Isn’t gravity an external force? 
And yes, minorities are still dramatically underrepresented in law. The one good thing we can saw about the field is that black people are less marginalized relative to other minorities than in the other professions.
Chinese and Japanese Americans were subjected to a great deal of persecution in the past. Nonetheless they are not underrepresented at any top college or university. They are overrepresented, relative to their share of the population at large. When it is implemented, affirmative action hurts many Chinese and Japanese Americans.
Tal Fortgang is ethnically Jewish, another group that’s received a bit of trouble in years past. Affirmative action wouldn’t do much to help him either. It is simply not the case that affirmative action always helps groups that were the victims of past wrongs.
They were. However that persecution didn’t include centuries of slavery and then a couple of generations of Jim Crow laws and other legislation intended to reduce their power and trap them in poverty.
Affirmative action, bussing, and other such policies aim to simply increases the diversity of races by force. Their goal is simply to ensure that certain institutions all have at least a certain percentage of certain races. But does that actually produce any “exposure to the culture and experiences” of other races? It seems to me that it typically doesn’t.
First, as we’ve noted in this thread and countless others, affirmative acton doesn’t benefit typical members of the “underrepresented minorities” that it’s supposed to help. If we look at the group of blacks who get into a top 25 university due to affirmative action, it’s not going to be a cross section of the entire population of blacks in this country. Rather, it will be a selection from the group of wealthy and middle class blacks. A sizable percentage of them come from outside the country. Even supposing that white and blacks students mingle and share experiences at this university, the white students will not get a good understanding of black culture from that.
Second, it’s unclear whether mingling will occur at all, or to any great extent. Far from increasing contact between races, affirmative action may just create little racial ghettos. That’s what’s happened, according to the article by Tanner Colby that I linked to already.
Imagine Bob, the head of an company in the aerospace field that does business with the government. Bob employs 1,000 aerospace engineers. Suddenly the government requires his company’s workforce to be 10% black and 10% Hispanic. That means Bob needs to hire 100 black and 100 Hispanic aerospace engineers. Problem is, there may not be enough qualified black and Hispanic aerospace engineers in the whole country to fill that many spots. And of course qualified black and Hispanic aerospace engineers will be heavily recruited by every company in the field, since they’re all facing the same requirement. What can Bob do?
Fortunately Bob is a capitalist with a good head for working around tricky problems. He creates a new department in his company such as “the Department of Community Outreach” and hires 100 blacks and 100 Hispanics to fill the new department. This department’s goals are somewhat nebulous, it’s not at all involved with the day-to-day running of the company, and the employees in this department never interact with the aerospace engineers who are doing actual work. Hence there’s an increase in diversity, but no increase in cross-cultural sharing of experiences.
“When is racial diversity important?”
its a non-question. there is only one race, and thats the human race.
Race is an idea people made up and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it has real effects on the way people treat each other. Unfortunately you can’t wave those away.
When people say “Race is a sociological phenomenon, not a biological one”, that doesn’t mean “race doesn’t exist”. It means that the racial differences that human beings have CREATED in their heads/cultures is much larger and more important than the racial differences that nature has created. There is actually more genetic difference WITHIN a given race than there is BETWEEN races. The borders of every race bleed into the borders of all the others.
I think the OP is mixing up 2 topics.
#1. He wants to discuss racial diversity
However,
#2. He wants to point out hypocrisy in the liberal leadership.
They really are 2 different topics.
On the #1. yes, I think its important. However “diversity” should also include economic as well as political and religious differences.
On #2. I remember when in the 2004 democratic primary Al Sharpton basically knocked Howard Dean out of the running by pointing out he had no black people on his staff when he was Vermont’s governor. Its something not discussed much in liberal circles.
I think racial diversity is important in the public sector, especially the part that deals with human health and safety. People tend to distrust the “authority figure” that doesn’t look like them, talk like them, and doesn’t relate to their experiences. This is especially true if we are talking about marginalized or stigmatized communities with a history of bad relations with public officials.
