6 replies to this topic

[arunma]

So if you haven't heard already, the Supreme Court will be taking up affirmative action this season. There was the case of a white girl who was denied admission at a university, presumably due to her race, and she sued on the grounds that the university's selection process goes beyond what's normally allowed by affirmative action rules (FYI: unlike lower courts the US Supreme Court doesn't take up apeals because it thinks someone got a raw deal, but selects only some cases that it thinks address important legal questions of the day). So basically, the institution of affirmative action is in jeopardy here. For details Google "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin." And for full disclosure, I'm fine with getting rid of affirmative action completely, but here are the arguments I've been seeing for and against it.

The original argument in favor of affirmative was basically that since certain minority groups, mostly African Americans, are collectively at a disadvantage in many sectors of American life, these groups should be given priority in college admissions, hiring practices, etc. But recently I've seen stuff online and on TV stating that affirmative action increases diversity in universities, and since diversity is something to be sought after, race should be used as one criterion. So then, what started out as effectively a "reparations" view of the practice seems to have evolved to a valuing of racial diversity. As to what "affirmative action" means, I've never been made quite clear on that. To some it means that if two candidates are otherwise equal, the one who belongs to a disadvantaged minority gets preference. In other cases it means that standards are set lower for these minority groups so as to increase their representation in a university. For examples of the latter, Google "underrepresented minorities and med school admissions."

The argument against affirmative action has remained mostly the same. Strictly speaking, it constitutes a form of discrimination based on race. I'd say more than that, but I've got plenty of arguments of my own against affirmative action, so I'll shut up and let others speak.

What do you all think?

[Delphi]

I think that in order to eliminate racism all together we need to stop "seeing" color. Affirmative action I see as something that continues the distinction between races and in some cases I feel it lessens the merits of others.

Having seen affirmative action myself in my work place and seeing how badly that went when it.became apparent that the guy in question was completely unprepared and incompetant for the position and it ended up seriously screwed me, I might be a tad bias.

In reality though I think people need to be more like my mom and sister. My mom only cares if you're a good person, not your ethnicity. My sister as a child seemed to not really notice racial differences, up to not even noticing skin color until it was directly pointed out to her. I believe if more people were like my sister, racism will meet its end.

[Egann]

I wouldn't say that affirmative action is discriminatory so much as misinformed, and perhaps more importantly misguided. Misinformed that even the smallest, most carefully balanced rosters will immediately become lumpy, misguided because the objective of diversity should be to foster intellectual diversity, not ethnic diversity.

Take my experience at my local commuter college, which specifically denies affirmative action, as an example. The student body as a whole is about 80% white. The debate club I was a part of? Never a once majority white while I was there; it was majority black or hispanic. And we're not just talking kids from across the street, either; out of the five or ten people I routinely worked with or practiced against, one was Puerto Rican, one was Korean, another was a naturalized citizen from West Africa.

Diversity is something which can't be mandated; it has to be attracted naturally or it's a phony token.

[Selena]

It's understandable why it was put in place - especially to protect people from employers and school officials showing off-the-record preference to white candidates. Even today, race aside, employers will go out of their way to find any little "official" reason to get rid of someone in order to mask the fact that they're being let go due to completely personal or arbitrary reasons. Have an employer with a race bias? They'll find a "legitimate" reason to hire white people instead of minorities, even if the minorities are qualified.

On the other hand, it really does leave wiggle room for under-qualified minorities to take a job/placement away from someone more qualified. Because companies and schools are so encouraged to go out of their way to include them - it's like getting super bonus points. They're quicker to show interest in minorities. There was a period a while back where I was desperately looking for work. After hitting a rough patch, I technically "fudged" my personal information by saying I was partially Native American. Which is true (I'm a quarter - which is enough to join most tribes), but you aren't actually allowed to tick that box unless you're enrolled in a tribe, which I am not. Naturally, I got call backs more frequently for those applications, even though I was applying for roughly the same work with my "I'm a 100% whitey" personal data. Ideally, qualifications would always hold more importance than race.

Given how the student placement and job application processes have become almost completely dehumanized - most now rely on digital forms rather than direct interaction - couldn't we get away with just completely removing the "ethnicity" box on all the forms? The computer isn't racist. Granted, there's that final interview to deal with...

I don't know. Racism is nothing like it was even 20 years ago, but it's still out there (see recent "It's called the WHITE HOUSE for a reason" tweets about getting Obama out of office). So there's still room for corruption, and it's difficult to document or punish when an employer can weasel out some official excuse about why they don't hire more minorities.

