And you know that guy is will probably be muttering for years about your failure to reward him. “I don’t get black people! I used to work with one and I talked to her about black people stuff all the time, and did she appreciate it? No.”
I don’t know anyone who cares about racial diversity for sprinting and the NBA. For one thing, so few jobs are available that it’s not an issue. For another, there is a general acceptance that the selection process is open to all, and any measures used are used reasonably race-blind. Therefore, although it’s a bit touchy as a public subject, the dominance of the NBA by black players who have replaced (going back far enough) the whites and “Hebrews” who preceded them is tacitly accepted as a straightforward superior ability based on an average difference in gene pools. Except for that one guy, asians can’t jump. If they aren’t tall, they ain’t gonna be in the NBA. Ditto for sprinting and ditto for most other sports except where obvious cultural/socioeconomic barries (I can think of hockey and golf, for example) so distort the starting pool ratios that it’s silly to pretend an average genetic superiority is at play. In the end, who gives a rat’s butt? We want to see a great basketball team, and if a given “race” has an average genetically-based advantage no one cares.
For the broad mix of society, though, we do care. We care about teachers and police and firefighters and accounts and lawyers and doctors and politicians. Without a reasonable racial diversity, we lose our perception of wholeness–and for a big part of the under-represented populations, a perception of fairness. The end result is balkanization in a land where the de facto motto is e pluribus unum.
Plus monstro has to put up with twits.
It’s probably more like, “Everyone says we need to have a dialogue about race. But I once tried to do that with a black coworker and she flipped out on me! Those people are WAY too sensitive!” He no doubt believes this, while conveniently forgetting the 99,999 times when I tolerated his other awkward attempts. But for some reason, being black means that I have to be some kind of racial psychotherapist–a fount of unconditional patience and understanding and acceptance. I’m just not that person.
I find this line of reasoning bizarre. No one cares about sprinting so its okay to use objective criteria there but in other areas we have to have diversity. The only time I think about sprinting is every four years at the Olympics. However, we count on police, firefighters, accountants, and doctors everyday.
If the US doesn’t have the best sprinters, who cares? let the Jamiacans win the gold medals. But when I call 911 I want them to send the best guy they have to fight the fire or catch the criminal. I don’t care what race he is. I don’t care the race of the person who teaches my child as long as they are good at what they do.
The way to fight balkinization is to treat everyone the same. No seperate standards for different races, no having people serve as their race’s representative on the team, whoever is the best wins. If that results in the NBA where 85% of the players are black, or like the NHL 94% white, then so be it.
A few years ago the FDNY was 90% white. Which of the following is more likely in your opinion: white people just make better firefighters, or other factors like racial biases were affecting membership in the fire department?
I also find these priorities to be more than slightly skewed.
In the NBA, we care nothing about racial diversity, and so performance is the sole criteria. But in fields where performance is much more important, like medicine or fire-fighting or engineering, performance is de-emphasized in favor of skin color, or gender, or whatever.
ISTM that it would make more sense to say ‘who cares about professional basketball, and therefore every team has to recruit X% of their players from whatever races or sexes or socio-economic classes are under-represented’, and ‘we want the best doctors we can get, so we are going to look at their scores and not try to gimmick the system because group X almost always flunks the MCAT’.
One of the early astronauts mentioned his feelings on one of the earliest test flights. He allegedly thought, just before take off, 'Every part of this rocket ship was made by the lowest bidder." :eek:
Almost equally terrifying would be the realization that you are flying in a craft from a company whose motto is “Diversity First, Everything Else Second!”
Regards,
Shodan
It has nothing to do with priorities.
There are no - or at least only insignificant - external forces acting to prevent a white player from making it to the NBA. There’s thus no problem to be solved; we haven’t erected any barriers to the NBA being a meritocracy.
This isn’t true when it comes to medicine. It’s also ludicrous to suggest that in “fields like” medicine, i.e. the actual workplace, performance isn’t important and diversity is really what it comes down to. Education and the field aren’t the same. I’m sure my law school had some affirmative action programs in place. Law firms are still stocked to the gills with people named M. Whitford Whiteford.
You are forgetting about two important factors, I think.
The first, obvious, one is that there are systematic historical reasons that explain at least some of the lack of diversity in professional fields. Regardless of your preferred methods, most people agree that it would be a good thing if the results of those past (and current) wrongs were not reflected in our current professional demographics.
Nobody cares about diversity in the NBA because there is no obvious connection with its current lack of diversity and historical discriminatory behavior. If MLB were overwhelmingly white as a direct result of decades of only allowing white ballplayers you would hear much more about it.
The second, less obvious, one is that by its very nature diversity can improve performance in all of the fields mentioned, even if the individual doctor or engineer scored slightly lower on standardized tests. Having a diverse group of viewpoints has been shown to improve the decision-making of the group as a whole. And that’s beyond the more tangible benefits of broader language skills, communication skills, and relevant life experiences.
To go back again to the NBA analogy, if there were any evidence that having a diverse team improved performance I guarantee every team would institute quotas.
