Giving a job to the most quialified applicant is not racism, amigo.
However…giving a job to somebody who is NOT the most qualfied but meets pre-set AA-ordained demographic quotas IS racism. Since it is, irrefutably, admitting that the person is getting the job becasue of his or her ethnicity.
What part of this equation do you not understand? There is no “pre-existing racism” to reverse (or, in your words, to reverser) if jobs and academic appointments go to the most qualified applicant.
**AA = using race as a criteria to award jobs or appointments.
Thus, AA = using race as a determinant factor.
Thus, AA = Racism.**
I think maybe you are not wholly familiar with all that AA entails. Or are confusing it with “Equal Opportunity.” (which I am fully in favor of, btw.)
Well I know in at least some senses where that’s true. For example, it can be very beneficial to an application if you have a parent who went to that college (a family with two or more generations going to the same college is much more likely to donate at some future time).
This is something that disproportionately benefits whites.
Well no-one here is saying that. If your point is that some people are wrong about some things, I agree.
I think any country should either be Equal Opportunity or trying to become that way as soon as possible. The goal should always be a meritocracy.
But here’s why the US has AA, and hear me out:
The United States is a special case: slavery was legal for longer than most of the developed world, then blacks were still treated appallingly following the civil war (as they bore much of the brunt of the resentment for the war). They only fully achieved civil rights in the second half of the 20th century.
And this is all in a country with extremely low social mobility.
So we would expect blacks to be underperforming right now, relative to whatever their potential is. What I mean by that is, if you want to believe blacks have a lower IQ on average and can only reach X level in society on average, well we’d expect them to be lower than X right now due to the inherent disadvantage of being the descendents of an impoverished and uneducated populace, in a country with low social mobility.
Now, one response to this is we just shrug. We set up society to be as close as we can to a meritocracy and just accept the fact that blacks will underperform for a long time. Eventually it should all even out, right?
But generally it’s not good for societies to live with imbalances like that. It can lead to social unrest. Hastening that process is an attempt to avert such problems.
But how to determine who is the most qualified applicant? Is a 4.0 student from a wealthy intensely academically-oriented family in a private school with multiple private tutors better qualified than a 3.8 student from an inner city public school with no father and a working mother without a high school education? The numbers themselves don’t tell the whole story.
And that’s just past racism built into the American experience. There is also current racism. People who make hiring decisions are people. People are influenced by unconscious biases. If 40% of the qualified applicants to your company are black and latino but only 10% of new hires are from those groups then it’s very likely bias is causing your company to overlook some of the best candidates.
OK, but I think it’s worth at least mentioning things like legacy advantage, as the perception many have, like in this thread, is white people get to college “for reals” but black people have some unfair advantage.
I hear you. I wasn’t talking in general but wondering specifically why asians feel disadvantaged by affirmative action policies since it looks to me like they are facing discrimination for the spots where they are competing against whites. If that’s true then why should they expect their chances of gaining admission will improve if spots are not reserved for disadvantaged students? But I’m no expert so most likely there is an explanation.
Every applicant is competing against every other applicant. It’s not just Asians vs. whites; Asians and whites are jostling betwixt themselves and every other applying racial group.
Except that if the “thing done to counter or reverse the effects of pre-existing racism” has the effect of making one racial minority that has endured its own history of discrimination have to score higher than every other racial group, including the white-majority group, then it’s indeed creating a new racist policy effect/impact.
Quite to the contrary, the purpose of AA *is *to discriminate, just in a different way. An administrator who says, “Let’s raise black/Hispanic/Native American representation in our student body from 17% to 25% by admitting more such students and less of other students” *is *practicing discrimination, by definition.
I think “discrimination,” like “racism,” has taken on such deathly tones that people are not willing to acknowledge that something is “discriminatory” unless it’s truly a worst-case example of such. Which allows a lot of lesser discrimination to slide by unaddressed.
I think the reason they don’t do this is not because of some inherent limitation but because a degree of exclusivity is part of the brand. If a million Harvard degrees are awarded this year, maybe a Harvard degree doesn’t seem so special next year (even if nothing was changed about the entrance requirements). Then next year you have trouble filling all those spots.
This kind of prestige is a big part of the college business model. I can download a lot of the course material from Harvard, Yale, MIT etc and sit exams to prove I understood it. But I wouldn’t belong to the Harvard alumnus tribe, which is something a lot of businesses select for.
