Why Do Liberals Support Affirmative Action?

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
No John it makes perfect sense, at least if you’re addressing it in the context of this thread. The facts of the matter are that race is an amorphous, malleable, subjective category even on the societal level, and the discussion is about whether the racist policies of AA should continue. In that context, it was shown that we don’t know what the heck we mean (and, more to the point, we can’t have any actual firm, objective meaning) when we use phrases like “The Black Race”.

When Shodan pointed out that it was pretty much impossible to construct a valid definition with a delineative level of self-continence, you responded that self-identification would be how we defined “blackness”. Which is fair enough, as far as group markers go… as long as you don’t intend to apply those markers for use in objective determinations.

And since, again, in the context of this discussion, the debate is whether or not racist policies that benefit “blacks” (self identified or defined, externally, by swiss-cheesed categorization) should be continued, it’s perfectly valid to ask why under your self-identification rubric, AA racism is okay, but racism regarding athletic ability isn’t, and racism regarding intelligence is right out.
[/QUOTE]

No. Shodan wants to jump from “we have a group, X, that we define by self-identification” to “group X has lower IQ”. Now, it may very well be true that group X has a lower IQ, on average, but that does not derive from the fact that group X exists.

We have some pretty good data that says Blacks score, on average, lower than Whites on IQ tests. We have some anecdotal evidence about athletics, but not any real scientific data on the subject. As for AA policies, they are just that-- political policies. Whether one supports or opposes them depends on what one assumes the role of government ought to be. That is not a question for science to answer, and is not subject to “truth” or “falsehood”.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

[QUOTE=you with the face]
Two questions:

1. What job are you talking about? AA isn’t at work in every situation. If you are a white man applying at a company is that is teeming with black women, then there would be no reason to entertain this question.

2. Why do you think you have to be better qualified than a black woman anyway? As has been stressed ad nauseum, AA is supposed to apply when two candidates with equal or sufficient credentials are being considered. If you are competing against a black woman and yall are both the same on paper AND the position has historically been underfilled by black women, then the scale will tip in her favor.

Was my answer hostile or meal-mouthed enough for you?
[/QUOTE]

I think what upsets a lot of people is the notion of “sufficiency” The bar for “being qualified” is much lower than the qualifications of the best qualified candidate. If 100 people apply for a job and all of them are “qualified,” it seems like you are saying that you would hire the least qualified candidate if she was a black female and everyone else was a white male. How deep are you willing to dig?

I tend to prefer AA in educational opportunity over AA in the workplace (absent some historical reasons or structural/institutional issues, in which case the sufficiency test may be enough) and I would be willing to dig as deep for educational AA as we are willing to dig for legacy AA.

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=John Mace]
That makes absolutely no sense. There is nothing about self-identification that would make any of those statements true. They are certainly valid questions to ask, but whether they are true or not is a separate issue.
[/QUOTE]

I expressed this very badly. What I meant to ask is if these are all valid questions, even though the group definition is held constant.

What I am trying to avoid is the dodge described earlier, where race is fine as a definition as long as it means they get the goodies, but the instant one starts talking about anything inconvenient, then all of a sudden race doesn’t exist.

My apologies for my lack of clarity.

Regards,
Shodan

[elucidator]

If a group of people were oppressed because it was believed that they were leprechauns, the falsity of that presumption changes very little. Efforts made to erase the effect of that oppression would not depend on an erroneous belief, but on a fact: their oppression, not the premise for that oppression.

[you_with_the_face]

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
I think what upsets a lot of people is the notion of “sufficiency” The bar for “being qualified” is much lower than the qualifications of the best qualified candidate. If 100 people apply for a job and all of them are “qualified,” it seems like you are saying that you would hire the least qualified candidate if she was a black female and everyone else was a white male. How deep are you willing to dig?
[/quote]

But I’m not saying any of that.