[Oberon Storm]

There will always be racism. Somebody is always going to see the color, and you can't just sweep it under the rug by not talking about it. At that point you're just pretending.

I really do not understand the case with UT. Maybe I just need to research it a little more. How is the student able to prove she was denied just because she is white? The way UT's application process works is if you graduated within the top 10% of your class from a school within the state of Texas you are automatically accepted. This is regardless of all other considerations. I understand she was a great student, but Fisher was not in the top 10% of her class. That is not UT's fault. While race is one of several points of consideration when you fall outside of that 10% mark, I fail to see how just because you were denied even with these great things on your record it automatically means it must have been for racial reasons. Then again, I do not have internal knowledge on how UT considers all factors involved and makes a decision.

As for affirmative action all together, I don't think anyone ever thought of it as a "reparation". Reparation for what? This isn't about giving someone a prize just because they are from a certain ethnicity. It's not like they just show up without ever putting in any effort and say, "I'm a minority. Let me in." Particularly in school admissions. In 2003 the Supreme Court rulled that race cannot not be the only qualification looked at and that a quota system is unconcstitutional. I'm pretty sure that technically only applies to schools, but I don't think any businesses have any real quota system. If they do use a quota system then I would agree that needs to stop, but I see no problem with taking race into consideration along with other factors.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

The Founding President of the African Astronomical Society and Technical Executive Officer of the National Society of Black Physicists, Hakeem Oluseyi, was a product of affirmative action. He was selected because of his "smartness" and according to the interview, it was reparation for the Unverisyt's "racist" past. Admittedly, his education meant that he wasn't really "qualified" for the position; he failed his qualifying exam first time.

New Scientist did an interview with him, though for some bizarre reason the magazine version has the title, "Under One Sky" and the website version has the title "I carried a gun and learned calculus".

Unfortunately, as I'm not an astrophysicist, I don't really know whether his work is any good or not.

http://www.math.buff...yi_hakeemm.html

According to the article, one group on the University wanted to select black people "from MIT and Morehouse College - people who would do well regardless". Others said to find smart people who had "never had the educational opportunity". Now from reading that, it would seem that the problem with Dr Oluseyi was not that he was black. It was that he was poor. He is what would be called, in the UK at least, lower class or working class. Now, I get conflicting reports about whether or not Americans recognise class structure in their society or not, so I'm not sure whether this would work, but if you do affirmative action for those that are lower class, then you would be a lot fairer. After all, it's not just black people living in poor communities where their education system fails them. There's Hispanics, there's possibly Asians and even white people amongst that mix.

Granted, if what is said is true, this would inevitably mean selecting people because they're black or Hispanic, because they're more likely to be in that group.

Edited by Wolf O'Donnell, 13 October 2012 - 05:03 AM.

[arunma]

The Founding President of the African Astronomical Society and Technical Executive Officer of the National Society of Black Physicists, Hakeem Oluseyi, was a product of affirmative action. He was selected because of his "smartness" and according to the interview, it was reparation for the Unverisyt's "racist" past. Admittedly, his education meant that he wasn't really "qualified" for the position; he failed his qualifying exam first time.

New Scientist did an interview with him, though for some bizarre reason the magazine version has the title, "Under One Sky" and the website version has the title "I carried a gun and learned calculus".

Unfortunately, as I'm not an astrophysicist, I don't really know whether his work is any good or not..

I can take a look at a paper or two by him and see if his work is any good. But given that he got his PhD at an American university (Stanford, to boot!), the chances of him not being a good physicist are pretty slim. And really, when dealing with affirmative action we typically aren't talking about cases of outright tolerance for incompetence. It's more an issue of relative qualification. If you only have so many positions available and you choose a less qualified person (who could still do the job) because of his race, its unfair to the person who worked harder and was still denied the position.

Incidentally, failing the PhD qualifier isn't necessarily a black mark. I know people who do really well in their research but fail the qual. And a lot of people fail it the first time, only to pass on their second attempt (it's different from department to department, but usually you get two chances before they kick you out with your Master's degree).

There will always be racism. Somebody is always going to see the color, and you can't just sweep it under the rug by not talking about it. At that point you're just pretending.

I really do not understand the case with UT. Maybe I just need to research it a little more. How is the student able to prove she was denied just because she is white? The way UT's application process works is if you graduated within the top 10% of your class from a school within the state of Texas you are automatically accepted. This is regardless of all other considerations. I understand she was a great student, but Fisher was not in the top 10% of her class. That is not UT's fault. While race is one of several points of consideration when you fall outside of that 10% mark, I fail to see how just because you were denied even with these great things on your record it automatically means it must have been for racial reasons. Then again, I do not have internal knowledge on how UT considers all factors involved and makes a decision.

