dj_bigbird 2007-08-26 12:18:25 PM
Why do we still care what skin color someone has?

Because there's a basic fundamental difference between "You have cancer, therefore I hate you and want to kill you and single you out entirely for that reason," and saying, "You have cancer, therefore I want to single you out and give you this specific remedy."

The first case clearly takes cancer into account and harms against people who have cancer. The second case takes cancer into account, but doesn't necessarily harm anyone. See the difference? Yes, there are some white people who claim that they are harmed by Affirmative Action, but odds are that what they lose due to affirmative action is far outweighed by the advantages they gain simply for being white.

For instance, in controlled studies where black people and white people were given similar backgrounds and resumes, they found that white people who claimed to serve 18 months in prison for selling crack still have a better chance of finding a job than a black person with a clean record. The disadvantage you get for being black is greater than the disadvange you would get from being a convicted felon.

In both cases, the condition is something beyond your control, that severely affects your quality of life. While cancer is inherently bad for you, being a minority is usually treated as bad by society. In both cases, people who believe that the problem still exists tend to also believe that the problem should be corrected. The exceptions are the people who have deluded themselves into believing that racism is no longer an issue, and libertarians, who frankly don't give a damn about whether or not racism occurs in the event that it might actually require some form of action either from themselves, or from the state.

pipettemonkey2007-08-26 04:11:29 PM

FYI, that study isn't perhaps the best one to illustrate your point. Affirmative action has nothing to do with the low end jobs that study targeted. In fact, the two are entirely different beasts.

Affirmative action is aimed at higher education levels and is institutionalized discrimination.

I can point to other studies such as the one showing that people with white names have a 50% better chance of getting a callback than people with white names depsite identical resumes, and that white people with high honors and education get a much bigger advantage and payoff than black people do. I can also point to studies showing that people with white sounding voices have a much better chance of finding an apartment (which conveniently becomes unavailable once the landlord realizes that the caller was actually black.).

Contrary to your assertions, it does negatively affect anyone who is not a member of the targeted group. Ex: if there are 100 slots for admission and 20 are reserved for a targeted group

Except that's not how AA works anymore. Quotas are no longer used. What AA says is that if you have equally qualified blacks and equally qualified whites and you can decide, then the black guy should probably get some degree of preference as a tie breaker. The only people white people who would be harmed in such a system are the ones with borderline talent. Amazingly, the ones with borderline talent are also the most likely to benefit from racism!

A real life example of this is medical school admissions. The cutoffs for admission are skewed based on skin color. MCATs and GPAs are primary factors in admission. It varies by institution, but the cutoffs per ethnic group follow loosely:
Asian 32 MCAT, 3.85 GPA
White 29 / 3.7
Hispanic 27 / 3.5
Black 25 / 3.2

So there has never been a white person in all of history who managed to get in with a 25/3.2? I seriously doubt that.

As Thomas Sowell and several other critics have pointed out, this does nothing to help poor families without a strong background

It also doens't help people who have cancer and AIDS. The issue of poverty is very distinct from race. Black people still suffer more even when socioeconomic class is factored into the equation.

How is the poor, first-generation Vietnamese immigrant with a 30/3.7 somehow inherently less qualified for admissions than that affluent Ghana immigrant with a 28/3.5?

Yes, let's present extreme situations to disprove something. Look dude, all admissions standards are going to be based on the law of averages. There's no gaurantee that a person with a 1500 is better than a person with a 1400, but the law of averages says that he's probably is. Maybe the person with a 1400 just got into a car accident the previous day, and maybe the guy with a 1500 paid $10,000 for the best tutors in the world. We don't know.

The study you referred to is actually a reflection on the ignorance of low-end job managers than it is on institutionalized racism

Yeah, I didn't realize that racism magically dissapeared once you reached beyond the status of entry level employer. Thank you for enlightening us.

alexanderplatz 2007-08-26 04:24:20 PM
schrodinger opposition to affirmative action is not based on the assumption that racism no longer exists. The existence of racism does not justify in the first place a racist system of access to higher education and jobs.