I made the point of saying “sufficiently qualified” because a lot of jobs don’t require a lot in the way of qualifications. In fact, many jobs will penalize applicants for being *over *qualified. So, if you have two applicants vying for an entry-level IT desk job that only requires an associate degree, and one applicant (a white male) has a PhD and the other (black female) just has a BS, “sufficiently qualified” would kick in in this situation. Their credentials aren’t equal, but the white male wouldn’t have cause to cry foul if the black female was selected over him. That’s all I mean by saying “sufficiently qualified”. Nothing deeper than that.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
Do you know what a logical fallacy is? Do you know what the fallacy of composition is? Do you understand why you committed the fallacy of composition? Do you understand why an argument based on a logical fallacy yields a fallacious conclusion in most cases?

As for something being a “semantic” quibble, I’d hope you’d not use such poor tactics in the future. Semantics means, literally, meaning. Calling an error in meaning a “quibble”, especially when it’s the meat of an argument, is the tactic of someone who is beaten on the facts and doesn’t want to address it.
[/quote]

Maybe I don’t really understand what you mean, I would have thought that I made myself clear by saying that I was using the phrase “as a whole” to mean on average or as a group. Can you explain to me how breaking it down any further isn’t quibbling?

Legacies “favor” nobody other than relatives of legacies. A poor person who goes to Yale and has children has exactly the same legacy status as a rich person. A Kenyan who goes to Yale has exactly the same legacy status as a white anglosaxon Protestant from New England.

There are more people from higher SES levels and more white people who benefit from legacy status, but the policy itself favors nobody. It is 100% egalitarian amongst its members, actually. Anybody who is a legacy, has the same legacy status.

And it doesn’t bother you that there are almost no black legacies because they were all slaves for the first few centuries of this nation’s history?

Both are spurious objections. Are you really against things that are unearned? Having parents who read to you as a child is unearned, should that be removed? Well educated people going back to get second or third graduate degrees doesn’t remedy anything, should they be prohibited from adding excellence to excellence?

I don’t think I said I am against legacies, I called them the privelege of wealth or something like that (and maybe the privelege is not exclusively enjoyed by the wealthy, but it is disproportioately enjoyed by the wealthy). But I find it almost impossible to defend legacies while objecting to AA.

Moreover, for all the claims that AA “remedies” anything, its own logical underpinnings eviscerate those same claims. For instance, we are told by some that AA has to exist because of a history of racism and oppression (statements like that, from Jesse Jackson, will no doubt provide an excuse for face to babble about how anybody who then disagrees probably hates blacks, but hopefully we can ignore such poor rhetoric, yes?). Well and good… but no matter what efforts are taken in the present, and the future, the past will never be changed. So no amount of AA will ever “remedy” the fact that we have a history of racism in this country. Nor will AA actually “remedy” racism, currently. As already pointed out, AA is racism. You cannot end racism by employing racism. Further, as I challenged and nobody has yet really answered, AA does not has not, and almost certainly can not solve problems like “Driving While Black”. Only changing minds will do that, and one does not convince people that racism is wrong by championing racism.

You don’t seem to understand how history works. When Jesse Jackson talks about the history of racism, he is not trying to erase the history, he is trying to erase the current lingering effcts of that history.

Further, for many, AA is no remedy at all. If someone from Zaire steps off the plane tomorrow at Newark, they’re entitled to benefit from AA, and yet, they have no history in America at all that needs to be remedied. And then there’s the fact that “blacks” are not fungible, you cannot commit the fallacies of composition and division and act as if you made a point rather than a mistake.

You keep bringing up corner cases as present them as if they were the common case. You can’t blow up a generality because you can find a few corner cases that don’t fit the generality.

