I’m curious what “race” you believe women to be.
The superior one 
j/k
or am I? 
What “racist ideas” is affirmative action based on?
Liberals support (race-based) AA because they see government as a good means for providing a remedy to the disadvantaged.
I do not know if the average liberal considers blacks and hispanics equal in potential to other groups or not. My WAG is that an honest poll would be hard to come by and the knee jerk reaction would be, “Of course all races are equal in potential.”
To date there is no evidence of that. Highly advantaged blacks, for example, underscore disadvantaged whites and asians on standardized tests.
This is another good reason to support race-based AA if you want SIRE group diversity in education and employment. If you only focus on opportunity, at every opportunity level blacks will tend to underperform whites and asians in quantitative disciplines by a substantial margin. (see the recent thread on UT-Fisher,e.g.)
One could take the opposite view for some athletic activities, where it seems that highly disadvantaged blacks substantially outperform highly advantaged whites and asians. However it is more difficult to come up with standardized testing to show this, and in any case there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm to correct the racial imbalance in, for example, the NBA.
Okay.
Hello Neo-Nazis.
It’s 2012. Your ideology is dead. It died in 1945 when Hitler shot himself. You’re so far behind the times that the ideology that killed your ideology has itself died of old age.
And stop shaving your heads. It just makes you guys look like a bunch of thumbs. And let’s face it, you don’t need to be giving people yet another reason to laugh at you.
Sincerely
Little Nemo
That may have more to do with home life than “race” or ethnicity, regardless of socioeconomic status. I am sure Obama’s children will do just fine if not better than most academically because their parents are so involved in their life and their education.
For example:
http://www.maricopa.edu/studentaffairs/minoritymales/An_Analysis_of_the_Factors.pdf
Is this your explanation for why children from black families with highly educated parents underscore children from white families with parents of high school or less education? The highly educated black parents forgot to take their kids to the library, or were too busy to tell them which courses to take so the kids could get an education too?
See figures 5 and 6 [url=http://lagriffedulion.f2s.com/testing.htm] here. [\URL]
Obama’s children will likely do better than average because they have better than average genetic potential coupled with better than average parenting and better than average opportunity.
I’m not sure why that example has anything to do with broad averages or the fact that I mentioned above…
How will we know when Affirmative Action has achieved it’s objectives and is no longer needed?
Link correction:
See figures 5 and 6 here.
So you think that this guy, http://www.blackradionetwork.com/images/userfiles/andy-garcia.jpg,
and this guy, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Al_Pacino_Mugshot.jpg/150px-Al_Pacino_Mugshot.jpg
are of different “races”?
As well as this guy, http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4ynpbjsnPvk/SFBIRHkgauI/AAAAAAAAFS4/tcoiwC4rvJE/s400/david-ortiz-2.jpg
and this guy, Archive blogs
being of different “races”?
Please explain why? In particular, please explain why you think this woman, http://www.biography.com/imported/images/Biography/Images/Profiles/D/Cameron-Diaz-9273866-1-402.jpg and this woman, http://directv.images.cust.footprint.net//photos/celebs/celebs/155494/155494_ba_d.jpg, are of the same race.
I ask because believing such strikes me as being extremely illogical and exceptionally unscientific but based on your post it is what you must believe.
Again, why are we talking about black people when most of the people who benefit from AA aren’t black?
I’ll answer my own question: because Aff Am makes a convenient lightning rod for anti-black sentiment.
Incidentally, I’m not an Aff Am supporter myself.
Affirmative action, in the US and in other countries - Malaysia, India - consistently provides the most benefit to the least disadvantaged members of any disadvantaged group. It generally provides no benefit at all to the truly disadvantaged.
In order to benefit from the affirmative action preference for firefighters in many locales, Hispanic candidates will need to have finished high school. The over 50% of Hispanics who drop out of high school are just not eligible. Even with the AA preference, Hispanic candidates will probably not be competitive if they haven’t also served in the military and received honorable discharges - to get veterans’ points. So the AA preference does nothing at all to help the alienated young Latinos hanging out on street corners here in the West Valley or anywhere else.
The other major problem with AA is that much of is based on ethnic categories that are already blurry or will become blurry with time. Who counts as Hispanic? Who counts as black? Who counts as Native American?
Susan Rice’s kids count as black:
So do Eartha Kitt’s:
http://www.exposay.com/celebrity-photos/eartha-kitt-daughter-kitt-and-grandaugther-5AshmC.jpg
So do upper class Africans and upper middle class West Indians. None of whom have any connection to the historic, slave descended black American working class. You know, the truly disadvantaged. Whether subject to an AA preference or not, increasingly the most competitive opportunities in academia and the job market available to black Americans are being taken by 1) biracials with white college educated mothers or 2) immigrants from the African upper classes or West Indian middle classes. Groups 1 & 2 do have much better academic preparation, and score higher on standardized tests, earn higher incomes.
While their upward progress is a beautiful thing to behold, it doesn’t help native born, antebellum black folks at all.
It’s not entirely coincidental that the most powerful black people in America are 1) the biracial son of an African immigrant and a white college educated mother 2) the son of immigrants from Barbados and 3) the granddaughter of immigrants from Jamaica.
