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On July 22 2014 04:28 L1ghtning wrote:Show nested quote +On July 22 2014 02:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 21 2014 23:45 docvoc wrote:On July 21 2014 14:01 deth2munkies wrote:
Affirmative action is merely a shitty remedy to a real problem: the inequality of the education system. Poor predominantly black areas have high dropout rates and overall crappier high schools which make them less likely to get into college. The overall costs associated with college and the related cultural stigma against college in extreme poverty areas all stacks the odds against black people going to college.
Fixing the underlying problems is a lot harder than saying "give us your undereducated black students so that we may hopefully be able to educate them". Anecdotal conversations with several admissions faculty members (including one at UT) also point out another ugly truth: affirmative action students typically do significantly worse in classes than those accepted on the merits.
Affirmative action is just a way to alleviate white guilt and make people feel better when in reality the underlying problems in the education system go unfixed. Comparatively few people that end up getting into college solely on affirmative action grounds end up doing well and making the most of their education. I'm all for burning the education system to the ground and fixing it again, but I'm in the minority. In the meantime, cut this shit out. Except from what I've seen, affirmative action isn't just a shitty remedy, it also exacerbates the problem. Instead of looking at a students background, it puts their race as the focal point. Instead of seeing if they come from a problem area or if they are impoverished or if there are other things that place stumbling blocks in their path, it looks specifically at racial diversity in a lot of cases. A quota if you will. That quota gets filled up by the best "minority" students, rather than the ones that truly need help getting into college in many cases. Much like the national achievement scholarships (National Merit but only for people who are Black), the people that end scoring high enough to get the scholarship are not people from problem areas, but really smart kids who went to the best schools and aren't, nor have ever been, truly underprivileged. In short, affirmative action doesn't do very much to help those kids you say need help, but it does give a convenient excuse for universities to create the ecosystems they want based on race rather than other factors. Quotas are a bulllshit myth. Any use of quotas is just lazy people being lazy and has nothing to do with the law. What are you even talking about with universities creating ecosystems based on race? People hear whacko stories about what affirmative action is and they just accept them as gospel, without having a clue it seems? For the first 200 years of this country black people were property and then just above property. That whole time white people poor and rich enjoyed privilege that was explicitly banned for black people (and others) It's been less than 60 years of Black people being legally human and (at least on paper) treated close to equally, and it's been nothing but whining the whole damn time. Complained about how freeing slaves was going to hurt the white man, how letting black people read was endangering the white man, how black people being able to vote was going to ruin democracy, how allowing black people to go to the same school was dangerous for white folk, how the world would end if black people could eat at the same lunch counters, how interracial marriage was the death knell for the white race, how it's welfare queens sucking the budget dry, how black people have 'lost the culture of hard work', and the poor white students who perform equally to a black person and lose their spot to that equally qualified student. What I say to people who complain about AA is 'cry me a river, then build a bridge and get over it'. I can't walk around the streets of New York without having my civil rights violated or being murdered in broad daylight, so pardon me if I don't give a shit about the horrible situation of losing a seat in school to someone who is equally qualified to ones white self. I'd trade every social program and every affirmative action type law in a heartbeat for 1 year of 'slave like' law. Hell I wouldn't even care if white people didn't actually do any slave work. Just the change in law would be enough to do more to reset the balance than every previous law combined. It never fails the same people offended by affirmative action are the same ones who want to white wash America's history. The Forbes 400 is full of people who inherited more wealth than most black people will earn in a lifetime and they inherited it from companies and people who indirectly/directly benefited from discriminating/slavery much worse than any AA law. That legacy remains well beyond the Forbes 400. So as long as we don't mind letting people keep that dirty money it's only fair to balance it out a bit with a law like AA. Could it be updated? Of course. Just not by the half-wits in congress. So as was mentioned before, we could have an imperfect law like AA or we could have nothing. I certainly prefer the prior. I could see how a group who benefited massively from the 200+ years of reverse AA wouldn't want a law like that and could see it as unfair though... So, what you're saying is that you view whites and blacks as separate groups, and that any injustice against someone in the black group could be countered by creating an injustice for someone in the white group. This is your so called fairness. To you, fairness is not about justice for every single one of us, rather it's about creating categories arbitrarily and then slicing them into evenly sized chunks. You're also overlooking the fact that many blacks are descendants from white slave owners and that a lot of white ppl don't have relatives who were slave owners and that a lot of very wealthy cultural groups, like american jews and east asians are as successful as whites today, and they immigrated to the country after slavery was abolished. Asians need higher grades in america to enroll at universities, compared to all the other cultural groups, simply because they're asian. If you don't think this is unjust, you don't know what justice means. The only crime of the asian americans is that they're hardworking. You want to punish them for this.
