Affirmative Action has now ended in the United States.
My parents were alive and in schools when segregation in education was ending. Decades of Jim Crow laws holding people down isn’t simply remedied by saying “We’re all equal now.” and doing nothing to redress the damage inflicted through the abuse of governmental power. Especially not when “We’re all equal now.” is largely lip service and systemic racism is still prevalent.
That’s probably true, and for that matter, even if you imagine a truly colorblind society exists for the next 100 years, it seems likely that inherited wealth and privilege would still be passed down.
Having said that, AA was not a very good remedy. It laser focused on only one thing, sometimes disregarding a clear reality. In an extreme example, if you took someone like David Steward’s kids, they would benefit from affirmative action despite being born to a billionaire.
Keep in mind, colleges and universities can still provide all the advantages they want based on other signals. Good ones might be family income and first-generation college students.
Piling on more systemic racism makes things worse, not better. We should focus our efforts on addressing systemic racism in the areas where it still exists, not on compensating for it elsewhere. Provide better funding for schools in low income areas. Support economic development to pull those areas out of poverty, etc.
You’re not wrong, but the goal of AA was to create that by proxy. Give students better education to help them get better jobs and help their communities. That and forcing institutions hands so they don’t come up with other bullshit reasons why they’re only accepting white students.
So why would you want to do the same thing again, just to a different race? Two wrongs don’t make a right.
If I only work out my right arm for 2 years straight and then suddenly say “oh I’m going to now start doing the same, equal work out on my left” they don’t just suddenly become the same. You’d have to put more time and focus into the left for it to become equal to the right.
However if you’re honestly claiming that affirmative action = “doing the same thing again to a different race”, no analogy in the world is going to help you. Your ignorance is untreatable I’m afraid.
It’s the same level of understanding the solution as spez thinking editing the karma DB values makes him look good.
If the fix didn’t start at the ground, then it wasn’t a fix
We can’t solve the hiring/acceptance discrimination by forcing it, they first need to be at a competitive disadvantage by doing it, and then we target the discrimination that exists after that.
With the way it is right now it’s encouraging the stereotypes of minorities being lesser/incompetent because it expects them to compete with people who received much better training and practice. It’s downright cruel to expect them to succeed in that situation.
Copying from my response here, which I had made earlier to a different commenter who made a similar analogy: https://programming.dev/comment/440090
But why is the goal to get each arm to be the same? To untie that analogy, we’re saying that we want the cumulative experience of each racial group to be the same. Like, taken to the extreme, that means that the ultimate fairness would be to now enslave the other group to make sure it’s even. What? No, that’s not what we want. Right?
What we want is for each individual, regardless of their group, to have the same access to opportunity. Right? To use your analogy again, the future we want is not to change our workouts to benefit the other arm preferentially so that we can have two arms be the same. Why? Because there’s new people coming to our workout classes all the time! If we now preferentially prefer the other arm, those new people are being unfairly treated.
Let’s say you have two infinitely large pitchers, and an infinite amount of water to pour into them.
Every day, you pour some water into the pitchers: one gallon into the left pitcher, and one ounce into the right pitcher. After doing this every day for over a hundred years, there’s quite a discrepancy in the amount of water in these pitchers.
Then, one day, you decide you’re no longer going to pour different amounts. From now on, you’ll pour one gallon into each pitcher every day. Exactly equal and perfectly fair, right?
Except, if your goal is to get the same amount of water into each pitcher, you’re never going to accomplish that this way. And then someone points out that the right pitcher is still a hundred years behind the left pitcher, and you reply with “well what do you want me to do about it? I’m pouring the same amount into both now.”
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
AA had done more harm than good
Now, i do wish we had better solutions that actually address the issues of individuals and communities suffering from poverty and discrimination, but AA does not solve that.
I’d much rather we provide an actual solution, than one that looks like while still being racist and in many ways making the situation worse, in particular by being a target to point to when talking about real solutions as “we already addressed that”
AA had done more harm than good
Would love to see a source on this, especially after I left a mod comment explicitly asking for people to be cautious about jumping in with a simplistic take of ‘AA bad’.
Literature is extremely mixed on this topic because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s almost impossible to control for all factors and implementation of AA varies so greatly (explicit diversity goals vs. some kind of equity boost vs. mandatory spots, etc.).
Ok, but if a solution can be found that has the same effect without codifying a groups race into law, isn’t that better?
And a lot of my experience comes from friends who qualify for these systems telling me it feeds quite a bit of imposter syndrome and distrust, because whenever something happens they ask themselves “did i earn this, or is this because of how i look?” and i don’t find that to be a helpful condition to be dumping on people who will likely already be behind coming in, due to the issues the AA was meant so solve in the first place.
I’m really not against solving the problem’s AA was meant to solve, but the AA solution looks like a racist go ahold of the project and made it cause more of the problem it’s meant to address.
Saying “oh we’ll let some blacks in” isn’t a helpful solution
uh …come again?
It was an example mean to illustrate the flippancy of the implementation, it applies to all affirmative action targets
Edit: and to answer your comment about calling blacks black, even though i certainly don’t have to answer, it’s because that’s what my black friends told me to call them, and not use african american. So back the fuck off that one maybe?
