And still no cite that AA primarily benefits whites.
[QUOTE=monstro]
Um, what?
My logic doesn’t allow for this at all.
[/quote]
…
- It is okay to discriminate for someone and against someone else if it serves a ‘noble’ goal.
- Feeding your family and putting your children through college is a noble goal.
- Thus, it is okay to discriminate against minorities if a business owner thinks he’ll make more money because his clients like white people more.
QED.
That is exactly what your logic yields. That you don’t support is shows something about whether your logic is reason or rationalization. As does your comment about not wanting a school that wasn’t an accurate “microcosm”. You don’t actually want a microcosm either, of course. You don’t want to make sure that some of the children are living below the poverty line, or that some are on the edge of starvation, or that some girls have undergone genital mutilation, that some are property in human trafficking schemes, let alone that crimes like murder, robbery and rape are accurate represented in the school on a per capita basis, let alone the fact that most people in the world don’t speak English, so most people in the class shouldn’t, either. Do you?
Your concern that a school isn’t an accurate ‘microcosm’ is just sophistry, right? Especially since it’s a very, very rare place where there is actual demographics that mirror the statistics of the population at large. In point of fact, non-homogeneously mixed groups are the macrocosm which a microcosm would actually mirror. The “microcosm” nature of a setting isn’t your actual concern, having the ‘correct’ percent of groups, however they’re actually going to be defined, is.
Much like your talk about the desirability of a “microcosm”, your claim that discrimination is okay is a malleable, mutable and self serving bit of rationalization rather than a consistent, coherent or cogent principle.
As for your examples:
[QUOTE=monstro]
Just looking at numbers, the first candidate comes out on top. Her grades are better, her schools are superior. She has more experience in leadership and seems like a better educator. But the second candidate’s no slouch. He’s got people skills and a demonstrated ability to reach kids. He’s also a great disciplinarian–something I need more than a math teacher.
[/quote]
None of this is contradictory. Merit involves more than just numbers. Obviously, how someone can do their job is part of merit.
[QUOTE=monstro]
Things that are also in his favor are his gender and his race. The absence of black males in my faculty roster lies in stark contrast to their abundance in my detention hall.
[/quote]
Which has nothing, whatever, to do with job performance.
And yet again, your logic explicitly justifies bigotry and racism. If I had a school where the majority of students in detention were white, should I discriminate against hiring a black man? Your logic says ‘yes’.
Nor have you given any actual reason why a qualified white teacher couldn’t do the job with a group of black students in detention. You’ve suggested lots of possibilities (again, generalities over actual instances) and actual included the possibility of hysterical and false claims of bias in the calculus. This, I would note, again shows malleable logic… as black students who might not feel comfortable with a white teacher would be cause to discriminate against white teachers, but a business man whose clients would feel uncomfortable with a black receptionist is a racist if he discriminates against black applicants. What, we should bend to racism when it comes from black kids in detention, but not white customers?
[QUOTE=monstro]
See how I weighed by the tangible (grades, schooling, accomplishments) with the intangible qualities?
[/quote]
You did no such thing.
You weighed job-performance related matters as job-performance related matters, and then gave extra points to someone because he happened to be the same race as students in detention.
Moreover, your example would have worked the same exact way had we taken out the totally irrelevant issues of race and gender. A candidate who can’t instill discipline can’t instill discipline even if she tans in the shade and has a vagina. A teacher who can, can whether or not he’s dark as tar and hung like a Clydesdale.
[QUOTE=monstro]
And see how the “noble goal” went beyond my individual needs, but to the n] eeds of the community that I serve?
[/quote]
A No True Scotsman fallacy with a side order of collectivism thrown in for good measure. It’s not a noble goal for someone to want to put their children through college and give their family a nice life, but giving those things to others instead is a virtue. It’s not a virtue if you enjoy it, but it is when others do.
Like I showed above, your logic is rationalization and not reasoning. You have to play fast and loose with what “noble” means, and have to apply a personal, subjective and idiosyncratic definition in order for your train of logic not to derail like a spastic bullet train.
[QUOTE=monstro]
But it would be just as wrong to say that merits can always be measured and quantified, and that the “best” person for the job is always the one who wins out on paper.
[/quote]
Nobody said it did. Charisma, for instance, is mighty hard to show on a transcript.
[QUOTE=monstro]
When doing so can be linked to benefits in the community, I think it’s justified.
[/QUOTE]
No, that’s another rationalization. How do you determine who the “community” is, or which among them gets to decide what they think is best? If a community is 51% white bigots, and 49% minorities, can the 51% decide it’s best for the community to institute Jim Crow laws? What if 90% of the community are white non-bigots and 10% are minorities. Is something that benefits the 10% but not the 90% for the benefit of the community? Or is something that benefits 90% but doesn’t benefit, or even harms the 10%? Who decides where the community ends or begins? Is it drawn by county line? City line? School district lines? What if there is gerrymandering going on? How do the divisions within a “community” get drawn? Does a wealthy black family who are opposed to AA count in a tally of those who it is “good for” along with a non-wealthy black family? Does someone fresh off a plane from Kenya count the same as someone whose ancestors were slaves in the US? How about poor people? Are all poor people, regardless of race, a “group”? Or just the poor people with the [del]right[/del] [del]wrong[/del] selected for color of skin?
Who gets to decide? You? The minority? The majority?
Never mind, of course, that “communities” are generalizations that don’t actually exist. You can not touch a community. You cannot taste, see, hear, smell or actually interact with it. There are just people, people whose individual needs you are quite happy to scrap, without a second thought, if it helps “the community”, whatever and whoever that is, exactly.
That’s actually highly elucidative. You are unable to differentiate race, which is an intrinsic variable, from crime, which is an external variable. Race. Does. Not. Matter. You are smart or stupid regardless of what color skin you have. You are an honest man or a thief no matter where your grandparents came from. It doesn’t actually matter.
That someone people act as if it does doesn’t mean that it actually does. We can always feel free to invent new bigotries and prejudices, that doesn’t mean they have any actual objective validity. Hating red haired people doesn’t mean that having red hair actually matters, merely that some people act as if it did.
- A denial of racism. One’s individual merits are set by one’s individual abilities, not the color of their skin.
- Race doesn’t exist. Biologically, it is as meaningful as phrenology. That we have a socially constructed category that people worship as if it was real doesn’t mean jack shit. Angels aren’t real, either.
:dubious:
That’s like saying that when someone creates a job and is a bigot, planning on only hiring white people, that they’re not taking a job away from blacks.
Again, malleable logic designed to rationalize a position.
Again, you logic is fundamentally racist/sexist/bigoted. Giving a scholarship to people whose parents have died actually tells us something about them, that’s an operational definition. You know, for a fact that everybody whose parents have died has had to deal with the loss of their parents. And that operational definition cannot be modified by sexism, racism, or bigotry. A Jew, woman, a black man whose parents died all have dead parents.
All you know about someone who is a minority, is that they happen to be labeled as part of that minority. Period. Acting as if you know a damn thing about someone because of their ‘group’ is just a racist when a multiculturalism does it as when a Klanner does it, even if the multi does it for “noble” purposes. ’
Judging based on race is racism.
Even though some people ardently want to redefine racism to mean not judging based on race.
When you get to the point in your argument that you actually claim that giving engineering scholarships to engineering students is the same as supporting chauvinism, or showing favoritism to minorities? Again, rationalization, not reason.
Appeal to authority and tu quoque fallacies, respectively.
But at least you’ve come to the point where you explicitly admit you support an unfair policy.