With so many progressives around, one would think you and DA wouldn’t so consistently mischaracterize and misunderstand progressive arguments and motivations. But slandering progressive motives appears more important to y’all than actually understanding what we’re arguing for, and why.
I’ve certainly tried - with DA I’ve been trying for years. If I weren’t the patient type I might find it irritating rather than amusing. So carry on huddling in the corner with the other progressive haters, whispering about how stupid and evil we are, if that’s your wont! I’m sure it’s easier than actually engaging with our arguments.
That being the case, we shouldn’t assume every difference in outcome is a problem needing to be fixed, right? Because we might actually be making things more unfair than they were before.
Instead we should investigate to see if there is bias or unfairness and fix that if and when we find it. For example, if schools with lots of minorities are underfunded then we should fix that. But we shouldn’t try to rig the results without knowing the cause.
We should look at the broader context and history. Here in America, and particularly here in Virginia, black people (and particularly black students) consistently have less access and less opportunity, and are consistently treated as inferior by institutions. It’s not a coincidence. Things aren’t okay. We shouldn’t pretend that disparities that are so often the same as they were 20 and 50 and 100 years ago are somehow attributable to random chance, or “culture”, or whatever, when the cause has been clear for years and years.
Why would anyone on Earth with half a brain trust that a system that’s gotten things wrong so consistently, just so happens to be getting it right now when black people (and some other groups) get a shit sandwich? If someone goes to the hospital right now with a cough, general fatigue, etc., then it’s pretty reasonable to strongly consider that it’s COVID and act accordingly. That’s where we should be at when we see these same disparities that we’ve seen for decades. Black people aren’t inferior. Black culture isn’t inferior. This isn’t about black people not being good enough, and it never has. Now isn’t special. This is just another time in America, pretty similar to most of the other times, when black people aren’t given a fair and equal opportunity to succeed.
If now is just like other times, what have you all been doing for the last 60 years? That’s some failure.
But as for trusting ‘the system’, how do you explain that white kids are also underrepresented at the school? Do they also have less access and opportunity? Is that a coincidence? The fact is, the disparities are not the same as they were 20 and 50 and 100 years ago when the top schools and universities were not filled with high performing Asian students. So why on earth attribute them to the same cause?
If the results we are seeing don’t match what your theory predicts, doesn’t that mean we need to take a closer look rather than blunder in blindly? It’s like trying to cure a stomachache by rubbing someone’s feet.
Indeed! Some progress has been made, but not nearly enough.
I’m fine with taking a closer look. In the meantime, let’s try and correct the most obvious and clear problem – almost no black and Hispanic students in this great school. That doesn’t stop us from trying to figure out what else is going on (besides the obvious bias against black and Hispanic students that’s been ongoing in the state since its formation).
I don’t have much of a problem if you have a selection range and from that range, you lottery the kids or use whatever metric (the school decides) to determine who gets in (unless it tends to be racist)
What I have objected to all along is that the school in question was going to have to LOWER it’s current standard to allow a different group of minorities the ability to qualify.
This is exactly the type of dumbing down I was referring to.
I’d say a lot of progress has been made. But if you don’t think it’s working, I don’t know why you’re so keen to do more of the same.
No, because your solution is bad in itself. We should only do something if the benefits outweigh the costs. In this case we know there are costs, and you have failed to establish there is even a problem that needs solving. Maybe black and hispanic students are underrepresented for the same reason as white students - in which case you are being racist by unfairly taking opportunities away from the Asian students.
You completely ignore costs and say we should turn the world upside down for any theorised benefit. That’s nuts.
We don’t need to go on and on about this. Some people are okay, in society and state with massive historical bias and bigotry, with black students continuing to be virtually unrepresented in a top school. I’m not. You’re not going to convince that this is okay.
You don’t fight racism with more racism. The only way to get equality of outcome is to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator, and that benefits nobody.
I’m gonna keep judging people by the policies they support and not what they say about their motivations or what slogans they put on their hats.
CRT is ends focused. It creates narratives and finds anecdotes that will justify and rationalize getting there by whatever means. This is a very flexible form of argument. Like religious faith, it can explain pretty much everything if you try hard enough.
In the end is does change things just like religion can change things. Some of it for the better, some of it for the worse but always at a cost that may or may not be worth it.
Right now part of the narrative is that it is not enough to have affirmative action in college admissions. You have to have preferential admissions to the most selective high schools as well (which makes them no longer selective) and like affirmative action this preference must not only be extended to the descendants of slaves and native americans but also black immigrants and hispanics. It is unfortunate that the burden must fall primarily on asians but it’s a price white progressives are willing to pay for the greater good they imagine will result.
I shared a cite earlier that shows that the majority of blacks accepted to harvard were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Noone has been able to explain why hispanics should have a preference over asians except to point at disparities in admissions as proof that racism is oppressing hispanics in ways it is not oppressing asians. For some people 2+2= racism.
It’s pretty clear what your motivations are. It’s racial balancing. No matter the cost to others because you just know with religious certainty that you are right. The pro-lifers picketing outside of abortion clinics think they are doing god’s work too. You cannot imagine a world where there can be such disparate results along racial lines, where the disparity is not caused by racism.
I think I respond to most of your posts but if you feel like i have been ignoring some argument you made, can you please repeat them?
