be able to use SIRE group alone (“race”) as a criterion for selecting a student if they want to protect their ability to get the best black students.
It’s true that cultural issues potentially at play are sometimes advanced as the reason that blacks with the same (superficial) opportunity still underperform other SIRE groups academically (although these cultural barriers apparently do not affect their ability to perform athletically).
But these are impossible to measure once you get past the traditionally-advanced inequalities: money and access.
A University needs to be able to take a black kid whose parents are physicians and admit him because he is the best black candidate they have, instead of having to reach down to lower tier black students who have had much less opportunity. They need to be able to use race alone as the criterion for taking that student. If they can’t use race alone, the kid will lose out to either other black kids with crappier scores but vastly crappier opportunity, or else lose out to a non-black kid with better scores and crappier opportunity.
Many of the top tier black candidates do not come from relatively crappy opportunity. All SIRE group performances on any quantifiable measures roughly correlate with socio-economic class and parental educational levels. Therefore, to compete for the best black students, Universities need to be able to ignore opportunity and use race alone when they are competing for the best students.
If SCOTUS simply says, “Hey; to make this an equal society, we are going to permit a policy of proportional representation by SIRE group quotas,” all this argument about why there is underperformance goes away.
It’s just like saying, “Hey; we want women accommodated wherever possible.” Once you say that, an argument about why women might be underperforming becomes much less relevant.
It’s true I think egalitarians are biting themselves in the ass by insisting we all have access to the same genetic potential and that only opportunity differences explain our outcome differences. Once you accept that as a given, you get in hot water when opportunity is normalized but outcomes remain disparate. But both egalitarians and non-egalitarians could take their arguments to the sidelines if we simply had race-based AA quotas.
You will find support for this position here.
But actually measuring it is difficult, and there are other viewpoints that are skeptical of Ogbu, Steele and others…especially the idea that you have to get to the grandparents and cousins to get your cultural excuses. Did the successful black parents somehow not figure out what not to do? What about non-black SIRE group parents who were the first to succeed? How come their children do well?
Why the hell should a black kid get preferential treatment despite both being a worse student and coming from a better background?
This is a Warning for deliberately ignoring Moderator instructions to stop the hijack and the snide remarks.
[ /Moderating ]
Respectfully, I was not continuing the hijack, but merely ridiculing his claims to have scientific proof for claims, which by his own admission, are racist. I’d have similarly ridiculed people who made claims about the Jews controlling Hollywood.
If people are allowed to make racist comments and continue to make them, then why can’t we ridicule such statements as is the board custom.
Missed the edit window.
Also, Tom, I do genuinely respect your perspective, but if you’re going to forbid us from ridiculing his highly ridiculable views and call racist views “racist” than please ask him to defend AA without using it as a cover to expound on the supposed mental inferiority of “blacks”(whoever they are).
Ibn Warraq, stop digging your hole deeper.
If you want to challenge his actual assertions, then do it with facts. Chief Pedant has not made any references to Rushton, and your comments about your mother picking the correct mate are irrelevant to the topic and are not in line with his actual assertions.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
Someone mention Rushton?
I mentioned him only because Ibn Warraq mentioned a theory of his (without naming him). Any further comments along the line of this hijack should be taken up in a new thread.
[ /Moderating ]
This is pretty interesting, actually.
Why does a university have to consider race in order to get the most qualified black candidates? Presumably, the most qualified black candidates are the ones who don’t need affirmative action.
The OP posits that very few black candidates can meet the qualifications due to genetic differences in intelligences between the races. AA is need to allow the one who don’t meet the qualifications to be able to gain admittance.
You responded with your remark in response to a post I made which contained nothing more than the Virginia NCLB waiver scores.
Exactly what sort of “scientific proof” do you want other than the link to the original document, which was contained within the post?
