Affirmative Action is Racist

[Oddish On Fire]

An ad hominem attack has no place in an intellectual discussion no matter how verbose or 'witty'.

Remember that just because you broke out the thesaurus does not mean you made a valid point.

Although I definitely got a chuckle out of your post, this contradiction must be pointed out.

 

[Zach]

Although I definitely got a chuckle out of your post, this contradiction must be pointed out.

I used ad hominem after making my point; he made no point at all.

EDIT: And that second quote isn't even necessarily ad hominem because, though patronizing, there is a point being made there.

 

[cantab]

simply because the testing processes to apply to this high school (and selective high schools in general) is geared heavily towards rote learning and drilled practices, both of which Asian people are either genetically (I've seen no studies suggesting it either for or against this) or culturally predisposed to.

I think the cultural aspect is certainly possible. I believe many east asian countries have notably rigorous schooling, probably with a strong requirement for knowledge (though not necessarily ignoring problem solving.)

One of the better rated sixth form colleges in my town is easily 95+% south asian. In its case, the reason is simple - the region it primarily serves has a similar demographic.

 

[petrie911]

I've heard of two different practices referred to as "affirmative action". The first one is the idea of going out and actively seeking candidates from the underrepresented minority that meet your standards and giving them whatever aid they might need to attend your school. The second is lowering your standards for minority applicants until you have the desired amount of "acceptable" ones, and is the one this topic is talking about. I don't have a problem with the former, but I do wonder why it isn't actually used. Is it laziness on the part of admissions, some sort of political pressure, or does it simply fail to provide enough candidates?

Anyways, I'd like to also say that affirmative action, as it is usually applied, may actually do more harm than good. Accepting someone with lower scores means that they will be behind their fellow classmates, and may not be adequately prepared for the courses they will have to take. This leads to higher dropout rates, and could be avoided if the applicants went to a lower-level college that would be a better fit for their abilities.

Lastly, I recently applied to graduate school, and on one of the applications, it asked to write a short essay about how you feel your race, socioeconomic status, life experience, blah blah blah, whatever, etc, would contribute to the diversity of the campus. I find this sort of question unsettling. I mean, every person has a different experience in life, a different set of views, a different way of thinking. But the fact that they would ask this question on an application implies that it affects the person's merit. That some people's experiences can be considered "better" than others'. Perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I don't like the idea that someone's worth can be discounted just because he didn't have the "right" sort of background.

 

[Maris]

Affrimative action is most definatly racist. Even if ALL miniorities were represented. Heres why, What the heck about poor WHITE people huh? Affrimative action is more or less the government saying "we hate all people the KKK didnt".

and coming from a town that is 75% asian i can tell you why asians preform well. there parents put a high value on education thus they preform well responding to the incentives given by their parents.
I am a 3.0 gpa student that is 25% latino and 75% white I will claim that i am a latino on my colledge application because it will provide a Huge benefit. Since the the colledge system has racial qoutas I am 3x more likely to be allowed into say SJSU if latino rather than white with my 3.0 gpa

 

[Radio Reevesy]

I don't know what to think about this. 2 things I'm drawing from this are-
1) Why must minorities be uplifted and helped to excel?
2) Should we consider the negative vibes this gives off to the majority?

We can help the minority, or piss off the majority. Put like that, Affirmative Action sounds like a poor concept. However I don't want to take the "It's instantly racist" side, yeah? I'm not sure I want to dismiss it yet.

Going from 2), I think it is exactly these ideas that make racism what it is, because as one of the majority I feel that I'm being put in 2nd place to the minorities. Maybe if my viewpoint for Affirmative Action was different, I could understand it better.

I'd be interested to find out the general demographic of the Smogon forums, as the thread seems a little one-sided to me.

 

[MrIndigo]

I've heard of two different practices referred to as "affirmative action". The first one is the idea of going out and actively seeking candidates from the underrepresented minority that meet your standards and giving them whatever aid they might need to attend your school. The second is lowering your standards for minority applicants until you have the desired amount of "acceptable" ones, and is the one this topic is talking about. I don't have a problem with the former, but I do wonder why it isn't actually used. Is it laziness on the part of admissions, some sort of political pressure, or does it simply fail to provide enough candidates?

Anyways, I'd like to also say that affirmative action, as it is usually applied, may actually do more harm than good. Accepting someone with lower scores means that they will be behind their fellow classmates, and may not be adequately prepared for the courses they will have to take. This leads to higher dropout rates, and could be avoided if the applicants went to a lower-level college that would be a better fit for their abilities.

