I went to a mostly black high school. My best friend had lower GPA, and lower SAT scores by 190 points. He and I were looking forward to attending same college. We applied to same major. He was admitted. I was wait listed. Ironically, my family was much poorer (trailer park) than his, and he felt much worse about it than I did. He assumed it was due to him being black, but no way to know for sure. I just made a point of visiting him a lot from the state school a few hours away.
Instead of dwelling on it, make the most of the college you DO attend. Remember that in the long run, your work and passions define your success far more than the institution you attend as a dumb 20 year old.
Race based affirmative action is silly, but I tell my son and daughter, who are mixed race (half Asian, white), that they need to focus on what they CAN control, rather than what they can't.
In the meantime, policies in the federal government designed to help descendants of slaves brought to US from Africa are benefiting wealthy people whose highly educated parents came here from Nigeria, because the policies don't differentiate beyond a superficial level. Simultaneously, my good friend whose family came here as barely literate refugees from Cambodia is lumped in same category as an Asian kid whose dad is a surgeon.
It's as idiotic as it is well meaning. Just remember that life will always be unfair, and that anger isn't an ideal way to handle it. You're going to dominate no matter how much these elitist morons try to hold you down.
It's very weird to me rich Nigerians can abuse the system, but poor South Africans are rejected as 'African American' altogether due to the color of their skin. Honestly, US race dealings are a cancer, I would move anywhere else.
It's that American cultural aversion to ever admitting that race is tied to history, they want to be seen to be doing something about racism but still do it through a racist lens where what matters is whether you look black and not what it actually means to have been discriminated against by American history and policy.
> not what it actually means to have been discriminated against by American history and policy.
There is a massive historical element to the position that most black americans find themselves in now. But there is also ongoing racism, which I don't see how you can tackle with only color blind policies.
It has some relevance for Americans, and clearly wasn't made to fit every global community. I'm not defending it, but I would think domestic applicants are far more numerous and therefore the effects on them merit more consideration.
It's because predicating carefully-chosen giveaways to "the right kind" of people with darker skin is easier and preferable to the elite than what is actually righteous and necessary: capital transfers (reparations) to the descendents of people who were wronged, and the people who are affected by stigma against the people who were wronged.
The fact that all of the various workarounds end up targeting people
nominally outside the scope is a feature, not a bug.
This is true everywhere. In India the SC/ST community have a lot of reservations in all colleges, Govt. jobs, Govt. procurement etc. Even after 70 years these were introduced and increased in % sometimes seats do not fill up. What has been observed is that the same group of SC/STs who mostly got everything hand delivered to them take advantage of the system. You see 3 generations of the same family utilizing the benefits. At the same time the really poor , remain poor.
This is more of a policy and political (changes cannot happen now otherwise there will be riots ) failure. No system can be perfect meritocracy, sometimes one just needs to suck up. Taking the comparison elsewhere one can argue effectively that where we are born is a matter of luck etc.
Personally i do not question policy intentions however always hope for better implementations in the future.
Yeah even after 70 years what is the representation of SC/ST people in any walk of public life in India? Affirmative action is more so a tool for representation than poverty alleviation device.
I think this is entirely dependent on the scale at which it is implemented. Certainly, you're right if we're only talking about for admission at elite colleges/universities.
India is well known for its casteism against untouchables which is nothing but pure racism. Even after 70 years of affirmative action - India still has 20% of its upper castes controlling 80% of Class A and Class B posts. Without affirmative action - it would have been 100%.
I had a half-black friend (which just means he was 100% black by our standards) get admitted to Harvard. The entire time he had this insecurity that he only got in because he was black and not because he was smart. Sure, the guy wasn't as smart as me in some areas, like he didn't pick up programming as fast, but he was smarter than me across a larger spectrum and definitely seemed more poised to become a leader. It was painful for me to watch him defeat himself over it, he had a bright future for someone who came up from such a difficult background.
Definitely, you have to control what you can, and not let the things people say get to your head, I wonder how he came to the conclusions he did.
Are these sorts of policies really going to get any better when the rhetoric they're based on is ramping up and demographics continue to shift in favor of groups that benefit from the policies? It's already practically socially forbidden to debate this sort of thing in public using your own name. I'm not going to have children, but I'm worried for the children of my siblings and cousins. Their parents don't have money or college educations and they're going to have a lot of roadblocks in their way and people telling them they don't deserve what little they do have.
Overall, I don't really know what any of us can do about it other than complain on the internet though. Unfortunately I don't really see a viable path forward to changing any of these policies.
Those policies bring a lot of cash to politicians to so called social scientists and to bureaucrats in the academia. If it weren't for the identity politics they would have been unemployed or had to do real work.