Also, there's no such thing as "slave work". Slavery occurs when someone by force from some kind of indisputable authority, takes away your freedom of self. The only indisputable authority in a civilized country is the government, so it's only through the government that you can create and maintain slavery in a lawful society.
I'm sorry, but I cringed when you started talking about Asian Americans. You obviously know very little about Asian American issues if you make blanket statements such as that.
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On July 22 2014 09:24 Millitron wrote:
I hate when people bring up slavery when it comes to modern race relations. No one alive today was involved. Hell, most people alive today don't even have grandparents who were involved. Why should people today be treated differently for things that their ancestors did or endured ~150 years ago?
I'm 1/8th Greek, do I deserve special treatment from Turkey for all the oppression under the Ottoman Empire?
One doesn't have to have owned slaves or descended from those who did to enjoy the benefits it wrought? Not to mention, slavery may have ended a long time ago but oppression is alive today.
Your right they shouldn't be treated differently so lets stop people from inheriting companies and fortunes built by their ancestors long ago...
Like let's say maybe JP Morgan which offered loans while accepting slaves as collateral,or Norfolk Southern who still rides rails built by slaves who were rented to the railroad for ~$3,300 a year ( paid to the owner in today's dollars), or any of the other countless companies who were built on the backs of slaves. It amazing how successful people can be when they take another group of people and say they don't have any rights and we can make them work to death for free (the second being one of the least horrible things about slavery).
To go on, after slavery, plenty of companies abused minorities to their benefit in a variety of ways and continue to this day. Just look at the child labor/ safety laws relating to tobacco farms. They have kids out there in 90+ degree weather picking tobacco 12+ hours, wearing garbage bags (sweat suits) to reduce the instances of acute nicotine poisoning.
http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/l0fvyd/nicoteens
My point being that people don't have a problem keeping what was stolen during our history, but god forbid that legacy be considered for those who suffer as well as those who benefit.
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That reminds me, I gotta call my congressmen about that; and the white house line too.
I encourage others to do as well.
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On July 22 2014 13:35 Nesserev wrote:Please stop bringing up slavery, it has nothing to do with the discussion in this thread... it's true that a portion of the population has some ancestral relationship with slavery, which they either benefit from, or are disadvantaged by, but it's not relevant in the current spectrum of this discussion. Benefits/advantages can/have been the effect of many different things, if you want to involve slavery in this discussion, you have to involve the universe. So, to the discussion: should race be a factor in admissions to universities? Affirmative Action goes against the 'political liberal thought'. For those who don't know, it is the principle that the state has to make sure that every person has the right to make his/her own choices (within a certain frame), and have the same opportunities as a different person, regardless of race, religion, etc. This is the foundation of almost every Western culture, including the US. I don't think (read: I hope) that there's no one in this thread who thinks that this is a bad thing. + Show Spoiler [remarks] +
1. It has nothing to do with 'American liberalism'. Please, don't make this mistake.
2. This doesn't mean that any person can do whatever he/she wants. A person can choose to drive too fast, but then he/she can be punished for it. Equality of opportunity, NOT equality of effects.
Affirmative Action has the right intentions, but it's simply not the right way to approach the problem; and is it even targeting a 'problem' in the first place? It's true that certain portions of the general population don't get equal chances, but is this because of their race? No, it's because of their individual situation (financial, cultural, etc.), and thus, a solution should be applied to those problems. And, when people don't get equal chances because of their race, it's racism. Racism should be dealt with in a proper fashion. Analogism: "If someone is stabbing people, you don't resolve the problem by patching the victims up, you resolve it by taking away the knife from the stabber." You can't solve racism by giving 'minorities' benefits, but by getting rid of racism. The problem with Affirmative Action is that it isn't the right approach to solve the problem. Also, as someone mentioned quotas regarding women/minorities; they suffer from the same problem.