The most qualified black candidates need AA the most, because in the first place their absolute scores still tend to be lower than all applicants, and in the second place they tend to come from more opportunity. All SIRE groups have higher scores as factors such as income level and parental education rises, and blacks are no exception. So the black kid with very high scores is more likely to come from a background of relatively high income and/or professional parents with high educational achievement. If you can’t use race, and you have to use opportunity measures, that kid gets put in a group that has high income and/or highly educated parents, and that kid’s scored–on average–are going to be substantially below his opportunity peer group. So what an admissions committee needs to do is assign a value simply to race, and let the kid in because he’s black–not because he is qualified based on scores for his opportunity group.
I’ve tried to say this before, but perhaps I’m not making the problem clear.
Right now, because SIRE group cannot be used as a stand-alone criterion for admission, work-arounds are needed in order to get good black candidates into a school.
If you only use non-SIRE based “opportunity” criteria such as income or parental education or some other factor, there are many more non-black candidates who have lower opportunity levels than black candidates with similar qualifications. For example, if you said, “Well, we’ll use low-income families as a criterion,” the problem is that there are many more low-income non-blacks with superior scores than similarly low-income blacks.
At every level of “opportunity,” blacks significantly underscore other groups who have the same level of opportunity. (Open the link in the OP to see an example with SAT scores and income/parental education.)
Simply put, the best black candidates come from privileged backgrounds but still have scores substantially below non-black candidates from underprivileged backgrounds. Therefore the only way to get these candidates accepted is to ignore opportunity and admit them because they are the best black candidates.
What Texas did in the case at hand is get around the whole issue by admitting X percent from all schools. Schools are the proxy for opportunity, so if you go to a crappy school in a crappy neighborhood, but you are in the top 8% (I think that’s the number), you are assured of admission. This system rounds out most of the entering class.
Then UT Austin wanted to use race alone as one of the criteria for admitting additional students. Specifically, they consider race, all by itself, as a “proficiency.” That way you can help a student get in based on his SIRE group alone.
But in the general system across the whole country, the same principle applies, in spades at institutions that don’t have the Texas X% of top schools system. So every University has a stake here, to preserve a system that lets us round out proportional representation and ignore any quantifiable measure of opportunity. Basically, Universities don’t want the government looking over their shoulder as they decide who should go there.
Contrary to the charges made above, I support this system, and as a past admission committee member for medical school, I understand how the system needs to work. I understand how important it is to be able to compete for the best students, and I understand how important things like graduation rates and alumni success are to a school. I also feel deeply that, despite the fact that average performance outcomes vary by SIRE groups, we need to have reasonably proportionate SIRE group representation at all levels possible.
Because equalizing opportunity does not normalize those outcomes, I support race based AA, with quotas.
Because if we don’t do this, we will lose the best black candidates. Suppose you are Harvard. You want your share of black candidates, and the best ones come from backgrounds that are more privileged (this is true as an average fact for all SIRE groups). If you have to take better non-black students because they come from underprivileged backgrounds over black students from privileged backgrounds, you lose your SIRE diversity. If you have to take underprivileged black students because you can’t consider race alone for the privileged black student, you lose your best black candidates.
Tom has already asked us not to continue this discussion.
It’s extremely bad form to try and continue to bait me and others you view as racially “inferior”.
How is it better to discriminate against a white or asian student who got better scores than it is to discriminate against a black or hispanic student because he didn’t get better scores?
One thing your graphs lack, and which is leading you to this erroneous conclusion, is error bars.
What’s your explanation for the correlation between African Ancestry and SES in the AA population? (Table S2 here.) I used to think that “colorism” was a possibility, but recent research still in draft has undermined that possibility.
What error bars would you propose?
These are simply average scores, calculated off all the SAT scores for that year, based on self-reported categories…
Is it the case you think there’s some kind of error that might have been introduced? Maybe white kids under-reported their family income but black kids overstated it or something?
Seems like a stretch…but OK. I haven’t seen the data itself actually questioned before, and pretty much 100% of similar sorts of studies (not to mention anecdotal experience) come up with the same patterns.
Have you been able to find studies to the contrary? I notice a lot of what I post is questioned in some way, but surely an easier approach would be to find contrary data. Similarly, if equalizing opportunity equalized outcomes, I think we would have seen many studies triumphantly announcing this.
The silence is deafening, and the dilemma for Universities continues.