Except you don't seem to actually understand what that word even means.

rac·ism [rey-siz-uhm] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1.a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2.a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3.hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

Affirmative action doesn't fit any of those definitions. Again, there's a big difference between saying "You have cancer, therefore I hate you and want you to die," and saying, "You have cancer, therefore I would like to give you access to medicine."

To quote a Supreme Court justice, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

There's a serial killer on the loose who's singling out women who fit a certain profile as his targets. Therefore, the best way for the police to stop the serial killer would be to not single out certain women who fit a certain profile when anticipating his next move. Instead, they should cast a wide net, because if they try to anticipate his next target, then they'll be just as bad!

If you support affirmative action then you are okay with the idea that some individual, somewhere, got the short stick because of their race

And in order to asusme that the white guy gets the "short stick", you have to assume that the white guy was entitled to the long stick in the first place.

I do not agree with that assumption.

A much more fair system would be one that gave assistance to the poor regardless of race.

Except that poor black people suffer more than poor white people, and rich black people suffer more than rich white people.

In order for a black man to succeed as wel as a black man, a black man would essentially have to work twice as hard. What you're doing is adding an additional step of punishing him for working twice as hard as a result. If I'm a black guy who works 80 hour weeks so my kids will have a fighting chance in a racist society, then the absolute last thing I need to be told is, "Hey, you work too hard compared to other black people, so we're going to make it more difficult on your kids as a result."

The fact is, there is a strong correlation between race and poverty. However, most poor black people aren't going to be qualified to apply for college, and most qualified black people who apply for college aren't going to be poor. So who benefits? Poor white people. Yay!

If you want to address the issue of poverty, then do that separately. There's no reason you can't do both.

pipettemonkey2007-08-26 04:44:36 PM

You're just bolstering my points. How does affirmative action help someone get an apartment? How does affirmative action help someone get a callback for a sales position? It doesn't!

No, but it does help out other people from other situations who suffer the same problem.

Dude, how the heck do you figure affirmative action works this way? If that is the case, then affirmative action is very rare.

You pretty much look at the statistics and the breakdowns. "Okay, we've admitted X number of white people, who have merit level X. Why haven't we admitted any black students with merit level X, given that we already have so many white students, and so few black ones?" Again, any system that chooses one applicant over another has to come up with some means of quantifying and comparing their abilities.

I have a better idea: how about removing the race field from all applications and admissions? To control for that pesky name thing, you can have a blind application where the name has been redacted and replaced with a number by HR.

It's like the chinese proverb about a guy who points to the moon with his finger and says "Look at that!", and the guy who he's standing next to responds by staring at his finger.

The issue isn't, "OMG, people with black sounding names are being discriminated against, we need to make a system where names aren't a factor!" The problem is, people are being discriminated against for being black, and a black sounding names is one of the early indicators of blackness. The same goes for having a black sounding voice, even when the grammar is already factored out and accounted for. The problem isn't that people are being discriminated against in entry level positions and in apartments, the problem is that they're being discriminated against in general.

Just about any job interview will require you to meet up with your potential employers face to face at some point, so that they can see how you respond to interview questions. It's like Gatacca, where a seeminglylegal drug urine test can be used for an illegal genetics screening. School admissions may be different, but as the data already shows, the same level of education will give a white person far more opprotunity than it will give a black person, when all other factors are considered. Since black people need far more education and honors than white people do in order to get ahead, it doesn't make any sense to punish them further by making it even harder for them to get that education in the first place.

Then everyone can be evaluated on their merits! *shocker*

And how can you be certain that everyone who's white gets by on merit, and everyone who's black doesn't get by on merit?

Again, look at the study showing that white crack dealers have a better chance of finding work than black people who haven't convicted any crimes. Either white people are getting far more opprotunities than their merit would suggest, black people are getting far fewer opprotunities than their merit would suggest, or some combination of both. You're assumption that an AA-free world would somehow judge everyone entirely by merit is entirely meritless.

alexanderplatz 2007-08-26 05:09:27 PM
schrodinger first off drop the whole cancer metaphor. Just speak plain, and say what you mean.