If the founder of BET’s children applied to college, should those children of a billionaire be treated as having more need for ‘remedy’ than a white child who studied hard but whose parents couldn’t afford to put food on the table most days, and so he had to deal with a seething belly while trying to study? You can’t just dismiss major logical fallacies like composition and division as “quibbling”. It’s the same whacked out logic that we saw above from unconventional where a white person, who is poor and actually has no power, is ascribed power due to a racist ideology where white people are interchangeable in the ‘power structure’, and even when an individual white person doesn’t actually have any societal power, they still do. Ignoring that not all “black” people need SES relief, nor a ‘remedy’ for a history of oppression, and that some “white” people do need SES relief, and could benefit even more than some wealthy (or even middle class) “blacks”?

I think this is the THIRD time in this thread that I will be saying that I think we are better off with SES based AA (at least in education) not because it makes the most sense but because it addresses most of the problem and it causes less resentment (which I think is more important than righting historical wrongs for blacks that have managed to bootstrap themselves into the middle class).

That way lies the path of the ideologue: the primacy of belief over reason.

Are you Yoda now? I think I am plenty reasonable.

Have you not been reading the thread? More than one poster, face most notably, irrationally, and bombastically, has objected to the fact that people have, ya know, noticed and responded to the claims of many of the supporters of AA who cast it as a “black program” designed and implemented to relieve historical and current ills done to “black” people. The charge has been cast that when Jesse Jackson or Evil Captor or whoever else, in this thread or out of it, supports AA by saying it was created primarily for black people and should continue in that vein, that debating, that actually responding to someone’s specific claims, makes one a racist.

I skipped a lot of posts that seem to be arguing about whether or not “race” is a meaningful or valid word.

The point, I suppose, is the Orwellian nature of some folks’ behavior, and the scope of the AA debate itself. AA is, obviously and undeniably, a racist policy. One which, of course, many people are left to argue is “good” racism, thus teaching children that there’s nothing wrong with racism as long as it’s the “right” kind of racism. Those same folks then, of course, bemoan the fact that racism isn’t being stamped out. So by gum, we need more AA!

Who is arguing for MORE AA? Like I said before, AA is race based because the injustices that necessitate AA was race based. But I have also said that we have probably gotten to the point where we can just let it be SES based.

Some of the most ardent supporters of the racist policies of AA say they’re doing it to counter racism against blacks, and then when people respond to those very claims, other supporters jump up and say that, damn if it isn’t true, people are discussing AA in the context of its effects and intentions towards blacks. So, by gum, we need more AA!

Etc, etc, etc.

Who is arguing for more AA?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
AA is racism, plain and simple.
[/QUOTE]

plain and simple… really? No complexity to the issue at all?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

[QUOTE=you with the face]
But I’m not saying any of that.

I made the point of saying “sufficiently qualified” because a lot of jobs don’t require a lot in the way of qualifications. In fact, many jobs will penalize applicants for being *over *qualified. So, if you have two applicants vying for an entry-level IT desk job that only requires an associate degree, and one applicant (a white male) has a PhD and the other (black female) just has a BS, “sufficiently qualified” would kick in in this situation. Their credentials aren’t equal, but the white male wouldn’t have cause to cry foul if the black female was selected over him. That’s all I mean by saying “sufficiently qualified”. Nothing deeper than that.
[/QUOTE]

OK, please replace the words sufficiently qualified everywhere I used the word sufficiently or qualified. How deep would you dig?

[you_with_the_face]

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
OK, please replace the words sufficiently qualified everywhere I used the word sufficiently or qualified. How deep would you dig?
[/QUOTE]

Why do you think I’m advocating doing any “digging”? Your question confuses me because it doesn’t follow from anything that I’ve written.

AA would kick in when you’ve narrowed your selections down to a few finalists and none of the finalists, merit-wise, stand head and shoulders above the rest.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=Shodan]
I expressed this very badly. What I meant to ask is if these are all valid questions, even though the group definition is held constant.

What I am trying to avoid is the dodge described earlier, where race is fine as a definition as long as it means they get the goodies, but the instant one starts talking about anything inconvenient, then all of a sudden race doesn’t exist.