So instead we pay to go college.
I’m not sure how affirmative action works for higher education. I’m assuming they don’t have quotas and are giving black and latino applicants “extra credit” somehow to bring in enough of those students to reach the school’s diversity goals. So students from those groups aren’t really competing with white and asian students. They are competing among themselves. If the school starts getting more accomplished applications from blacks and latinos they won’t need to give each as much extra credit to maintain their goals. Thus the percentage of those groups in the freshman class remains approximately the same.
I am asking about the rest of the students and my question is this: if there are a lot of more highly qualified asian students being denied admission to colleges then how come they aren’t pushing out the white students? Yes, I know there are legacy advantages for a lot of white students but if the problem is as bad as people are saying then why aren’t asian students increasing their representation on campuses by displacing whites without legacy advantages?
My point being that if asians are being discriminated against for these open spots now then why should they expect to increase their representation in colleges if affirmative action for blacks and latinos is curtailed?
And again, I’m not claiming to have uncovered some profound wisdom here. I expect that there is an answer to my question but I’m not informed enough to know.
Not so much for hard sciences, its right up there of course, but CalTech is probably the best in those disciplines. Bit like Imperial College is is in the UK vis a via Oxbridge.
The impression I get is that the kids getting into these top tier schools (Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, etc.) are all top tier kids (with the exception of legacy kids, who tend to still be pretty darn good). Harvard isn’t letting in black kids with a 29 ACT and a 3.5 and rejecting white and Asian kids with a 32 ACT and a 3.7. At the point where you reject 90% of your applicants, it often comes down to “we have six ranked violinist, and seven state Science fair winners, but here is a kid who had a set of unique experiences to bring to the school.” i.e. no one has objectively lower qualifications - except perhaps the legacy kids. Some kids might have subjectively lower qualifications.
Even the objectively low qualifications is interesting - because objective measures aren’t all objective. We know there is a racial bias to testing - which is some of the most objective measures we have. But high school grades are also highly subjective - some schools just grade a lot harder than other schools. Some schools offer a lot of weighted coursework, other schools offer none.
This site has some data for “10 highly selective universities”, but it’s 20 years out of date:
They used the white ACT/SAT scores as the base and found that Blacks were -3.8/-310 and Asians were +3.4/+140 on the ACT/SAT. That’s a huge swing somewhere in the neighborhood of one or two orders of magnitude. I’m guesstimating here, but I’d put the average Asian score somewhere in the 99th percentile while the Black one would be more like 60-70th percentile.
If you accept that, like most human attributes, academic excellence is a normal distribution you will always be able to select the cream from the milk. Take basketball ability, for example. NBA HOFs are an order of magnitude better than NBA all-stars who are an order of magnitude better than NBA players. That pattern repeats all the way down to the kid who couldn’t make the middle school team vs the one who did. It’s never going to the be the case where you can draw a line and say everyone above this line is effectively the same.
I see it differently. I don’t think you need affirmative action for there to be discrimination against Asians. Harvard capped the number of Jews it admitted for a long time without any affirmative action driving that discrimination against the Jews. All that was required was an aversion to having too many of the wrong kind of people attending.
If they are the best applicants, why not? There are 50% whites, why isn’t that not ideal?
I don’t see how that is the case. How does affirmative action peg the asian admission population at 20%? As the Hispanic population grew over the last 20 or 30 years, their cohort in the freshman class at top colleges grew in tandem (more or less). The Asian population grew even faster and yet their percentage of the entering class at top schools remained flat. Those extra Hispanic students didn’t eat into the Asian cohort, it ate into the white cohort. Asians were capped at 20% and that pool was competitive enough that Asians hit the cap every year. If there was no cap on Asians then we might see some marginal effect on Asian admissions but right now affirmative action has almost no effect on that 20% number for Asians.
Affirmative action purely for the sake of racial diversity is in fact racial discrimination. I think people have said this several times over the last decade.
But some forms of affirmative action are not racism. For example, I think there is a benefit to having more black cops and judges and doctors serving their community. We had centuries of white cops and judges and doctors serving black communities and we got some bad results so we are intentionally tilting the playing field to create more black cops, judges and doctors.
There’s also that whole slavery and segregation thing for blacks and genocide for American Indians that I think could justify racial preferences.