Breaking: Supreme Court Shoots Down Affirmative Action.
Breaking: Supreme Court Shoots Down Affirmative Action.
Affirmative Action has now ended in the United States.
73 comments
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We just had to lock a thread in politics over this, I suspect we may have to lock this one as well. If your only take is "affirmative action bad" you might as well just leave now.
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Sad, but expected. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. Just another casualty in Conservatives' war on equality.
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I guess being treated better/worse because of the color of your skin is equality.
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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.
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Equality v equity.
Do you want every to be given the exact same resources at the start? Or do you want everyone to be able to reach the same outcome?
The state legislated racism - kneecapped a swathe of the population's ability to access education and prosper. So how could the state possibly provide restitution for this without addressing the population it did this to?
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This reply will almost certainly be lost, but I do understand where you're coming from since it is literally true, but fails to account for context. Consider a marathon in which half the participants were given 10 pound weights on each leg. Halfway through the race, the judges ruled those participants shouldn't have weights on. Is the race now fair, since everyone is being treated equally? Of course not - they were immensely disadvantaged from the outset, so the only way to try to approach some level of fairness is to give them advantages to make up for their initial handicap. In theory, AA is meant to be corrective action to restore equity, at which point it can be dropped because it's no longer necessary, but a simple glance at census data demonstrates we're nowhere near that point.
Incidentally, this is also why "race blindness" is considered a bad thing in social justice. In theory it would be ideal that you don't treat people differently, but in practice it means ignoring their disadvantages.
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School is better for everyone if it includes a diversity of experiences. It enrichens and deepens our culture to know each other and to have professionals from all backgrounds learning from one another.
This is a loss for every single person that actually wants our schools to be the best that they can be.
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I'm going to copy over parts of my response from another thread on this topic. I don't think it's a loss for every single person, and the topic of equity is much more complex than just race.
As someone who went to an “elite institution,” coming from a first-generation immigrant background, and used it as a vehicle for massive social mobility, I am quite ambivalent (not in apathetic, but strong feelings about it on both sides) about the elimination of race-based admissions at these institutions.
The people who truly benefit from the current state of race-based affirmative action are not real “underprivileged people”. 99.999% of those will never even reach the academic qualification needed to get past the first round of screening at these schools. The overwhelming number of people who “benefit” from this are under-represented minorities from extremely elite backgrounds - the black of latino kid who went to top-tier private schools. If you have two applicants: 1 White/Asian kid from a poor background, vs 1 black/latino kid from Philip Exeter, who do you think these schools will take?
These schools are institutions with the goal of perpetuating elitism. period. Legacy, athletes, and “extracurriculars” are all just forms of gatekeeping for people without the knowledge, or social economic freedoms to partake in these activities. (I’m very confident about this from my years of helping underprivileged kids get into universities)
Now I do think race-based affirmative action does 2 things very well:
- It broadens the racial and international perspectives of the new “wave” of elites, and there are numerous studies on how that improves the performance (mostly from a capitalistic point of view) of those students in the new international world. This flows into your argument about how allowing race-based affirmative action actually makes schools better. However, this could be a dangerous justification. What if segregation makes schools better? That same logic can be used to justify private school admissions metrics that we can agree are objectively unjust.
- It makes it so that there is some semblance of race diversity (at the cost of economic class diversity) within the new wave of “elites” coming out of these schools. I think this is actually quite a good thing, which is one of the reasons that I am quite ambivalent about race-based affirmative action at these private schools.
In many ways, the current race-based admissions system in the elite schools actually sacrifices economic affirmative action, for race-based affirmative action. Again, we can debate how intersectional the two topics are, but that's just the reality of how these systems work.
IMO, the path to more social equality isn’t by changing the skin color of people who become elite, but by opening the gate for more people from non-traditional backgrounds in the form of community colleges and an easy path to transfer to universities (a la California university system, though the current pace of UCs is also aiming to join the ranks of these “elite” institutions)
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This is an interesting perspective, thank you. I wouldn't have considered that AA optimizing for race may simply select for already-privileged PoC more strongly than white students and may also give a false sense of equity based on improved racial demographics, but it makes sense. Is there no selection for the less advantaged at all? Even if it's not as efficient as it could be, surely opening the floodgates for privileged PoC which circumstantially lets in a trickle of less privileged people is still better than nothing? I need to look into the stats on this.
