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So, genuine question: Is affirmative action good or bad?
It's good.
There are people who are arguing it's bad. They are either doing so in bad faith, or have the luxury of either never experiencing the racism that made affirmative action necessary, or never looked into the historical reasons for it.
A good place to start to understand why laws like this we're enacted is Redlining
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
The TL:DR here is maps would be drawn that we're used to determine how risky it was to loan people money. These maps would be drawn based on the ethnicity of the neighborhood (this can be verified, there are poor white neighborhoods). If an applicants address was in a neighborhood that was Redlined, they could be denied a loan.
A modern example is the NFL. In 2021 they were ordered to pay a billion dollars to retired black players. The reason? The NFL were "race norning" cognitive tests designed to see if players had suffered mental decline over their career.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002627309/nfl-says-it-will-halt-race-norming-and-review-brain-injury-claims
Essentially if a white player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old (this example is made up, I don't know the exact metrics) that player would be paid for their injuries.
If a black player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old that player would not be paid for their injuries. Because the NFL was working under the assumption that black people are fundamentally less intelligent than white people, so for them to be "damaged" they needed a higher level of mental decline to qualify.
This was happening in 2020.
The US needs affirmative action. We're a wonderful country that does many things well. We also still have a fuckton of racists at all levels of government and business. We're simply not there yet.
Yeah it will. For decades, undeserving white people got loans over black people who may have been more deserving.
How would you right that wrong if not by giving more resources to the community that was denied them
Sure, we can do both.
Why don't you want to give to poor people who also have been victimized by systemic racism?
Yes it does
It's still funny to me your solution to centuries of systemic racism is "ok, ok. That absolutely did happen. But now we're going to treat everyone equally. No need to give the people oppressed for generations any kind of additional benefit '
Yeah, so oppressed people should be compensated. I'm glad we agree
This doesn't explain why affirmative action is good or bad.
I think he did just explain it with the modern day NFL example…
They explained why redlining is bad and why "race norming" is bad, but all that isn't connected to affirmative action (in the post).
Argument structure:
There's no link between the points. To be fair, I'm for affirmative action. Just that post doesn't really say anything about it.
Who is going to teach you to be a carpinter if your parents don't know and the school doesn't want you because you're non-white? This also include preparation to attend that school. To break a cycle of poverty people need to be granted a chance to escape. Education is one path to give people tools.
Again, I understand why affirmative action is a thing and why it's good. My point is that the top level comment doesn't actually answer why it's a good thing. It doesn't really make a coherent argument at all.
It forces corrections for racists doing harm to large groups of people.
If you couldn't get that from that explanation, you weren't paying attention.
Depends...
In the case of West point, the criteria for preferential admissions is going to be based on maintaining the number of officers who are black at 15% or so (to align military officer demographics with the general population). By and large there won't be any actual action, they aren't going to actively go looking for black people to enroll to add numbers. If there is an occasion where candidates are competing for seats, they will adjust preference to pursue their demographic targets. The standards won't get lowered, it's just a bias in competition among those who otherwise qualify.
In some cases, it ends up being a little different. It won't be preference among similarly qualified people, it will be an active pursuit of getting a specific number of black people into seats, sometimes with no regard at all for other qualifications. The qualification for a seat becomes skin color. Essentially, the standard becomes inherently racist.
I don't know exactly how affirmative action was implemented at Harvard or West point, but there's a very real chance that West point will fare better in a lawsuit, because the merits of affirmative action aren't fixed, it depends on how it's implemented. It can be good, it can be racist. If a white guy needs a bunch of qualifications and a black guy just needs to show up with his melanin, that's not cricket, but if both meet the qualifications (to a roughly equivalent degree) and you preference for a target demographic outcome (that roughly mirrors population demographics), thats completely sound and entirely laudable.
The devil's in the details, as with most things. It's not a black and white issue, despite the obvious :)
Good. Correcting historical systemic injustices are always good.
Correcting injustice with further injustice isn't good though.
How is it injustice to ensure that black people get admitted in at least proportional percentages to the general population? The injustice is allowing that to lapse. Do you really think that there will be proportional representation of black people at Harvard or Yale now?
Assuming all Asian people or all white people had the same opportunities, money, and privilege is racist. Creating affirmative action that blindly looks only at skin color is racist. We should be looking at better metrics like family net worth. If you have money, you can literally get into any school you want regardless of skin color.
That isn't what is happening.