This past summer I was tapped to talk to a community group who was fired up about all kinds of issues. On the top of their list was environmental injustice and the fact that their community is carrying a disproportionate brunt of the pollution in their region. Most of the people in this community (as well as the group) are poor and black. All their previous attempts to reach out to state government had been met with dismissals and/or silence. So the group went to the Feds, and the Feds contacted me for help.
My boss was convinced the group was run by race-baiting Al Sharpton radicals or something, so he was reluctant to let me speak to them. But he let me go anyway, before cautioning me on what to say and not to say.
First off, they were just about the nicest group of people. They welcomed and thanked me profusely, and listened with rapt attention as I gave my presentation and answered their questions. During lunch, I talked about my experiences growing up on the “bad” side of town, and how stark the contrast was between my neighborhood and the neighborhoods where I went to school. I even talked about my mother and her social activism (the group felt very much like my mother’s organization). Turns out the director of the group and I grew up just a few miles apart, and we attended rival high schools. I didn’t cosign any rants about environmental racism or how unresponsive the government is to problems. Even though their rantings fit in with my personal politics, I wasn’t trying to get fired. What I did was assure them that we were doing what we could to address the pollution problems we had identified in their neighborhood. I didn’t sugarcoat. I didn’t poo-poo or dismiss or condescend. But I did try to educate without scaring anyone, to empower them in their activism.
Did the fact that I was a black woman help keep the situation calm and tension-free? I have no idea. But I think my being black was an asset in navigating this potentially sticky situation. For the group, perhaps the face of the government didn’t seem quite so alien and “heartless white Republican” anymore. Maybe the next time they hear about a fish consumption advisory, they’ll see my not-so-scary face and actually believe what they are told. And because I wasn’t afraid of the people and I knew where they were coming from on multiple levels, I didn’t end up embarrassing the agency or the state.
I think most people who wave away the importance of diversity have never had to deal experience a workplace or educational setting where they are the minority. So that’s why I tend to wave away their “waving away”. You may think you’d act and feel the same regardless what your coworkers and managers, teachers/classmates, or government officials look like. But the truth is that life experiences are shaped by one’s appearance and racial background (and gender…and class). Life experiences inform thoughts and actions. One set of life experiences makes people afraid to speak in front of an all-black audience. Another set makes talking to black people a no-brainer.
I mean, I wouldn’t expect to have the same success currying the favor of the Rush Limbaugh-listening, Obama-hating, Confederate flag-waving white farming community. However, we have quite a few people from this cultural background in my department. Guess who gets sent out to all the public meetings and hearings in the rural areas? So thank goodness for diversity, I say. Because we black girls from the inner city can’t win hearts and minds all by ourselves.
This is a sweet sentiment, and we’ve had lots of threads around the way “races” are defined. But defining away race using either a biological or sociological argument does not get rid of the problem that our determination to self-categorize is fairly strongly ingrained, and real angst develops from disparate outcomes based on that self categorization.
The simplest way to determine “race” for the purpose of categorization is to let individuals self-identify into traditional categories which are in turn very loosely based on geographic ancestries which in turn loosely reflect historic population migration patterns over the last 200,000 years.
If we don’t use those “race” self-identifications to make special exemptions for places in society, we would still have humans holding all the roles, but what we usually think of as “diversity” would be gone. In any role requiring a standardized measure of evaluation such as an entrance or competence exam, all “race” diversity would be as absent and disproportionate as is the “diversity” in the NBA or in the world of sprinting (where the quantifiable “exam” is your time in the hundred meter dash). There would be almost no black physicians in the entire United States–and for the same reason, almost no black students at Universities with the most rigorous screening standards: almost no PhD candidates in any STEM fields (all of which have quantified measures for evaluation somewhere along the line); almost no black workers in any job with limited availability for which a screening test is administered.
No society anywhere on earth has been able to find a way to smooth out the performance differences for different self-identified “races,” and in general those performance differences are always the same general order. Everywhere in the entire world, across every history and every political system, and every set of laws, the same “races” excel at the same categories of things.
