However, your clarification of your position was submitted after the three posts that I quoted–and nothing that Novelty Bobble has posted leads me to believe he is describing only college admissions.
Well, Tom, I think you need to decide if RP and Novelty has lead you to believe they are discussing a topic as you interpret it or the one that is more consistent with the ongoing lines of thought. I’m willing to make allowances for less than precise language chosen in good faith.
Think of it this way. Rather than white people are normal and black people are oppressed, think of it as white people being privileged and black people not. Effectively, its very much the same thing, but the perspective is slightly different and slightly uncomfortable.
And it probably is intended to make a white person a bit uncomfortable, that’s ok, I can take it. But its a long damn way from “Shut your cracker ass up, honky!”. As you insinuate.
We are nothing if not expert hair-splitters here on the dope but on this occasion it is exactly what it looks like, i.e. I’m only talking about college admissions.
If we want to talk about other specific outreach activities that are under the blanket of “affirmative action” then better to clarify what they are. I think if you asked most people on the street what the main feature of AA was they would say “college admission quotas” so feel free to insert that term wherever I’ve used AA. Also, you will see from my quotes that you yourself picked that I’ve made sure to switch to the more obviously neutral “racial discrimination” rather than “racist”
So hopefully now, with that all cleared up you will have no problem with the statement “college admissions quotas as proposed under AA are racially and sexually discriminatory”
This is not a rebuttal. It a rebuke taking the form of ad hominem.
“AA is not racist because you are ignorant.”
Affirmative action was originally meant to require that employers/colleges ignore race as a criterion for hiring. When it evolved into positive discrimination, whether that be quotas or otherwise, it clearly forgot what it was intended to be.
Now most of the ruckus with AA is when schools (such as my alma mater) decide to forego race as a criterion for admission. This is when the reverse racists get up in arms–denying merit over the color of your skin. That is, at its core, racist.
A return to the original intent of Affirmative Action would not be racist. That is not what most proponents of the system want–they want the racist part.
That ignores the entirety of the historical context in service of a narrative that, intentionally or unintentionally, would serve the aims of the original racists we were trying to stamp out, and would defeat the aims of the people who made the strides that you’re saying were the big important ones. What affirmative action was intended to be is very clear: action to end discrimination. In 1960, or before that, simply requiring that minorities not be entirely excluded was a big step forward. In 1960, racially neutral hiring would have had the necessary effect of eliminating lots of discrimination. That’s because of how incredibly terrible the status quo was.
It’s 55 years later; we’re presented with different questions. We’re not entirely conflicted about whether or not it’s acceptable that an employer might just flatly say “no niggers allowed.” The idea that there were remnants of historical discrimination which could result in disparate college admissions statistics isn’t quite as absurdly overshadowed by the fact that, oh, I dunno, we’re still trying to implement the recent landmark Supreme Court case that said for the first time in history that our public schools should be integrated.
It’s pretty unfair and insulting to the goals of the original civil rights leaders to suggest that we’re somehow forgetting them by asking for even more progressive ones than the ones they were fucking murdered for half a century ago.
This:
Is also just absurdly inaccurate. Most of the ruckus I’ve heard is about the Supreme Court repeatedly saying we’re required to forego race as a criterion.
If you want to continue and even strengthen the racist components of affirmative action, that’s cool. That would certainly be the “Progressive” philosophy.
But I cast doubt that the civil rights leaders sought something more grand than to “sit at the table of brotherhood as equals.”
Ok. And suppose you were just completely wrong about that, Stringbean, and in fact Dr. King strongly supported racial preference for African-Americans to remedy centuries of mistreatment. Would that change your mind?
(You don’t need to answer. It’s a rhetorical question. We all know the answer.)
So basically you can no longer call people any variation of “nigger”, “wop”, “kike”, “white trash”, “bitch”, “fag”, “homo” or tell them that “they suck”? Which of these terms do you feel you need to use to effective exercise your right to free speech?
Also, there seems to be some misconception about “censorship”. Ithica College is a private college, not a state school. The First Amendment only protects you from government restricting your right to free speech. IANAJD, but I’m pretty sure private institutions have more leeway to limit speech as a condition of membership.
I’m more interested in the economics of this plan. It costs over $53,000 a year to go to Ithica College in tuition and room and board. It takes a certain amount of privilege to afford that. So if you continuously crack down on “people of privilege”, they may decide to take their privilege to a different university.
You need to go back and read the details of what this thread is about. It’s NOT about that. Those would be, to coin a new phrase, macro-aggressions.
When Dr. King said “I oppose Vietnam because that’s the white man’s war” it strongly affected the way I viewed that war, particularly from the African-American perspective. It made sense. Why should black Americans, who faced oppression at home, fight in someone else’s country for a cause they don’t find legitimate? Saying that took tremendous courage at that time in our history.
The greatness of the Civil Rights leaders was that they bottled the pent-up anger of black Americans and channeled it into consistent, morally-sound ideas that white Americans could not resist.