There is no company that has this motto. They place diversity on a list of values along with the others, and attempt to balance them to get the most productive workforce they can.
I think it’s foolish to concede that the NBA isn’t diverse. And of course there used to be quotas: there were unofficial rules that teams would limit their numbers of black players and black starters. A couple of years ago the league was 78% black, 17% white, 4% Latino, and 1% Asian. The number of players from other countries has gradually increased over the years. Now can we stop with the NBA nonsense? It’s preposterous that every time we talk about diversity in American society at large, a couple of people say “but the NBA!” as if a group of a few hundred professional athletes had any kind of bearing on society at large or said anything about anyone’s view about diversity.
I’m sure it is a great comfort to someone who has lost a loved one to an incompetent doctor who got into med school to make up for what was done to his great-grandfather.
Exactly. No one plays in the NBA in order to redress the past, even though the NBA is a highly unimportant part of society. In areas like medicine which can be life or death, qualification goes to the back of the bus. 
Perhaps you can show via cite how doctors from diverse med schools consistently make better surgeons.
No doubt you’re right. But you just finished saying that having a diverse team would improve performance. Now you say that there is no evidence that it would. Which is it?
Regards,
Shodan
I’m sure they’d be better people and better surgeons. Not sure how you could study it though, as there are so many other variables.
I did not claim that they made individually better surgeons. In fact, I acknowledged that they may be inferior ones. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t make the overall business (and industry) better, either by reaching a new client group (minorities are far more likely to practice in minority communities) or by improving group decision making.
More anecdotal, from second-hand observation of the current medical industry, coming from a diverse background is extremely helpful in communication both with other physicians and with patients. So I wouldn’t be surprised if a diverse background had a positive correlation with variables like patient care and communication, although I’m not aware of a systematic study of it.
No, I said diverse groups tend to make better business decisions. Which has been studied numerous times - I can dig up a cite if you’d like.
I do think it’s possible that a diverse coaching team may have a positive impact (where decisions making and communication are paramount). I wonder if there is any study of that - off to Google.
Hardly an accurate claim.
What may get shuffled are school entrance test scores, but no state has lowered the rules for licensing doctors. (The notion that specific test scores are actually indicative of anything beyond test taking has still never been demonstrated, so your claim is based on a mere assertion even if the “qualifications” aspect had not been erroneous.)
Yea, this is often something that gets forgotten. In many professions, there is a licensing requirement that applies to everyone, and does not vary per ethnicity or socio-economic background. There is a minimum standard which must be passed.
Affirmative action programs and diversity-focus just give a slight advantage to groups that were historically at a disadvantage for various reasons. It gives them a chance to continue into fields that before they may not have been able to be part of. But after that, they’re on their own, and they have the same opportunities as others to pass or fail.
If someone has gone to medical school, passed boards, done residency, pass the boards, done fellowships, and has established an overall record of competence, does it matter to you that that person entered the medical school originally because of something like affirmative action or perhaps a desire from the school to increase its medical class diversity? If it matters to you, why?
Right. You know what you call the person who finished last in their medical school class? Doctor.
Affirmative Action isn’t about taking unqualified applicants, it’s about making an effort to make sure qualified minority applicants get included in the mix.
Here’s a personal anecdote:
When I grew up, I knew zero black people. Well, technically, my aunt and uncle had an old black servant who I barely was aware of before she died. There were no black people in my elementary school (except a janitor maybe), none in my junior high school, and none in my high school.
Then, one year, my mom went to join a cult, so we moved to another state. This was during my junior year of high school, so I was in a new school this year. There were many African-Americans around, possibly even a majority.
I was like :eek:… well sort of. I mean, sure, I knew they were just people like any other kind of people. But then, one black guy approached me (uh-oh) and said, “Hey, home boy!” Oh no, what does that mean? Is that an insult? Is that a degrading term? What’s he trying to communicate? Should I be nervous, afraid, or scared? (Yes, those are the only three options.)
But he was just offering me one of his donuts. Nothing to fear. Whew.
Yeah, I was young and stupid then, but regardless… not understanding another person’s culture can cause this sort of misunderstanding. And that which we don’t understand, we fear.
This is partly correct. The minimum licensure standard is not lowered. Pass rate for blacks is substantially lower (I want to say something like 70 v 90% for first test effort). However that licensing exam is a bare minimum, and for any kind of actual medical career you need a residency training program. There the standard for entry is lowered in the sense that the same kind of score differential is extended toward black graduates in order to get at least some of them into residencies. The score disparities persist all the way through, with a smaller number of black residents passing the specialty exams as well. The differences in scores never goes away despite years and years of exactly the same educational exposure, from college to final specialty boards (a total of 7-15 years or so of post-high school education.
It isn’t a minimal test standard that’s lowered, but certainly there are two average tiers of doctors, all the way through. As I have posted elsewhere, at least one study showed a tenfold increase in disciplinary action for medical judgment between blacks and other groups. It’s not just an academic issue.