AFAICT, you don’t actually ever present any arguments. You simply state that a policy that results in more blacks and hispanics is good, almost regardless the price to others. I don’t know that I’ve actually heard to state and defend an argument, just state opinions and proclamations.
I think admission via a lottery system of students within a certain criteria (ex. all with GPA over 3.5) is a good way to do it. Hopefully the size of the program can be increased over time if there is a higher demand so more kids can be admitted.
Sure I can. But in present day Virginia, I find it highly unlikely, and I find the burden of proof to be on those who insist that the disparity is “fair”. Nothing close to such proof has been offered. Just the same pablum that assumes everything is just fine. It’s never been just fine, not in Virginia. It’s not going to fix itself on its own, and we shouldn’t pretend that we can go on as if everything is okay.
Then how is it that the black population at tjhsst isb higher than the black population at stuyvesant in nyc? And tell me how you use these facts to justify your preference for hispanics?
We never enslaved hispanics, hispanics were not subject to the jim crow laws any more than asians.
You seem to be invoking occam’s razor and you’re not applying it correctly. The way I learned it was “if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras”
Your position seems to be that the under-performance of hispanics on academic achievement metrics is the result of slavery and segregation. You engage in very complex almost conspiratorial theories to arrive at the conclusion that hispanics academic underachievement should be attributed to racism and corrected for. It’s silly.
Who has ever said black people are inferior?
I thought we had an entire subthread about black immigrants, particularly nigerians.
This is simply another attempt by progressives like you to paint any dissent as racism.
You should stop that it undermines our ability to have a discussion.
There are good and bad elements of all cultures. I have spent more than a little buit of time trying to reject the bad elements of my culture while retaining the good parts. Sometimes it is hard to separate the two. Black culture focuses on different things than asian culture. that doesn’t make one culture better than the other. A minivan isn’t better than a mustang, they focus on different things. There is a lot of inertia and you may be emotionally attached to that mustang but you can trade in that mustang for a minivan.
Who ever said it was. Asians aren’t just outperforming blacks, asians are outperforming everyone.
Crt actually does a reasonable job of exaplaining much of the black/white disparity.
Culture explains the asian/everyone else disparity. The culture doesn’t confer magical powers, it comes at the cost of great effort and sacrifice. The vast majority of asian kids aren’t going to achieve the levels of academic success that we are all talking about but when the culture focuses on academics like this, almost every kids that has the potential will have that potential realized to some degree. Very little ends up on the threshing room floor.
For example, the ratio of white kids to black/hispanic kids at stuyvesant over time has not really changed, if anything the ratio of blacks/hispanics to whites has increased. What has changed is that that the asian kids have been crowding everyone out. There are simply fewer seats being shared (at the same relative proportions) by black/hispanic/white kids.
This disparity at tjhsst isn’t the result of black insufficiency as you keep implying, it is the result of asian success.
So you think there hasn’t been significant improvement since the 1960s?
We are pretty much in the same place we were 60 years ago?
And why are hispanics given preference over asians?
Lets just assume everything you say about the oppression of blacks in america is true. What is the rationale behind giving similar preferences to hispanics? Have they suffered in similar fashion?
Many religions have a god and a devil. The devil in this case is a omnipresent almost sentient societal racism. The devil explains why things are not going according to god’s will. You can exorcise the devil in your stomach by rubbing the feet.
What obvious bias against hispanics has been going on since the formation of the state?
If they want to provide more opportunity, they can provide more opportunity, they can offer those classes outside of tjhsst. They want to appropriate the reputation that years of academic selectivity has created. They want to pretend that these kids are just as good as the kids that came before them because they went to the same school even if it was using different criteria. And in the process, they are destroying the very reputation they seek to appropriate.
The exact same scenario is playing out in the secondary school system in New York, and in the court cases about the Asian quotas at Ivy League universities. I know that as a progressive devotee of critical race theory, you believe that white scheming against blacks is the essential motivation for every decision in all of America, so that won’t change your prescription for quotamongering and the destruction of merit regardless of geography. It does raise the question of what makes “present day Virginia” worth bringing up, exactly.
These are ambiguous statements in the context of the discussion.
Agreed, if what is meant is: There is nothing inherently or genetically or unchangeably better or worse about any racial grouping, nor can racial groupings be reliably defined by reference to biology alone without social context. This is a premise that must be accepted if one is to have a reasonable claim on
being non-racist.
In the context of encouraging and facilitating educational achievement, you are facing an enormous uphill battle to maintain this claim.
It is. Those people who are not capable of passing the admissions test are not good enough to pass the admissions test. Many of those people are black, though a much larger number (of those who currently fail the test, and those who will be given the new quota spots under the anti-Asian plan) are white. The real question should be finding where the system went wrong - which will include, but not be limited to, asking what the difference in household culture is between Asian immigrants and native-born black families of equal economic standing - to produce these disparate abilities and correcting those factors. Your solution is to create a quota in the country’s most rigorous high school for people who have proven that they are, in fact, not good enough to keep up with that school’s curriculum, punishing both the people who actually are qualified for those spots and the students who will waste time flunking out of an academic program that they aren’t able to keep up with (in theory, of course what will really happen is the standards will be diluted because flunking the new, unqualified black and white students will not be politically viable, and the school’s value will be destroyed for everyone).