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Obviously Affirmative Action wasn't something that should be in place forever, but any reasonable person has to see that it sought to un-tip scales that were already heavily tipped. The process for removing Affirmative Action should not be "well let's ask some old people whether we should remove it", it should have been a long term study showing the impact of the measure, and perhaps come up with a plan for scaling it back until it was no longer needed. Removing it outright without any kind of intelligence behind it is just...irresponsible.
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I've known quite a lot of people to complain about affirmative action and similar efforts. And while I can agree it's a pretty clumsy solution, I'm not sure what people expect when they're not willing to have a deeper conversation about the tensions and issues that lead there, even outside the United States. In the U.S. itself it's headache-inducing when people's "solution" is to simply undo affirmative action with no other response or ideas to take its place.
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I didn't have to read the article to know that the black guy definitely voted against black guys.
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Samuel L. Jackson dubbed him "Uncle Clarence."
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This may be apocryphal, but rumor was that Jackson said he based his performance in Django on Clarence.
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Shocker
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While AA is not a good remedy, I wish that shooting it down would have come with some better solutions attached.
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The supreme court can't make policy they can only declare policy actions made by others as unconstitutional. There would need to be a bill from congress with solutions...
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Solutions? From current politicians?!
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This is perhaps the most significant indicator of bad faith decisions by conservatives.
It's like gun regulation. A functioning, pro gun, political party would propose gun control regulations which achieve and addresses concerns, while maintaining and satisfying the fundamentals of gun ownership. Advocacy groups, like the NRA, would then have involvement and assurance. They shouldn't instead advocate for no solution whatsoever: The only possible result of which will be an eventual critical anti gun majority with following blanket fire arm bans. Or occasional, disruptive bans on specific weapons.
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A little unrelated context that sort of lends a bit of background to this will make things equal claim.
I was at one time an international non-white student at a US institution. After joining, during orientation I find out that the test scores and metrics required for international students is insanely high compared to US citizens. Like in a subject based international test, I had to score above 95th percentile while most of the students from the US did not even write the test or if they had, scored on average around 75th.
To add more context, I come from a country with far weaker education system and it cost me around half an year of savings to pay for this test.
So, I find it hilarious ridiculous when people think that any of these institutions are remotely fair. I understand how for these institutions citizens > aliens. Now try transplanting this context on to different race groups within the country.
I'm not a huge fan of affirmative action or its local equivalent, but I understand why it is needed and it is the responsibility of the government and judiciary to assess it's impact before deciding to do away with it.
I also wish they would focus more on things like, nutrition, good school environment, truancy, access to healthcare and so on for disadvantaged groups instead of trying to act at a level where most of the disadvantaged people cannot reach. Still something is better than nothing.
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this is why relying on precedent is very bad, write that shit down as law like youre supposed to
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This is one I actually agree with. I don't know of a solution to historical racism, but current racism against another group doesn't seem like it can be it. That would just lead to an unending loop IMO.
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how is affirmative action as a concept contributing to "current racism against another group"?
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Good, any law that gives anyone an advantage or disadvantage based on race seems short sighted to me.
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Jumping into a thread on such an important issue and leaving a potentially inflammatory response strikes me as bad faith. Would you like to expand your comment?
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But that's not what it does.
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It's a little early to be piecing together the details and impact. The Post is being more cautious with their initial full story in terms of definitive statements.
But, as it stands, the hed of "Supreme Court restricts use of race in college admissions" directly conflicts with Sotomayor's dissent quote in graf 7: " ... It holds that race can no longer be used in a limited way in college admissions to achieve such critical benefits," which more closely matches the breaking-news stream hed.
I'm not saying there's no reason for concern; rather, the things to be concerned about have yet to come into specific relief.
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There's a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we're losing sight of the forest for the trees.
The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: "wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans". (I'm using 'wealth' as a stand-in for all the good experiences we're trying to optimize for, and 'black' and 'white' as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.
We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I'm willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.
But I don't think that it's a useful metric in the first place. And I can't really articulate why. I'd welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.
I guess... it just seems racist to me to be comparing "oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let's make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians". That doesn't seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.
Like I said, I'd welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.
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There's plenty of discussion in here if you'd just read it instead of posting inviting someone to reply
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73 comments