You were making a flawed argument that you can't address a problem that targets specific individuals based on a given criteria when you yourself target specific individuals based on a given criteria. I presented a counter example, thus undermining your initial reasoning. How about instead of attacking me for presenting a counter example, you either address it, or explain why the two are different in such a way that it would affect the validity of the comparison?

The issue isn't "race is being considered." Race is always being considered, whether you want to admit it or not. The issue is what happens afterwards. The problems with racism isn't that it considers race (which isn't the definition of racism), but that it uses its consideration of race to do something very, very bad (which usually does fit the definition of racism.).

With respect to the white person supposedly being entitled to the long stick, you misunderstand. No one is entitled to the "long stick." Everyone is entitled to a fair shot at the long stick though.

Which study after study shows is not the case when you remove AA.

Affirmative action gives a leg up to one party based on their race and in turn puts someone at a disadvantage because of their race.

Again, only people of borderline merit, who are the most likely to benefit from pro-white racism in the absense of AA. The high achieving white people are going to succeed with or without AA, and the low achieing white people will likely fail with or without AA. The borderline individuals are the most likely to get a job over a black person based entirely on race, which is therefore corrected by AA.

Again, if white people have 50% more opprotunity than black people simply for being white, then how do you intend to address that discrepency, without either increasing the number of availble of opprotunities for black people, or increasing the number of opprotunities for black people? Mind you, in the absense of AA, the presence of white people would only go up a few percent, at most, meaning that white they gain from being white is far more than what they lose from being white. From your perspective, only the part where they lose is unfair, even though it's far more insignificant in practice.

You cite a dictionary definition of racism as if came down from the mount in Moses' hand, still sizzling and smoking from the hand of God Almighty.

Yeah, how dare people use things like the dictionary in order to determine whether or not the use of a phrase is accurate? It's so much better to simply throw around baseless wrods that you don't know or understand. Hey Alexander, I deem you a child molestor. Sure, you might not be a child molestor according to the dictionary definition, or the legal definition, but IMO, you still are one. So there!

Seriously, if you don't even understand what the word entails, then what makes you think that you understand the actual problem?

But fine, have it your way on the semantic point. Doesn't change the fact that racial discrimination is immoral and illegal. And affirmative action is precisely racial discrimination

Cut the BS. Affirmative action learly isn't illegal in any area where it's practiced, and considering that you don't even have the faintest clue about what racism even is, I don't see what your grounds for calling it "immoral" are. Oh no, every once in a while, a qualified black guy might get the position over an equally qualified white guy. How awful!

Whether poor black people suffer more than poor white people is entirely subjective.

No, it's not. We can measure it in studies and achievement scores. Poor white people do better on the SATs than poor black people, likely due to various cultural biases. Resumes with white sounding names get a better response than identical resumes with black sounding names, where the difference in socio-economic status is literally non-existent, because the people in question don't actually exist.

The problem is five fold:

1) White people are far more likely to be well off than black people
2) In the event that the white person and black person are both poor, the white person is far more likely to score better on achievements test.
3) In the even that the white person and black person are both poor, and both achieve equally, the white person is far more likely to be better recieved.
4) Poor white people far outnumber poor black people, mainly because there are more white people in general. THerefore, any shift from race to poverty will disproptionately help out white people.
5) Black people are far more likely to be convicted of crimes than white people. Yet even when they avoid crime altogether, they still have less opprotunity than convicted white people.

When you go visit most colleges today, do you honestly think to yourself, "Gee, the biggest problem with this place is that there are too many black people!"

If not, then why would you honestly support a program that would only succeed in giving black people even fewer opprotunities, and handing those opprotunities to white people instead, which is the only possible result?

BTW, Alex, I'm just curious: Do you also find it racist when people hold screenings for sickle cell anemia for black people? After all, sickle cell anemia is a disease that primarily affects people of African descent. Therefore, the best way to treat the disease is to ignore the factor of race when selecting potential candidates for screening.

What about voter suppression. Black people tend to be disproportionately targetted by voter suppression efforts. In the 60s, civil rights workers attempted to work with the black community to get people to vote. But they didn't go to the white communities to encourage white people to vote. Therefore, the civil rights workers at the time were racist, and part of the very problem they were trying to stop!

Please.