Just because people want to forget slavery, doesn't mean it isn't relevant to discussions about current discrimination. The same goes for segregation, and discriminatory laws. Another myth is that Affirmative action is only intended to address intentional, overt racism. It's not. Unintentional discrimination is an important (probably more so now) part of what Affirmative action is intended to address.
Most people who are so avidly against affirmative action seem not to understand, what it is, what it's for, or the historical context, among other aspects. It seems just comprehending what it is and what it does (as opposed to what people blame it for) would alleviate most of the complaints.
Also as I mentioned before 'quotas' are a myth.....Or just a lazy person being lazy.
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On July 22 2014 09:45 Shiragaku wrote:Show nested quote +On July 22 2014 04:28 L1ghtning wrote:On July 22 2014 02:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 21 2014 23:45 docvoc wrote:On July 21 2014 14:01 deth2munkies wrote:
Affirmative action is merely a shitty remedy to a real problem: the inequality of the education system. Poor predominantly black areas have high dropout rates and overall crappier high schools which make them less likely to get into college. The overall costs associated with college and the related cultural stigma against college in extreme poverty areas all stacks the odds against black people going to college.
Fixing the underlying problems is a lot harder than saying "give us your undereducated black students so that we may hopefully be able to educate them". Anecdotal conversations with several admissions faculty members (including one at UT) also point out another ugly truth: affirmative action students typically do significantly worse in classes than those accepted on the merits.
Affirmative action is just a way to alleviate white guilt and make people feel better when in reality the underlying problems in the education system go unfixed. Comparatively few people that end up getting into college solely on affirmative action grounds end up doing well and making the most of their education. I'm all for burning the education system to the ground and fixing it again, but I'm in the minority. In the meantime, cut this shit out. Except from what I've seen, affirmative action isn't just a shitty remedy, it also exacerbates the problem. Instead of looking at a students background, it puts their race as the focal point. Instead of seeing if they come from a problem area or if they are impoverished or if there are other things that place stumbling blocks in their path, it looks specifically at racial diversity in a lot of cases. A quota if you will. That quota gets filled up by the best "minority" students, rather than the ones that truly need help getting into college in many cases. Much like the national achievement scholarships (National Merit but only for people who are Black), the people that end scoring high enough to get the scholarship are not people from problem areas, but really smart kids who went to the best schools and aren't, nor have ever been, truly underprivileged. In short, affirmative action doesn't do very much to help those kids you say need help, but it does give a convenient excuse for universities to create the ecosystems they want based on race rather than other factors. Quotas are a bulllshit myth. Any use of quotas is just lazy people being lazy and has nothing to do with the law. What are you even talking about with universities creating ecosystems based on race? People hear whacko stories about what affirmative action is and they just accept them as gospel, without having a clue it seems? For the first 200 years of this country black people were property and then just above property. That whole time white people poor and rich enjoyed privilege that was explicitly banned for black people (and others) It's been less than 60 years of Black people being legally human and (at least on paper) treated close to equally, and it's been nothing but whining the whole damn time. Complained about how freeing slaves was going to hurt the white man, how letting black people read was endangering the white man, how black people being able to vote was going to ruin democracy, how allowing black people to go to the same school was dangerous for white folk, how the world would end if black people could eat at the same lunch counters, how interracial marriage was the death knell for the white race, how it's welfare queens sucking the budget dry, how black people have 'lost the culture of hard work', and the poor white students who perform equally to a black person and lose their spot to that equally qualified student. What I say to people who complain about AA is 'cry me a river, then build a bridge and get over it'. I can't walk around the streets of New York without having my civil rights violated or being murdered in broad daylight, so pardon me if I don't give a shit about the horrible situation of losing a seat in school to someone who is equally qualified to ones white self. I'd trade every social program and every affirmative action type law in a heartbeat for 1 year of 'slave like' law. Hell I wouldn't even care if white people didn't actually do any slave work. Just the change in law would be enough to do more to reset the balance than every previous law combined. It never fails the same people offended by affirmative action are the same ones who want to white wash America's history. The Forbes 400 is full of people who inherited more wealth than most black people will earn in a lifetime and they inherited it from companies and people who indirectly/directly benefited from discriminating/slavery