The former is used; I know numerous programs instituted by schools, the police force, etc. that are minority-targeted recruitment drives. The difference there is that they're not forcing a particular demographic outcome, they're encouraging greater participation from the minority communities, and that's fine.

The latter is usually a policy instituted by government agencies because it is a quick fix, and it is easy to police and show so it looks good politically. And as with all things that look good politically, they do nothing functionally.

Lastly, I recently applied to graduate school, and on one of the applications, it asked to write a short essay about how you feel your race, socioeconomic status, life experience, blah blah blah, whatever, etc, would contribute to the diversity of the campus. I find this sort of question unsettling. I mean, every person has a different experience in life, a different set of views, a different way of thinking. But the fact that they would ask this question on an application implies that it affects the person's merit. That some people's experiences can be considered "better" than others'. Perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I don't like the idea that someone's worth can be discounted just because he didn't have the "right" sort of background.

I'd be pretty unsettled by that question too, and would probably say something to the effect of:

"I don't believe that anyone's race or culture would make them any more or less suited to be a student at this institution, and frankly am offended by that racist implication. I would have applications from all students considered entirely independently of their race, creed, religion or culture, and purely on their academic and personal characteristics."

@Maris & RadioReevsey: Affirmative Action is a process intended to offset a flagging demographic expectancy within a particular group (the police force, university students, graduates, etc.). It's motivated by lobby groups who see an unequal outcome as direct evidence of unequal opportunity, and they believe that forcing an equal outcome will help repair the damage of racist attitudes and fix the situation created by past lack of opportunities for the minority group.

Of course, as I and others have pointed out, this is not what happens. It sows dissent amongst the racial groups, both by patronising the majority group it helps and by ostracising the majority and other minority groups who don't get help. It's also incredibly naive, because it doesn't take into account different goals/lifestyle/cultural values of the minority groups (e.g. engineering is a male dominated industry. Some feminist groups see this unequal outcome as evidence that women are being discriminated against and so they can't get engineering jobs because they get given to men instead. What it ignores is that the majority of women do not want to work in the engineering sector. To get more women in, it should not be forcing companies to hire a certain number of female graduates, it should be encouraging more women to graduate in engineering).

Essentially, it makes the common minority-support error that equal outcome implies equal opportunity, and unequal outcome implies unequal opportunity.

 

[Zystral]

Lastly, I recently applied to graduate school, and on one of the applications, it asked to write a short essay about how you feel your race, socioeconomic status, life experience, blah blah blah, whatever, etc, would contribute to the diversity of the campus. I find this sort of question unsettling. I mean, every person has a different experience in life, a different set of views, a different way of thinking. But the fact that they would ask this question on an application implies that it affects the person's merit. That some people's experiences can be considered "better" than others'. Perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here, but I don't like the idea that someone's worth can be discounted just because he didn't have the "right" sort of background.

I know what you mean.
I've applied to three private schools recently. These three are all comfortably within the top 50 in the country. The fact that there were more minority applicants than caucasian applicants was one thing, but this is another, actually.

On all three application forms they had this question or some variant.
"How do you think you will add to this school?"
"Talk about yourself or your experiences and why you would be a good candidate."
"How do you feel about yourself within a community?"
I found these questions really awkward, because technically, it's a lose-lose situation question.
If you go overboard and talk about how you're the best person in the world they'll reject you because you'd come off as show-offish.
If you be honest and say you're an ordinary guy with no good experiences/background/qualities they're going to reject you because you're a crap applicant.

I completely agree in that valuing a student based on his background/person is a pretty bad idea and should be scrapped. There's a boy at my school and he's one of few students in this school who is smarter than me (sounds arrogant I know) and yet, he's been rejected from 4 different PUBLIC schools already just because both his parents immigrated from Africa and his whole family earns less than £15,000 gross/annum. And this is a boy who could easily achieve a Masters in English Language if he wanted to.
Unfair, no?

 

[cantab]

On all three application forms they had this question or some variant.
"How do you think you will add to this school?"
"Talk about yourself or your experiences and why you would be a good candidate."
"How do you feel about yourself within a community?"

The first two questions are reasonable. The second in particular is about connecting life experiences with key skills. Saying you have good IT skills doesn't mean much; saying how you used your IT skills to make a database to handle the membership records of the chess club means a lot more. (This sort of thing is more common in interviews than on forms I think, but I've come across similar on the latter.)
The third question is however more dubious. Not everyone has a strong sense of community, and lack of it is not necessarily a personal choice. (I'm making the reasonable assumption they won't think much of involvement in online communities.)
The question mentioned by petrie911 is also dubious. It is essentially biasing applications against those of the current majority group. And that is almost certainly the intention.