That isn't what is happening.
That is indeed a good metric that we should use. But it also does not cover everything. Much of the issues that minorities face is because they are stigmatised. Simply looking at wealth does not address that. Additionally, one of the purposes of affirmative action is to ensure desegregation, which in itself has been shown to decrease racist sentiments over time through the contact hypothesis.
Because they’re not black and they want special treatment too, it’s not faaaaaait 😢
I think there are two separate questions. The first is 'Is the concept behind affirmative action valid?' and the second is 'Is the implementation of affirmative action effective, fair and just?'
I believe there shouldn't even be a damn debate about the first question. This country has a massively problematic history with race relations and there are obviously still ripple effects in modern society, and we should take active measures to fix that. Minorities have been explicitly excluded from opportunities to gain wealth and status up until disturbingly recently, and many are still implicitly excluded from them to this day. Anybody who says that racism and the problems that come with it is a thing of the past is straight-up wrong. They are either not trying to understand the problems, or they are actively trying not to. Both of those are unacceptable to me.
The second question does merit some debate. Is it effective to simply say 'if we have two equal candidates we'll hire the minority'? How often does that really happen? Is it fair to do things like the NFL rewarding teams that hire a minority head coach? Is it just to implement quotas and percentages? I don't have answers to all of these questions. I have some opinions. But as a straight white cis dude, I feel like my voice doesn't need to be the loudest in the room in this one.
It's like asking if investments are good or bad. Depends on a lot of factors. Affirmative Action is meant to be an investment in an underperforming, underdeveloped, section of the population.
Education Is directly correlated with long term income. The more educated a population is, the more money they make, the more taxes they pay. In most countries, free education pays for itself as the educated citizens earn so much more than uneducated citizens that their increased taxes easily pays for the cost.
I think everyone can agree with the above but the questionable part is: What does being Black have to do with it? There are a lot of Americans who are born into poor and uneducated families. Why can't Affirmative Action apply to anyone who meets that description regardless of skin colour? I think the general argument here is that Black Americans faced historical oppression and there needs to be some kind of amends for that. Which brings up another contentious question: When does it end?
Was the Affirmative Action program or bill created only for Black people, POCs or minorities in general?
The largest beneficiary of Affirmative Action has been white women.
Which is a perfectly correct and expected result. Of the discriminated against groups, women are the largest and in the United States white women are the largest subgroup.
I don’t even have to check comment history to find out this is a leading question
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WlPTmXi0pVk/hqdefault.jpg
No not really, I’ve just heard a lot of debates about this but you’re more than free to judge me beforehand.🥰
If you've heard a lot of debates about this, then you surely already know what the basic positions are on the matter? What else are you hoping to gain?
It’s like overhearing an angry conversation: I kinda get the gist of it but I’m asking for a clear, concise conversation.
Not sure what you expect to learn if you've already heard the debates
You have to be lying about something, here
It’s like overhearing an angry conversation: I kinda get the gist of it but I’m asking for a clear, concise conversation.
The answer to that question is "are people today still suffering from the domino effect of past discriminations and loss of opportunities?"
Depends what you mean by good or bad. Is it a societal positive? I would say yes. Is it good at its intended purpose? I would say no. There are obvious major social injustices that have happened in the past with current financial effects as well as ones that still continue to this day. We could do reparations payments for families that have experienced those injustices but that would only solve past injustices and would not do anything to fix the system that are still causing injustices.
So whether you view it as good or bad is up to you. It is a policy to fix a clear issue. If you have better ideas, feel free to offer them up.
For whom? For white woman it works pretty well for Asian males not so much.
Just so you know, any opinion on affirmative action being bad is being deleted by the mods.
Lol sure
Good.
It’s an equalizer to combat unconscious bias.
People act like the person chosen for every position is always the best person no matter what, but the very criteria they use is biased and even the most well meaning person is susceptible to systemic biases.
I hate to break it to you, but experiencing less privilege because people want to make the sample better match the population is not "racism", any more than correcting typos or poorly constructed sentences is "censorship".
I think there are better ways to achieve that than letting all of the horses finish the race and then reordering them based on color. It's using a sledge hammer to do the job of a scalpel and it is racist to both those who it aims to benefit and those who "experience less privilege". Change needs to happen before that, at the community level, which I am not against the government funding.
It's not a fucking race dude
It's life
I could see it like a gun: Could be used for righteous or nefarious purposes.