My apologies for my lack of clarity.
[/QUOTE]

OK. I think they are valid questions to ask, but if the question is biological in nature, you need to make sure that the cause is biological, and not social. For instance, people looking for a genetic basis for some trait that African-Americans appear to possess often ignore the fact that African-Americans are not a well defined population, biologically. That is due to the possibly large, and often unknown, amount of mixed ancestry that any given African-American might have. If one wants to know something about people of African ancestry, one would be better served by testing actual Africans, in Africa. Testing African-Americans is fraught with problems, from a biological standpoint. Those problems may not be insurmountable, but one has to take them into account if one wants to do good science.

If one looks at something like discrimination due to race, that is something that is sociological in nature, and not biological. One needn’t understand a person’s genetics to know if that person has been discriminated against.

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=you with the face]
AA would kick in when you’ve narrowed your selections down to a few finalists and none of the finalists, merit-wise, stand head and shoulders above the rest.
[/QUOTE]

But earlier you said that a white male who was much better qualified than an AA candidate would not be entitled to complain if they selected the less-qualified minority. Now you’re contradicting that.

OK, suppose you are a hiring manager. You have five candidates for the position. Four meet the minimum standards, one significantly exceeds the minimum standards. Your company, to be completely fair, has ensured that you have no idea what the race or gender of any of the candidates is.

Which one do you pick?

Regards,
Shodan

[Shodan]

[QUOTE=John Mace]
OK. I think they are valid questions to ask, but if the question is biological in nature, you need to make sure that the cause is biological, and not social.
[/QUOTE]

No, no - I have deliberately not gone anywhere near the biological or social causes question. I want to hold one thing constant - ‘here is group X. What can we determine are its characteristics?’ where X = ‘is eligible for AA’.

Regards,
Shodan

[you_with_the_face]

[QUOTE=Shodan]
But earlier you said that a white male who was much better qualified than an AA candidate would not be entitled to complain if they selected the less-qualified minority. Now you’re contradicting that.
[/quote]

Just because a point flies over your head, doesn’t mean there’s any contradiction.

[Shodan]

But if you say one thing and then another, it does.

Regards,
Shodan

[tim314]

Most commonly, it seems to come down to different definitions of fairness. Some people would say the fairest thing is not to give anyone an advantage due to their race. But many affirmative action supporters would say that blacks (and other minorities) are already at a disadvantage in our society from the start, so you need an advantage to cancel that out. It’s not a question of intelligence, it’s a matter of what resources they’ve been given. So far as I know, a higher percentage of blacks than whites are in poverty, a higher percentage don’t have college educated parents, etc., and all these factors make it harder to do well in school and get into a good college. Arguably, these demographic differences are society’s fault, in the sense that they’re a long-term repercussion of a time when black slaves were denied education, or more recently a time when they were legally descriminated against and denied many forms of employment.

Of course, someone could answer that you should just use things like poverty as the factor rather than race. In some sense that would be more fair because it helps the poor white kids as well as poor blacks, and it doesn’t help the children of rich, well-educated parents just because they happen to be black. But there are at least some supposedly objective measures of academic performance, like the SATs and ACTs, that seem to favor whites over blacks. That is, even poor, inner-city whites do better than equally poor, inner-city blacks. I’m not sure anyone knows why that is, although there are various theories. So arguably because they’re being judged by race-biased tests, you ought to take race into a factor to cancel that out.

Some would also say there are cultural differences between blacks and whites that make academic achievement less highly valued on average in predominantly black communities, putting black kids at a disadvantage. If that’s true, then one could ask “Whose fault is that?” If you think these cultural differences ultimately stem from slavery and other oppression inflicted on blacks by white-dominated society, then you could argue that society owes it to them to make up for the disadvantages that cultural bias creates.