much worse than any AA law. That legacy remains well beyond the Forbes 400. So as long as we don't mind letting people keep that dirty money it's only fair to balance it out a bit with a law like AA. Could it be updated? Of course. Just not by the half-wits in congress. So as was mentioned before, we could have an imperfect law like AA or we could have nothing. I certainly prefer the prior. I could see how a group who benefited massively from the 200+ years of reverse AA wouldn't want a law like that and could see it as unfair though... So, what you're saying is that you view whites and blacks as separate groups, and that any injustice against someone in the black group could be countered by creating an injustice for someone in the white group. This is your so called fairness. To you, fairness is not about justice for every single one of us, rather it's about creating categories arbitrarily and then slicing them into evenly sized chunks. You're also overlooking the fact that many blacks are descendants from white slave owners and that a lot of white ppl don't have relatives who were slave owners and that a lot of very wealthy cultural groups, like american jews and east asians are as successful as whites today, and they immigrated to the country after slavery was abolished. Asians need higher grades in america to enroll at universities, compared to all the other cultural groups, simply because they're asian. If you don't think this is unjust, you don't know what justice means. The only crime of the asian americans is that they're hardworking. You want to punish them for this.
Also, there's no such thing as "slave work". Slavery occurs when someone by force from some kind of indisputable authority, takes away your freedom of self. The only indisputable authority in a civilized country is the government, so it's only through the government that you can create and maintain slavery in a lawful society. I'm sorry, but I cringed when you started talking about Asian Americans. You obviously know very little about Asian American issues if you make blanket statements such as that.
Please educate me, oh expert on asian americans.
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On July 22 2014 06:08 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 22 2014 04:28 L1ghtning wrote:On July 22 2014 02:00 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 21 2014 23:45 docvoc wrote:On July 21 2014 14:01 deth2munkies wrote:
Affirmative action is merely a shitty remedy to a real problem: the inequality of the education system. Poor predominantly black areas have high dropout rates and overall crappier high schools which make them less likely to get into college. The overall costs associated with college and the related cultural stigma against college in extreme poverty areas all stacks the odds against black people going to college.
Fixing the underlying problems is a lot harder than saying "give us your undereducated black students so that we may hopefully be able to educate them". Anecdotal conversations with several admissions faculty members (including one at UT) also point out another ugly truth: affirmative action students typically do significantly worse in classes than those accepted on the merits.
Affirmative action is just a way to alleviate white guilt and make people feel better when in reality the underlying problems in the education system go unfixed. Comparatively few people that end up getting into college solely on affirmative action grounds end up doing well and making the most of their education. I'm all for burning the education system to the ground and fixing it again, but I'm in the minority. In the meantime, cut this shit out. Except from what I've seen, affirmative action isn't just a shitty remedy, it also exacerbates the problem. Instead of looking at a students background, it puts their race as the focal point. Instead of seeing if they come from a problem area or if they are impoverished or if there are other things that place stumbling blocks in their path, it looks specifically at racial diversity in a lot of cases. A quota if you will. That quota gets filled up by the best "minority" students, rather than the ones that truly need help getting into college in many cases. Much like the national achievement scholarships (National Merit but only for people who are Black), the people that end scoring high enough to get the scholarship are not people from problem areas, but really smart kids who went to the best schools and aren't, nor have ever been, truly underprivileged. In short, affirmative action doesn't do very much to help those kids you say need help, but it does give a convenient excuse for universities to create the ecosystems they want based on race rather than other factors. Quotas are a bulllshit myth. Any use of quotas is just lazy people being lazy and has nothing to do with the law. What are you even talking about with universities creating ecosystems based on race? People hear whacko stories about what affirmative action is and they just accept them as gospel, without having a clue it seems? For the first 200 years of this country black people were property and then just above property. That whole time white people poor and rich enjoyed privilege that was explicitly banned for black people (and others) It's been less than 60 years of Black people being legally human and (at least on paper) treated close to equally, and it's been nothing but whining the whole damn time. Complained about how freeing slaves was going to hurt the white man, how letting black people read was endangering the white man, how black people being able to vote was going to ruin democracy, how allowing black people to go to the same school was dangerous for