 

[Eraddd]

Ironically it's that exact question you guys posted above that made me cross some schools off the list.

I also think that Affirmative Action is stupid and useless. It should be based on your socio economic status, rather than your race.

 

[Shinryu]

I also agree for the most part, that affirmative action is racist. Yet here, it is pretty much a "legal" form of racism, in part because it is backed by the government...

 

[Stagnant]

Check out Bakke vs California court case. I think the ruling on it holds merit to this discussion.

 

[MrIndigo]

Thanks, interesting reading.

 

[MrIndigo]

From the Wikipedia page on Affirmative Action, there's a quoted selection of misconceptions of AffAct opposition:

- One cannot hope to create a color blind society by practicing color blind policies since such policies put racial minorities at a disadvantage. For instance color blind seniority systems tend to favor white workers against job layoffs, since senior employees tend to be white.[4] The point being existing imbalances in representation tend to perpetuate themselves in the absence of affirmative action.
- While a few studies claimed that affirmative action undermined the self-esteem of women and minorities,[5][6] more recent studies and public opinion polls have indicated that such is not that case[7][8][9]
- The claim that one cannot redress one form of discrimination by introducing another is a play on words that uses the same word "discrimination" to refer to two different things. Racial, ethnic or sex based discrimination is often based on unfounded, often irrational and deeply ingrained prejudices. Affirmative action is a response to a statistically observed inequity in representation, reproducibly demonstrated by social scientists in many societies with a history of discrimination.[10][11]
- Some opponents of affirmative action believe the practice implies the preferential selection of unqualified candidates over qualified candidates. But in fact, most supporters of affirmative action oppose such preferential selection and instead prefer preferential selection among equal or comparable candidates.

a) The problem is that the implementation of AffAct policies is then not dealing with problems of racism but simply punishing the majority for being in the majority, which is not conducive to a colour blind society either. The only place where people should be protected is if, to keep the same example, senior executives are being selected because of a racist bias. If that is the case, then it is that racist bias that should be attacked, not anything else.

In fact, a seniority system actually increases the percentage of job losses held by the majority demographic in a given tier, because assuming no deliberate bias, any given job loss within a tier will be more likely to remove a majority than a minority.

If you're not comparing like with like in terms of the jobs being lost, you are misconstruing your statistics. Consider instead the argument that in a recession, you should cut down on senior executives from one company but force another company to keep their mechanics. It's equally ridiculous.

To use affirmative action to beat seniority methods is just hiding any racial bias, and not dealing with it.

b) The fact that most members within the minority are not offended, does not mean it is any less patronising. Patronising with a benefit attached is still patronising, just like how running into someone's formal dinner and yelling "YOU'RE ALL CUNTBAGS" is crass even if noone at the formal dinner is upset. Things aren't entirely defined by the way they are perceived.

c) Even if you take the discrimination as two separate meanings, the argument still stands as "You can't beat X by introducing Y." The fact that Y isn't the same as X does not make Y any more of a useful solution.

d) I'm totally fine with that opinion, and I am a supporter of that premise where relevant, and most opposition to AffAct would probably agree with it too. The problem that is complained about is that regardless of what the supporters actually support, the implementation of AffAct is, in some/many cases, NOT reflecting that opinion but instead allowing benefits to compensate for otherwise underqualification.

 

[Slyguy46]

The way I see it, if you have two people with equal credentials on every point, the only difference being, say, one is Asian while one is Native American, you can either

A) Hire/Accept to your School Both of the Them
B) Deny Both of them.

 

[cantab]

The way I see it, if you have two people with equal credentials on every point, the only difference being, say, one is Asian while one is Native American, you can either

A) Hire/Accept to your School Both of the Them
B) Deny Both of them.

The problem is that this isn't practical. A workplace has one job position. Schools can be more flexible, but they too have a limit on the number of places.
Also, in the real world you won't find two people who are identical. Even if they are the same 'on paper', factors like personality, and how they handled themselves at interview, will differ.

 

[Commander Blue]

Affirmative Action should be changed to help people of economic disadvantage rather helping people based on race.

Do you really think a wealthy son attending an elite private school will have trouble in life?

And most people of economic disadvantage are negro/latino anyway.

 

[RaikouLover]

Posted by Chris Is Me
Personally, I think that using race rather than socioeconomic status is an overly simplified measure of what affirmative action supporters want. True diversity doesn't come from people who look different.

I'll 2nd this.

 

[jc104]

I mean, could you imagine if the top High School in Dubai was 97% White?

It might well be.

Excellent topic - agree with the OP almost entirely. In terms of some exampless such as college applications, I can see it as being (just about) all right if their grades are bumped up slightly, but sometimes the number admitted exceeds the proportion of the number of applicants, which to me indicates an unfair advantage regardless of their social position.