On the other hand, some people would argue that even if blacks are at an inherent disadvantage, and even if that disadvantage is ultimately due to past actions of white-dominated society, that nevertheless affirmative action might be the wrong way to rectify the problem. They would say that while it might help blacks get a better education and a better job in the short term, it’s only perpetuating the idea that blacks can’t compete with whites on an equal playing field, and thus hurting them in the long term. Affirmative action proponents might respond to this criticism by saying that having blacks enjoy more academic and financial success will only serve to encourage the view that blacks and whites are equals.

Anyway, I’m not sure how I feel about all that, but I’m generally pro-affirmative action for totally different reasons. At least I am when it comes to college admissions. I think universities have an incentive to provide their students with a diverse environment, as meeting people with different backgrounds and worldviews is one of the chief benefits of a college education. I went to a major public university, and there were people there from more rural parts of the state who had literally never seen a black person except on T.V. It was a valuable educational experience for them to meet people of other races, just as it was a valuable educational experience for me to meet people from a less diverse environment than I grew up in and see how this affected their perspective on political and social issues.

Some people say, “Yes, but does the value of diversity in education make up for the unfairness of taking a better candidate over a worse one?” But in my experience, the line between one college applicant and another is seldom that clear. A school may have a certain pool of outstanding applicants, all of whom are accepted. Then there’s a large pool of applicants who are more borderline. Probably they’d all do reasonably well if accepted, but there are more qualified applicants than the school can take. (At least, this is true at major universities – I don’t have any personal experience with smaller colleges.) So it comes down to splitting hairs – maybe they like someone’s essay a little better, maybe someone had a more unique extra curricular activity, etc. Within this large group of applicants that are all adequate but not outstanding candidates there’s plenty of room to apply affirmative action, still only taking students that are qualified and not taking an obviously more qualified candidate over a less qualified one. And that way the school can ensure that the students they do accept get to enjoy the educational benefits of a diverse environment.

[you_with_the_face]

(edit window ended too soon)

@Shodan

OK, suppose you are a hiring manager. You have five candidates for the position. Four meet the minimum standards, one significantly exceeds the minimum standards. Your company, to be completely fair, has ensured that you have no idea what the race or gender of any of the candidates is.

Which one do you pick?

Depends on how far out the one exceeds the minimum and what job it is. If he’s a MD,PhD geneticist with 10 publications under his belt and he used to head a major pharmacetical company, I don’t think he’d make a good fit as a technician in my biochemistry lab, taking orders from grad student who just learned what D-N-A stands for.

So in that situation, I’d focus on the four and do enie-meenie-miney-moe if they are all the same. Or maybe pick the candidate who graduated from Ga Tech, if anyone did.

[Ocean_Annie]

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
By your rationale, is anti-semitism among Palestinians a form of racism or does it fall into the category of “you can’t be racist if you are oppressed by the people you are being racist against”
[/QUOTE]

I almost didn’t respond to this, Damuri Ajashi. The highly emotional, complicated, and divisive Israel/Palestinian issue can’t be reduced to a simple postulate about Anti-Semitism or oppression.

[FinnAgain]

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
plain and simple… really? No complexity to the issue at all?
[/QUOTE]

Yes, and no.
Respectively.

Pronunciation:
\ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm also -ˌshi-\
Function:
noun

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

Maybe I don’t really understand what you mean, I would have thought that I made myself clear by saying that I was using the phrase “as a whole” to mean on average or as a group. Can you explain to me how breaking it down any further isn’t quibbling?
[/quote]

Yes, because saying something is true of a group “as a whole” means it is true as a whole. The point is that taking the characteristic of a part, and generalizing to the whole is the fallacy of composition. It’s not quibbling to point out that you committed a logical fallacy. If something is true of a part of a group, then it is a logical fallacy to claim that it is true of the group as a whole. It is not true of the group as a “whole” part as a part of the group as a part. It is not a “quibble” to point out that you’re using bogus logic.