But with any effort at AA for disadvantaged groups, we are going to need to accept that real differences in performance exist, and that the greater good is diversity. Everyone of us (I hope) knows very fine black physicians who can take care of us any day of the week. An “average” just does not mean that much at the level of judging an individual because even if overall averages are significantly different, there is significant overlap.
In the interest of accuracy, we should note the difference in entrance scores is not “slight.” It is substantial. I have posted them elsewhere, but you can look them up. As one progresses through training, it is not the case that once in med school, all differences smooth out. They persist all the way through training, so by the time you get to the very top tiers of specialty, with increasingly rigorous knowledge base and exam requirements, the percent of black physicians gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
However, I would say that for any physician who actually finishes a residency and passes board certification exams, the practical difference is not significant. It turns out that ability to succeed in the academic rigor of medicine is relatively well-predicted by the MCAT admission scores, though. It’s almost impossible to get a student with poor MCAT scores very far along the training line in medicine.
As a long-time doubter that test scores are meaningful, I am unimpressed.
Well, provided the study could be replicated AND provided the disciplinary actions are not, themselves, heavily tainted by racism. We already know that whites are judged not guilty more often than blacks in the criminal justice system and that blacks are punished more harshly for the same crimes as whites when convicted. Before I accepted “a study,” I would need to see significantly more evidence.
Perhaps one solution (and this is one of the things that’s being tried without actually coming right out and formalizing it) would be to have whites and asians take stadardized tests, but exempt blacks and hispanics.
If we do use standardized tests as a minimum bar, we have to have a double standard for those tests to retain diversity. The ratio of high-scoring whites to high-scoring blacks (adjusted for number of candidates taking the test) is about 10 to 1, and as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, adjusting for socioeconomic circumstance does not make a difference. Within every tier of SES opportunity, black scores are always at the bottom, so you can’t get to diversity just by adjusting for opportunity. You have to use race-based AA.
But a lot of people feel like you do: that standardized tests are over rated as a screening tool. And certainly competent doctors or lawyers doing general practice work can be found within lower MCAT/LSAT scores as long as their work ethic and other qualifications like ability to relate to people are there. MCATs, LSATs and other standardized tests don’t test for that.
At the same time, many in the academic fields do think there is a fundamental relationship between being standardized tests and the ability to amass, retain, digest and use large amounts of data for really complex decisions. I don’t know of anyone who thinks there is no difference between students who have poor MCAT scores and ones who have high ones.
So one approach would be not to force blacks and hispanics to take standardized tests at all. Put them in race-based AA set-asides and make sure their groups are represented where we need diversity that would be denied them if they had to pass the same screen as everyone else. Whites and asians could continue to be ranked with criteria that use standardized scores as one additional screen for ability.
From an article on graduate test scores in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:
*
"In 2005 the mean combined score for black students who took the Medical College Admission Test was 21.2. (Each of the three sections of the MCAT test is scored on a scale of 1 to 15.) For whites, the mean score on the combined three portions of the MCAT test was 28.5. Therefore, the white score was about 18 percent higher than the mean score for blacks…
** <by CP: I think their math is off and this should be "the white score was about 34% higher>**
If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine…
In 2004, 10,370 blacks took the LSAT examination. Only 29 blacks, or 0.3 percent of all LSAT test takers, scored 170 or above. In contrast, more than 1,900 white test takers scored 170 or above on the LSAT. They made up 3.1 percent of all white test takers. Thus whites were more than 10 times as likely as blacks to score 170 or above on the LSAT…
The nation’s top law schools could fill their classes exclusively with students who scored 165 or above on the LSAT. But if they were to do so, these law schools would have almost no black students…
The mean black score on the GMAT was 425. (The test is scored on the familiar 200 to 800 scale used for each section of the SAT test.) For whites, the mean GMAT score was 532. This is 107 points or 18 percent higher than the mean score for blacks…
<by CP: Wouldn’t that be 25% higher?>
The average GMAT score for admitted students at the nation’s leading business schools is over 700. Perhaps only 1 or 2 percent of all black GMAT test takers score at this level. Therefore, without continuing affirmative action admissions programs at Harvard, Penn, Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and other top MBA programs, the nation’s leading business schools will have very few black students…
The latest JBHE survey shows that blacks make up about 5 percent of the students at the nation’s leading business schools. If affirmative action admissions programs were to be discontinued, African-American enrollments at these schools might drop by 75 percent.
In 2003 the mean score for blacks on the combined verbal and quantitative sections of the GRE was 821. For whites, the mean combined score was 1062. Thus the mean white score was 241 points, or 20 percent, higher than the mean score for blacks. This racial scoring gap is even wider than the persistent and growing gap on the SAT test…
The GRE scoring gap between blacks and whites varies to a large degree depending on the field of proposed study in graduate school. Black students planning to study in the field of engineering scored on average 187 points below whites who plan to pursue a graduate degree in engineering. In the physical sciences, black students on average scored 247 points below whites…"*