 

[Deck Knight]

Not that along ago there was a thread here whining about the nefarious feminist conspiracy to subjugate men. Now I am informed that black people only have a bad lot in life because they're too lazy to learn anything. Can someone get Deck Knight to pen a screed about the oppression of Christianity at the hands of secular humanism and call it a trifecta?

Fellow people of a liberal persuasion, don't assume that opposition to affirmative action is based on appeals to progressive values. It's as much a part of a reactionary white racial agenda as demagoguery about welfare queens, no matter how much it's dressed up in platitudes about political correctness to appear hip and edgy.

Go back to Media Matters.

At least my theories regarding people meeting in smoky back rooms for the purposes of power broking have substance to them. "reactionary white racial agenda." Really? What is this "white agenda." Is it to enslave and kill all the colored people? Funny, that already happened and oddly enough, the first major nations to completely abolish slavery were all run by oppressive white people. The Middle East still treats women as second class citizens, there are still slave cartels in Africa and Asia, especially as regards to sex trafficking. But I'm sure you will ignore my reality and substitute your own, because facts are inconvenient to the excuses affirmative action proponents make to expand government, ostensibly to "help" minorities by entitling them to undeserved points, or docking them for not being the right kind of minority for electing progressives to power.

The only important thing about affirmative action to progressives is it expands the size, scope, and influence of the State. "Progressive values" don't exist. Progressives would have to have values first. Raw, naked power and absolute control are not values, they are ends.

Liberals have values. You sir are not a liberal, and your persuasions are not liberal. The "lib" in liberal comes from liberty, and there is nothing freeing about affirmative action. Affirmative action's very existence colors the resume of every competent minority. They don't need it to succeed, as they have proven time and time again.

Here is the question you should always ask regarding any law some fool wants to pass to "do something": Is this law necessary?

Government mandated affirmative action is neither necessary nor desirous. It should be abolished, especially in education. That way we can eliminate the "Black bonus" and the "Asian deduction." You see, even though Asians are and always have been a smaller minority than blacks, they get docked because there's no Asian race shakedown industry to fight against it. It's essentially socialized examination scores. Aim low Americans, and the government will raise your score.

As to what private companies want to do to boost their image or whatever, that's there business. But no law should mandate affirmative action anywhere.

 

[Oddish On Fire]

Yes, DK. Affirmative action increases the power of the government, not right-winged policies like the Patriot Act. But hey, why consider that policies like gay marriage bans are infringing on our rights when you're in the same party as the people making these bills?

Affirmative action a complete failure in the way that you are not judged by intellect but by race. (No matter how much you try to mask it using large phrases and ad hominem, SSBM Roy.) However, some minorities obviously have much larger problems growing up in ghettos compared to white suburbia. (Yes DK, not everyone has the same chance at the American dream.) Does this mean we should raise their test scores? NO. I may not have the answer, but affirmative action is not the correct one. So, although I'm throroughly enjoying all of your posturing,

cut the bullshit, DK and SSBM Roy.

 

[MrIndigo]

They should have their own forum, and then people can post topics and they just fight about them for our amusement.

 

[lati0s]

actually they do have thier own forum http://www.smogon.com/forums/group.php?groupid=29

 

[th3anarchist]

It isnt racism at all. Schools are private institutions who may accept anyone they choose. If they choose to try to gain a minority group into their college so they can bost diversity, it is up to them. Colleges arent educational institutes. They're businesses. They operate to get the most money and if affirmative action helps them do so, so be it. The idea behind affirmative action isnt to help minority races, but simply to maximize profits while helping others. Think of it as social entrepreneurship that screws over white people :)

 

[cim]

It isnt racism at all. Schools are private institutions who may accept anyone they choose.

These two points aren't connected at all. Whether or not something is racist and whether or not something is legal are completely different. The KKK can accept anyone they wish, because it's a private institution. That doesn't make it not racist...

Obviously affirmative action isn't the KKK, but no one is saying racism is disallowed.

If they choose to try to gain a minority group into their college so they can bost diversity, it is up to them.

Yup, it is. No one is saying it isn't.

Colleges arent educational institutes. They're businesses.

Every accredited college in the US is non-profit.

They operate to get the most money

Every accredited college in the US is non-profit.

and if affirmative action helps them do so, so be it. The idea behind affirmative action isnt to help minority races, but simply to maximize profits while helping others.

Every accredited college in the US is non-profit.

Think of it as social entrepreneurship that screws over white people :)

Yeah, and screwing over people of any race is.... racist!