In the United States, poor whites with uneducated parents outscore wealthy blacks with highly educated parents. White firefighters in the same exact job as their black co-workers given the same exact material to master for the same exact promotion examination will outscore their black counterparts. Despite the fact that nearly every white kid in the country has exposure to basketball and for the white kids who show a talent for it, far better opportunity to nurture a hoop dream than a struggling black kid just trying to survive into adulthood, the ratio of black to white NBA stars will be 4:1 against a general population ratio of 1:4.
At every socioeconomic level, the same general performance outcomes always align along the same patterns, and the differences are so strikingly severe that accommodating for socioeconomic status never creates a schema by which “racial” diversity is created.
If we decide that “race” needs to go away, what we consider “diversity” will go away with it.
We have quite a few threads on this, but the easiest way to understand the genetics of “race” is to understand the history of human migrations and the relative isolation of descendant groups from antecedant groups at certain points in time across migration boundaries. Those boundaries produce average differences for any given gene (evolving de novo or introgressed from an extant population) within descendant populations. For example, at the out-of-africa migration 40-70kya, one boundary line would be roughly the african continent and eurasia. A new gene introduced post-africa might have substantial penetration (assuming it was an advantageous gene for that geographic circumstance) into the descendant eurasian populations but almost no penetration into african antecedent populations (and vice versa).
The degree to which the genetic differences for the human self-identified “races” are “important” depends not on the total amount of variety, but on genesets driving key outcomes. These are currently undefined, although we are unraveling the genetic code. So for example, a geneset might drive a maximum height potential and therefore an average height difference for a population. This creates two groupings for any outcome for which the driver is height. Population 1 of giraffes might have a huge variety of genes; a subpopulation 2 that migrated off gets a new gene for height which becomes highly penetrated in that migrated group’s descendants, and the descendant group has a huge advantage for feeding. The underlying total amount of “genetic variation” of the orignal source giraffe population is irrelevant in understanding why the two populations of giraffes have different successes in feeding, and the two “races” of giraffes are distinguished by key genesets for height; not some sort of measure of total genetic variation.
Chief Pedant said (in part) :
Ah, Chief. Constraining examples to accentuate your agenda is such a favorite pastime of yours, isn’t it? Guess what happened when I googled “Why are blacks better at basketball than whites”? From Yahoo Answers :
So, rather than being due to inherent genetic differences between the races, your 4:1 - 1:4 ratio of ratios is due instead to culture, motivation and opportunity. Aren’t those the very things you’re arguing against? New genetic mutations and backcrosses to parent populations need not be invoked.
I’m at the end of a very long night and need to snatch some shuteye so I’m only going to examine this one example of yours. It does make me wonder about all the other situations you ascribe to genetic differences, though.
BTW - if you want to turn your nose up at Yahoo Answers, feel free to do so. In that case, I would just ask the other thread participants where they would apply Occam’s Razor. Would it be with your more-or-less genetic predestination? Or would it be with the sort of situation delineated in Yahoo Answers? In this case, I’d bet on the world being less deterministic than you make it out to be.
Perhaps you might consider looking over some of the other threads where we’ve discussed diversity in the NBA. But if Yahoo answers is your go to, have at it.
I don’t personally find much support for the idea that white kids are lazier than blacks when it comes to motivation for basketball practicing. Given the incredible degree of idolization that almost all children in this culture seem to have for NBA stars, it’s hard for me to accept that white kids would just rather play polo and lacrosse. When one looks at opportunity and nurturing, it’s pretty evident that a white kid who has a passion for basketball gets, on average, far more opportunity to pursue the dream until he gives it up. He has better facilities; a better chance at getting to basketball camp; a better chance at playing basketball instead of having to work because the family has no money; a more stable family environment to nurture whatever passion he has; a much smaller chance of being distracted by crime, drugs and imprisonment; and pretty much every other advantage you can think of.
I find this idea that black kids play basketball at the cost of every other pursuit, including academic ones, because they and whatever families they have are just to stupid to be able to rank which pursuits are statistically likely to result in a career to be not only wholly contrived, but offensive.