Well, that's the thing with any admissions process, right? When choosing between two people who exceed the minimum requirements, it's hard for the candidates to point to any one criterion as the reason they were accepted/rejected. The person making the decision could probably tell you, but it's exceedingly difficult to prove that one person was accepted or rejected for a specific reason. The best we can do is look at larger number statistics. If you look at the distributions of test scores for, say, whites and blacks, and notice that blacks who are admitted consistently have lower scores, it means there's an institutional bias in favor of blacks (obviously you've got to control for other variables, etc.). Now these distributions wil almost always overlap a bit, so it's difficult to pick out one statistic and say that race was the motivating factor. In this case, I'd be willing to bet there was at least one black or Latino who got higher test scores than Fisher; so you can't make the statement about discrimination with utter certainty.

The most we can do here is look at both the statistics and the official school policies. Many schools say outright that they use race to discriminate between applicants. Here's a policy we can actually argue on legal grounds. Can race be a factor in admissions? Again, the usual justification is "we want diversity." But imagine if, say, CalTech started preferentially admitting white people. Under the current understanding of affirmative action I think this might be legal. CalTech is where you go if you want to do sciencey stuff. And there's a huge number of Asians and Indians there (or hell, in any engineering college). The reason is that they (or should I say "we") are better at math and science than everyone else, and end up being disproportionately represented in these fields. But if affirmative action ever favored whites, there would likely be charges of racism. I know this isn't the typical line of reasoning used by lawyers on either side of the issue, but it seems to me that when race is a factor in an admissions process, racial discrimination (according to the technical definition of "discrimination") is going on.

As for affirmative action all together, I don't think anyone ever thought of it as a "reparation". Reparation for what?

No point being PC about this. I think the answer in everyone's mind is slavery and Jim Crow era segregation. And let's also be honest, because of those two things blacks in America as a whole have gotten a pretty raw deal. One can't deny that telling blacks they are 3/5 of a person and useful primarily as farm implements isn't going to create an intrinsic economic disparity. But two things to consider. First, many racial groups have been discriminated against in world history, and the damage isn't irreparable. Second, we have to ask if affirmative action in its current implementation is the right answer.

This isn't about giving someone a prize just because they are from a certain ethnicity. It's not like they just show up without ever putting in any effort and say, "I'm a minority. Let me in." Particularly in school admissions. In 2003 the Supreme Court rulled that race cannot not be the only qualification looked at and that a quota system is unconcstitutional. I'm pretty sure that technically only applies to schools, but I don't think any businesses have any real quota system. If they do use a quota system then I would agree that needs to stop, but I see no problem with taking race into consideration along with other factors.

Well no, it's not like an underrepresented minority can show up with absolutely no effort and demand to be let in. But an underrepresented minority can show up with less effort than someone else and get in. This sort of gets to the root of my personal reason for being opposed to affirmative action. When my brother applied to medical schools (a haven for affirmative action) a few years ago, he came in with excellent records. 4.0 GPA, 99.2 %-ile on the MCAT, and all the BS volunteerism those guys require. He got interviews at Ivy League places, but only got accepted at average schools. I don't just say this out of fraternal bias: there was nothing "wrong" with his application, i.e. he didn't have a criminal record or take bullshit classes or anything. Except that he had the disadvantage of being Indian. Now, one of the things people do in the pre-med community is post their academic profiles online and ask current doctors/med students what their chances are; if you don't believe me go to www.mdapplicants.com. So my brother was able to look at the sort of people who did get into the Ivy League schools that year. Underrepresented minorities with significantly lower GPAs (like 3.0 and lower) got into places like Yale and Harvard. Once when he was pissed off about this I mentioned "look, because of our race you need to work twice as hard to get half as far," and only realized a minute later that this is precisely what black mothers had to tell their kids back in the Jim Crow south. That's wrong. Whether you're black, white, Indian, or whatever else, you ought to be judged on the basis of your work, not your race, and should not be penalized due to someone else's idea of diversity. The funny thing is that Indians are minorities, we just aren't underrepresented. I can accept an admissions committee choosing the minority when two candidates are effectively equal. But choosing less qualified people to promote diversity does an injustice to those who work harder. If race were one of many criteria as the supreme court prescribes, then why is there such a large discrepancy here?