In fact, the logical fallacy you’re using is pretty much the entire basis for every form of bias, bigotry and prejudice that humanity has ever encountered. It’s the same bigotry which sees a white family unable to afford shoes for their children as more powerful than a black billionaire, because they’re part of “The White Race”. It’s the same bigotry that sees a poor German Jew and thinks that they must have money somewhere because everybody “knows” that Jews “as a whole” are wealthy.

The very concept that a group, as a whole, is anything unless that statement applies to 100% of the members of the group, is a fallacy in reasoning. Being unable to deal with the nuances of reality as opposed to the sloppy imprecision of linguistic abstractions reveals a thought process that is neither logical nor accurate, can neither deal with the world as it is or nuances.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

And it doesn’t bother you that there are almost no black legacies because they were all slaves for the first few centuries of this nation’s history?
[/quote]

Why on Earth would it? Jewish legacies are also comparatively recent, and bigotry against admitting Jews only disappeared comparatively recently. I couldn’t possibly care less. If there was still slavery going on, that’d be a bad thing. But it’s been over for quite some time. And there are some very robust anti-discrimination laws on the books. Should I really adopt the illogical, irrational and agenda driven position of opposition to totally race-blind legacies simply because they happen to have a certain percentage, right now? Should I, too, pretend that a program that favors nobody really favors someone, when it is physically impossible for the program to favor any race at all, as it has no selection criteria at all other than mere attendance and graduation? If in 100 years, as I posited, Hispanics and/or Asians have a large percentage of legacies, does that then make legacies “good” again? What if the racism of AA continues for another 200 years, and blacks then have a significant portion of legacies at the finest American universities. Is it then a “good” policy"
If the actual policies never changed, if there was never any actual racial test and no possibility that the policies could favor any damn person over anybody else, as long as they were all graduates, how can I find anything wrong with the policies now but not then, without being Janus-faced?
(Short answer, I can’t, and I value logical consistency and intellectual honesty).

I have no truck with the opportunistic use of fallacy and bullshit designed to support a political position. If legacies are wrong and “favor” people when the demographics of college attendance are one way, but without the policies changing by a single phrase, are right and “favor” nobody when the demographics shift? You can bet money on the fact that someone’s been playing real fast and loose with definitions in order to score rhetorical points.

The truth of the matter, as opposed to the agenda driven distortion, is that legacies are totally blind. They favor nobody at all and, over time and with shifting admissions rates, the percentages will change.
Scrapping legacies because the past was unjust would be like stripping home ownership deeds from white people, because blacks wouldn’t have been allowed to own houses or earn that kind of money in past centuries. 1 + N wrongs does not make a right. Yes, there was racism and injustice in the past. The way to correct it is not with racism and injustice in the present, but with individualism and justice.

Myself, I have no love lost for Mugabe-esque “justice”, in any case.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

But I find it almost impossible to defend legacies while objecting to AA.
[/quote]

Except, as pointed out, legacies are actually not the privilege of the wealthy. As for you being unable to see why defending a totally neutral, objective system that’s open to any and all who qualify for it, equally… over an explicitly racist system?
I guess we all have to make our own judgment calls.

I support an objective system, open to any and every single graduate, without discrimination or preference, and granted to all of their children, without bias or prejudice.
I oppose racism.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

You don’t seem to understand how history works. When Jesse Jackson talks about the history of racism, he is not trying to erase the history, he is trying to erase the current lingering effcts of that history.
[/quote]

:rolleyes: followed by :dubious: followed by some more :rolleyes:
I know damn well how history works. You, however, have dodged the fact that it is physically impossible to change history, so claiming that the justification of a program is past injustices is mere sophistry, that AA does not actually change current racism, and most importantly, that perpetuating racist policies will mean that there will always be racist policies.