Culturally, what drives the ongoing pursuit of a hoop dream is ongoing success. Kids who are basketball stars in their peer group don’t drop out of basketball until they are no longer stars, because even the immediate rewards are too great. They drop out when the competition is superior. A white kid in some sort of totally white world is never going to know how good he is(n’t) until he rises to a level where all competitors are represented. At that point he’ll find out where he ranks on a scale where everyone is included.
The history of the NBA demonstrates this nicely. From the early basketball leagues with “Hebrews” and blacks playing for nearly no money, to the mostly white NBA to the inclusion of blacks, you can see a trend of diversity slowly give way to a marked reversal of the starting pool ratio once the pursuit was opened to all comers.
And the idea that whites just decided to go become used car salesman and businessmen because they suddenly found basketball stardom a second-class dream is kind of pitiful.
I don’t know what “Yahoo Answers” is, but I wonder if it’s not some sort of general question scheme where any idiot can come along and post an opinion…whoever made up the answer you quote does not appear to have given it much thought.
jimbuff314, Here is a meta analysis of a couple of (over-hyped and over simplified) “athletic genes” which vary in distribution among the crude categories we use for self-identified “races.” None of these are very well worked out; there is no “athlete gene” despite the nice media headline a given research paper might be given. But it is of no debate that these sorts of genes–and many more–differ in type and average frequency among even so crude a categorization mechanism as self-identified “race” (for the reason I mentioned above. So far, unraveling the genetic code does not seem to be leading in the direction that we are somehow all racially homogenous.
Efforts to drive diversity should not rest upon false and unsupported premises such as the notion that all groups have some sort of identically average gene pool. That’s a recipe for very bad policy, and court cases such as Ricci v DeStefano or Fisher v U Texas are what come of those policy assumptions. When SCOTUS decides we’ll get rid of racial discrimination by getting rid of discrimination based on race, the substitute mechanism to drive diversity becomes “opportunity.” The tragedy that results from that is a loss of diversity at every level of opportunity.
While I’m piling on, I might add a suggestion that you listen to Kevin Durant’s MVP acceptance speech for a perspective on how advantaged is the path by which black kids stomp all over competitors from other races in their culturally-driven dominance of the NBA.
Pile is the correct word for the above, Chief Pedant. I don’t know how this turned into yet another thread about your views on genetics.
Might have been partly my fault, Marley. Kinda thought that coming up with a possible viable alternative explanation from something as simplistic as Yahoo Answers would set the teeth of Chief Pedant on edge. Still like what it said though.
Saw KD’s whole speech. Loved how he acknowledged his mom. The week before Mother’s Day no less.
Reading through what Chief Pedant said - wow! I said every black kid pursued bb to the exclusion of all else? Also, criminy! You sure did put a lot of words in my post that I never typed. I mean, you did this so much that you offended yourself! That is hilarious! You certainly have a unique debating style, Chief. Pray, where did you learn it? Notice how I carefully avoid suggesting anything here? Would that you could as well.
Enough of the tangent and enough of the commentary on the posting styles of other posters.
Get back to the topic of this thread, everyone.
[ /Moderating ]
The OP said that a voucher scheme would give poor families the chance to send their kids to private schools. The only thing I’ve seen vouchers used for is to send kids to private, Christian schools here where I live. Having made deliveries to these schools, I can attest that they are monocultural and pretty much white. The city school system employs bussing to greatly increase the diversity of its various campuses. (I think that it was mandated at one time.) Parents are using vouchers to avoid this multicultural exposure. So, despite the OP’s (and my) hopes, vouchers are in reality being employed to decrease diversity in the school system as a whole.
I don’t know what the objections to bussing are, but it does seem to work to increase diversity, as do magnet schools.
Wow, talk about clearing out a thread. I gotta say, it’s hard not to take this personally.
<Hands in pockets, scuffs toe on ground.>
I didn’t mean it about school vouchers. School vouchers increase diversity tremendously!
Hello?