white folk, how the world would end if black people could eat at the same lunch counters, how interracial marriage was the death knell for the white race, how it's welfare queens sucking the budget dry, how black people have 'lost the culture of hard work', and the poor white students who perform equally to a black person and lose their spot to that equally qualified student. What I say to people who complain about AA is 'cry me a river, then build a bridge and get over it'. I can't walk around the streets of New York without having my civil rights violated or being murdered in broad daylight, so pardon me if I don't give a shit about the horrible situation of losing a seat in school to someone who is equally qualified to ones white self. I'd trade every social program and every affirmative action type law in a heartbeat for 1 year of 'slave like' law. Hell I wouldn't even care if white people didn't actually do any slave work. Just the change in law would be enough to do more to reset the balance than every previous law combined. It never fails the same people offended by affirmative action are the same ones who want to white wash America's history. The Forbes 400 is full of people who inherited more wealth than most black people will earn in a lifetime and they inherited it from companies and people who indirectly/directly benefited from discriminating/slavery much worse than any AA law. That legacy remains well beyond the Forbes 400. So as long as we don't mind letting people keep that dirty money it's only fair to balance it out a bit with a law like AA. Could it be updated? Of course. Just not by the half-wits in congress. So as was mentioned before, we could have an imperfect law like AA or we could have nothing. I certainly prefer the prior. I could see how a group who benefited massively from the 200+ years of reverse AA wouldn't want a law like that and could see it as unfair though... So, what you're saying is that you view whites and blacks as separate groups, and that any injustice against someone in the black group could be countered by creating an injustice for someone in the white group. This is your so called fairness. To you, fairness is not about justice for every single one of us, rather it's about creating categories arbitrarily and then slicing them into evenly sized chunks. You're also overlooking the fact that many blacks are descendants from white slave owners and that a lot of white ppl don't have relatives who were slave owners and that a lot of very wealthy cultural groups, like american jews and east asians are as successful as whites today, and they immigrated to the country after slavery was abolished. Asians need higher grades in america to enroll at universities, compared to all the other cultural groups, simply because they're asian. If you don't think this is unjust, you don't know what justice means. The only crime of the asian americans is that they're hardworking. You want to punish them for this. Also, there's no such thing as "slave work". Slavery occurs when someone by force from some kind of indisputable authority, takes away your freedom of self. The only indisputable authority in a civilized country is the government, so it's only through the government that you can create and maintain slavery in a lawful society. I don't 'view whites and blacks as different groups', you can look at countless statistics to see that in practicality they obviously are. Not because I wish it, but due to our history and everyday realities. I admit AA is a poor way to address the issues but again it's that or nothing not some better alternative(political reality). Trust me, I have had these discussions far too many times and done far to much research to not be aware of discrimination and economic achievements of other races. Your assertion about Asian Americans is pretty unfounded and even if it did exist, has little to nothing to do with affirmative action. If anything it is just evidence of the history of white privilege and it's impact on many different people. Asians, like most minorities, suffer from the inequity of legacy admissions and historically discriminative practices. Finally you just completely missed the point about 'slave like law'
If you admited that AA is a poor way to address the issue, then you wouldn't support it. Colleges that stopped AA practices, saw mainly increases in asian students when they started picking the students based on merit alone. AA may be designed to take away opportunities from white ppl, but because asians are more successful than whites on avg, it hits asians even harder.
You can't achieve any amount of justice as long as you look at categories rather than individuals. White ppl are more likely to have been brought up in a rich household, which would have made them privileged, but this is not true all across the board.
Sweden is a very homogenous country by american standards, and all studies that has been made here have shown that how successful you become in school, is directly linked to your parents income. The fact that we have free education, which logically should help those who come from poor households doesn't seem to matter.
Privilege is not about skin color, it's about the quality of your parents and your surroundings.
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Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan, or if one plays the cello and the other lacrosse. Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few exceptions, but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places are diverse is if that’s all you’ve ever seen.
Let’s not kid ourselves: The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere
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EPT