I will say, however, that last particular dodge sure shows plenty of damn chutzpah.
“We’re championing an explicitly racist, sexist program in order to get rid of racism and sexism and show people that racism and sexism aren’t acceptable. And yet, no matter how long we keep this racist and sexist program going, there still, for some reason, seems to be racism and sexism! That just shows us that we need to keep the racist and sexist program going longer.”
It’s a bit like the boy who murders his parents and then throws himself on the court’s murder, as he’s an orphan.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

You keep bringing up corner cases as present them as if they were the common case. You can’t blow up a generality because you can find a few corner cases that don’t fit the generality.
[/quote]

Simply to fight your ignorance, fuck yes I can. That’s exactly how you show that generalizations are bullshit, by showing how they don’t actually map to reality.
You have, yet again dodged a substantive factual, logical rebuttal. That AA applies to people who need no remedy debunks the claim is only about providing remedy, rather than unfair benefits based on racism. That AA does not give remedy to those who need remedy (as long as their skin is the “wrong” color), shows that AA does not really offer remedy based on economic disadvantage, but a racist spoils system.

And to fight your ignorance some more, defining something only by the “common cases” while deliberately ignoring that the “corner cases” invalidate your definition is known as the No True Scotsman fallacy.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

I think this is the THIRD time in this thread that I will be saying that I think we are better off with SES based AA (at least in education) not because it makes the most sense but because it addresses most of the problem and it causes less resentment (which I think is more important than righting historical wrongs for blacks that have managed to bootstrap themselves into the middle class).
[/quote]

You have dodged yet another logical, factual rebuttal. I don’t care whether it would breed less “resentment”, the fact that the core claims of AA advocates: that is for those who need help due to SES and/or historical/current oppression have both been refuted, shows that it has no logical underpinnings upon which to stand. That it is a logically unsupportable position is why it can’t be supported with reason.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

I think I am plenty reasonable.
[/quote]

Yep, and 80 percent of drivers believe they are above average drivers.
A good test as to whether you are applying reason or not is to look at much much of your argument is supported by logic, and how much undercut by fallacies, and especially how much of reality you have to ignore in order to make it fit.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

I skipped a lot of posts that seem to be arguing about whether or not “race” is a meaningful or valid word.
[/quote]

Speaking of which, if you’re going to claim to be “reasonable”, it’s rather odd that you also skip over whether or not the very categories being used to delineate and define an issue, the categories which determine what actions are to be taken are, themselves, valid and coherent categories which have sufficient self-continence, or invalid categories which are sloppy, haphazard, arbitrary and malleable.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

Who is arguing for MORE AA?
[/quote]

Every single person who is arguing that it has to continue until tomorrow or beyond. 101 days of a program is obviously more of the program than 100 days.

[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]

Like I said before, AA is race based because the injustices that necessitate AA was race based.
[/quote]

As already proven logically and factually, AA can’t do anything about historical injustices, does not and almost definitely can not do anything about current bias-based injustices, actively and thoroughly prohibits the end of racist policies as it is a racist policy itself, applies to those who have no need for remedy and no history of oppression in America, and so, in short, is not necessitated by any of those claims. A program can’t be necessitated by problems which it can’t actually address.

[tomndebb]

[QUOTE=diggleblop]
AA is racism, plain and simple.
[/QUOTE]
No, it is not.

The quotas and set-asides that are the primary points under discussion in this thread are, arguably, racist. However, AA is a broader set of actions and a simplistic claim that "“AA is racism, plain and simple” demonstrates a serious ignorance of AA in its origins and its history in the U.S.

[FinnAgain]

[QUOTE=tomndebb]
No, it is not.

The quotas and set-asides that are the primary points under discussion in this thread are, arguably, racist. However, AA is a broader set of actions and a simplistic claim that "“AA is racism, plain and simple” demonstrates a serious ignorance of AA in its origins and its history in the U.S.
[/QUOTE]

But what is AA if not the quotas, preferential treatment and set asides?
I’m not asking to nitpick, this is an honest question… if you take away those things, what’s actually left over?