It’s even blurrier with Hispanics. Exceptionally white, upper class Latinos become eligible for AA as soon as they get green cards. The most ironic case I knew personally, was my roomate’s best bud from high school. He’d gotten a full ride scholarship to a top Midwestern private school based on being Latino. He was blue eyed, fair skinned, with dark blond hair. His surname was English, because his plantation owning ancestors had emigrated to Cuba after slavery was abolished in Jamaica. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and had no connection to anything other than the upper middle class Midwestern Anglo community where he grew up.
When people no longer worry if they’re coming out ahead or behind on affirmative action.
I was just watching the latest vlogcast from Glenn Loury (Brown University) on bloggingheads.tv and one topic that was touched upon was how AA doesn’t seem to publicly stigmatize any group other then African-Americans. It’s interesting that AA has become a stigmatizing “Mark of Cain” wielded against African-Americans (it’s a standard insult toward Obama for example) when it isn’t used as such towards other groups.
Corey Brettschneider recalls an excellent point (~3 mins) about how white Americans (who are old enough) have definitely benefited from a twisted form of preferential treatment, but remain free of any “stigma of incompetence”.
Ibn, I thought we went over this already.
“Race” is a self-identified categorization. It’s a social construct, by definition, as the term is typically used.
It’s biological underpinnings derive from the fact that this self-identification tends to lump people into groups which reflect gene pools from the populations from which they actually descended. “Black” self-identification correlates well–on average–with populations of sub-saharan origin, for example.
It’s easy to prove this. Look up race-associated diseases or physiologic differences and you’ll find countless examples.
I think the thing that confuses you is this simplistic idea that if someone categorizes themselves atypically, a biologic construct is meaningful for that individual. Or if someone has a number of populations whose gene pools are represented in their particular genome, that renders the whole biological average moot. But it doesn’t.
Navin Johnson self-identifying as “black” does not mean that blacks–as an average group–have a higher incidence of cystic fibrosis. Biologically, Navin is white, so we would predict his chance of CF to be higher than his social siblings.
Again, as it turns out, most self-identification is a fairly accurate predictor of ancestral population origin, and that’s why the biologic construct of race correlates as well as it does with the social construct.
Even biologically, “race” is a large and crude construct; not nearly as specific as identifying a sub-population. That does not mean that average biologically-driven differences cannot be identified even within that crude grouping. Men and women are two different groupings, and there are average differences. You would not want to draw an a priori conclusion of a difference between any given man and woman based simply on which group they belong to, but that doesn’t mean the average difference (height, for example) doesn’t exist.
They’ve been wrong before am I right? In any way, that’s a shaky authority on which to base your argument. How about citing the document itself. Where does it say we can five special treatment to women over men? Blacks over whites?
No matter how many times you repeat this argument, history says you’re wrong. Blacks were often disenfranchised before the Voting Rights Act, therefore this mythical 100 year period in which the democratic process had an opportunity to stamp out institutionalized racism does not exist. Racism ends with voluntary cooperation between races and changing of social attitudes. AA advances neither of these. In fact, as i’ve noted, in my experience the existence of AA can make racism worse.
Who believes that?
No. Are you?
Maybe it is crazy. But it is possible under an affirmative action policy that an equally qualified woman or black person gets the position simply because they are black or female. The very existence of this possibility could increase racial and gender hostilities. In my experience it increases racial hostilities. I am not making similar claims about a possible increase in gender hostilities.
Affirmative Action is not intended to stamp out racism. AA is intended to give people who were explicitly excluded from “the American Dream” an opportunity to partake in it, fully. Arguments that AA wil not end racism are irrelevant.
As to claims that AA promotes racism, they are simply after the fact rationalizations. The racism comes first, then people attempting to defend themselves from charges of racism make the absurd claim that AA “caused” their racism. People who are racist need excuses, not reasons, and if it were not for AA, it would be some other excuse.
Why not? It seems to be rather odd that you claim a situation has two identical (possible) outcomes but that you are only going to make a claim for one of them. Confirmaion bias? Cherry-picking data? Preference for one group of disadvantaged persons over another group?
If one action will produce a results on two groups, it seems absurd, to me, to argue that it happens on one group but not the other.
ETA: If the competing candidates are exactly equal, then choosing the man or the white could be just as easily seen as favoring white men–an example of racism and sexism. So, in your scenario, we are going to have accusations of racism or sexism (or both) regardless who is chosen.
Do you seriously think that because someone’s skin is darker they are dumber than someone who is white? Does intelligence go up the lighter your skin gets? Why are Asian American children statistically more successful academically than everyone else?
I sincerely believe it’s nurture not nature in this case. The quote uses the library as an example. Of course it doesn’t say that only taking your child to the library is going to make them more successful. It says that parental involvement in a child’s academic success results in more academically successful children. Its a no brainer The study found, regardless of income, that Asian parents are more involved in their child’s academic life than other minority parents. It’s a fact that has to do with cultural expectations and not genetics.
And I am offended you are implying that because Obama’s children have some Caucasian genetics in them they will automatically be smarter than a black person. As a matter of fact you will find very few black people in the US who are 100% of direct African descent, so that argument doesn’t make any sense.
This sort of passive-aggressive way to slip an insult into the discussion is not appropriate.
Back off.
[ /Moderating ]