From an interview with MLK in 1965:
*Haley then asks: “Do you feel it’s fair to request a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro, or for any other minority group?”
King: “I do indeed. Can any fair-minded citizen deny that the Negro has been deprived? Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages–potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation. It is an economic fact that a program such as I propose would certainly cost far less than any computation of two centuries of unpaid wages plus accumulated interest. In any case, I do not intend that this program of economic aid should apply only to the Negro; it should benefit the disadvantaged of all races.”*
I agree. For example:
Note that while King was there intellectually defending the idea of preferential treatment, the program he was actually calling for was focused on the poor and not just poor black Americans–because he knew that white America would be too resentful otherwise.
But if the question is whether Dr. King thought racial preferences were a good idea or justified, the unequivocal answer is that he thought they were. Later in that same interview he even expressly talks about choosing black candidates over white candidates in civil service jobs.
Simul-post.
So, then, what the fuck Stringbean? How can you post that and also maintain that you “cast doubt that the civil rights leaders sought something more grand than to ‘sit at the table of brotherhood as equals.’”
I guess it depends on our ability to hypothesize the intentions of others. A GI-Bill-for-blacks may have been seen as a temporary affirmative action to achieve greater equality. At that time, maybe it was a valid idea, if politically unfeasible. What Dr. King would think in 2015, with a black man sitting in the White House, cannot be known.
What I do believe is that a perpetual program of positive discrimination, absent a societal imperative such that existed in the 1960s, does not promote the ideal of equality that Dr. King and others advocated for.
You’re obviously on firmer ground with “cannot be known” than asserting we know that King wouldn’t have wanted it.
And we’re quite far afield now, but I would just suggest that maybe less has changed since 1965 than you think. King’s explicit point was that centuries of plunder left African-Americans worse off than they should otherwise be. Very little in the last half-century has changed that. Black wealth is still a tiny fraction, per capita, of white wealth, and that disparity persists across education and income levels.
And, of course, institutional discrimination didn’t end in 1965. Even if you only move the clock forward to account for racist housing policy and all the pernicious effects on the distribution of wealth and power and education that had (and don’t include, say, racialized policing of drug crimes), you still get within a couple of decades of the present moment.
Nobody is suggesting a “perpetual program.” But keep in mind that as recently as five years ago, it was more difficult to get a mortgage loan in majority-minority neighborhoods than elsewhere. Vicious, life-changing discrimination isn’t a thing of the past. It’s still with us.
We need to do two things:
- End discrimination for good.
- Find ways to make it right for people whose lives are on balance negatively impacted by this discrimination.
We can debate how to do step 2. Affirmative action is one possible method. But skipping the step is a terrible option.
So what exactly do you think the election of a black man as President has to do with how society at large, and the power structures within it, treats black people? Specificity would help.
Since i have said nothing like this, your comment makes no sense.
This is utterly wrong. Utterly. Affirmative action was originally a directive by the government for employers and government agencies to take “affirmative action” seek out people who had been denied opportunities because of their race (and, later, sex), and to make sure that they were offered those opportunities. Claiming that AA was originally meant to ignore race simply makes no sense.
The way it worked was to ensure that efforts were made to encourage people to apply, first for jobs, later for housing, who would normally have been excluded due to the way that such opportunities were offered. Examples would include expanding employment recruitment to black college campuses at a time when the ratio of black students at most schools was far below ratio of blacks in the population or to ensure that housing was advertised in markets where blacks lived rather than segregating the advertising between white and black markets (which was a standard practice at the time). There was no directive that, having provided those opportunities, there was any requirement to actually hire the applicants or provide the housing.
I know of several companies that are still following the original AA guidelines. No hiring is based on race, but instead of going only to campuses that are overwhelmingly white, they extend their recruiting to campuses with larger black populations, continuing to hire only the better candidates regardless of race.
The first quotas were implemented almost ten years after AA had begun, when it was argued in several courts that in seniority-based occupations, (construction unions, firefighters, police), even adding a large number of new blacks or women among the workers, it would take “too many” years, (depending on one’s definition of “too”), before they could attain supervisory positions. At roughly the same time as the employment quotas were ordered, the concept was carried over to schools where quotas were developed and the reason given was often the desire for a diverse student body.
I have never supported quotas, but it is silly to claim that AA must be racist and it is even sillier to claim that it originally meant “ignore race.”
Maybe I got Wikifieid, but this is what it says of the origin of AA:
*The term “affirmative action” was first used in the United States in Executive Order 10925, signed by President John F. Kennedy on 6 March 1961, which included a provision that government contractors “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”[6] It was used to promote actions that achieve non-discrimination. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 which required government employers to take “affirmative action” to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin”. This prevented employers from discriminating against members of disadvantaged groups. In 1967, gender was added to the anti-discrimination list.[7]
Affirmative action is intended to promote the opportunities of defined minority groups within a society to give them equal access to that of the majority population.[8]*