> * Want to dehumanise people by seeing them only as a member of their respective groups
This seems like such a facile argument. It seems very difficult to combat racism (ie. the common strand of thought in society that sees people only as a member of their racial group) if you can't consider race at all.
How, for instance, could we even make racial discrimination illegal if the state were entirely forbidden from considering the race of its citizens at all?
> Want to dehumanise people by seeing them only as a member of their respective groups
How do you propose governing people without somehow grouping them?
It feels like the slippery slope that data aggregators go down. The tension between specificity and parsimony. False positives vs false negatives. Okay so no Nigerian children of privilege. But what about Rwandan children of privilege who were refugees after genocide? So to fix this problem, _more_ grouping seems inevitable, but that's the slippery slope. How much invasion into and quantification of peoples' personal lives can we tolerate in the interest of enforcing equality? I don't think these problems have an easy answer, and "not grouping" doesn't really seem like an option either.
My personal take is just to use socioeconomic background (class) as the main factor. But race, gender, and other identifying factors inevitably play a role. There are some special historical traumas, like slavery, that I do think admit special consideration when we define "equal opportunity," even today.
> It's as idiotic as it is well meaning. Just remember that life will always be unfair, and that anger isn't an ideal way to handle it. You're going to dominate no matter how much these elitist morons try to hold you down.
College admissions depend much more on things you can't control than most people realize. For example, preferences are often given to children of donors, children of alumni, applicants from different states, and even male applicants (many colleges seek a 50/50 ratio.) At the end of the day, it can be almost random that one person is admitted while another is rejected - perhaps that person was a concert violinist and there were too many violinists who applied that year!
Fortunately it is possible to get an outstanding education nearly anywhere you attend. One data point is that faculty jobs are so competitive that nearly any professor who is hired needs to be some kind of superstar, regardless of the institution. Moreover, most colleges have very useful and often excellent facilities in terms of libraries, computing and online resources, laboratories, performance spaces, gyms, etc., and tend to be full of interesting people who you will learn a lot from. Community colleges in particular are the best bargain in education - affordable tuition, and faculty who are actually there primarily to teach students (rather than publish papers and raise money, which are higher priorities at research universities.)
I don't think that "severe discrimination" even compares to the regular subtle discrimination faced by most non-white Americans (and Europeans), and that's part of why it's still in place in the US. I'm glad for you that you have the option to choose a place that supposedly discriminates against your child less.
I hold a different belief - it is that the liberal faction in our society - while virtuous along some dimensions - has promoted economic and racial policy which has contributed to the worsening of race relations and made life worse for the black and white working class.
The disintegration of black, and then white social organization at the lower class levels can be tracked - I believe if there existed a revival of tacit knowledge, the trades then the society would be more prosperous and less divided than it is now.
Some of us on the left and right see eye to eye on this and the moderates are the ones who are delusional. The middle class concentration on information processing has damaged the society and their faction does not acknowledge negative results from knowledge. This is not anti-intellectual - the residents in HN must respect the note that every major stagnation in history is accompanied by the formalization of education and society. You all know it is true of computer code - beset by legacy issues.
He demands, as entire sectors of academia creak above his head, threatening to crash down and dash him against a floor on which the phrase, "reverse racism," is painted in 12-point font between two 200-point quotation marks.
I hope your son doesn't live in The Netherlands then either, because it's going the same way there. And I'm sure in many Western-European countries it's the same. Where people get selected for top positions to fill some quota instead of being selecting on qualities.
These quotas are discrimination in itself. And it becomes more complicated with mixed-race people. At one point one becomes "too white" or "too black" or "too asian"? In Brazil it's become way too complicated and ridiculous [0], for example.
People should be judged by their capabilities, skills, personal situation, not by race, gender or other group belonging.
We live in Eastern Europe, where even if this things are pushed by some politicians and some media, they still aren't a policy. Anyway, I feel that in most of the Europe there is a backlash against "identity politics", people got enough of it.
Discrimination is also inevitable, because we are human, and we are biased. Affirmative action is attempting to resolve the perception that some groups have more bias against them, consistently, due to historical impact.
Also more complex: ignoring discrimination, even if implicit, creates an environment where our natural human impulses (tribalism/bias) flourish.
I went to a mostly black high school. My best friend had lower GPA, and lower SAT scores by 190 points. He and I were looking forward to attending same college. We applied to same major. He was admitted. I was wait listed. Ironically, my family was much poorer (trailer park) than his, and he felt much worse about it than I did. He assumed it was due to him being black, but no way to know for sure. I just made a point of visiting him a lot from the state school a few hours away.
Instead of dwelling on it, make the most of the college you DO attend. Remember that in the long run, your work and passions define your success far more than the institution you attend as a dumb 20 year old.
Race based affirmative action is silly, but I tell my son and daughter, who are mixed race (half Asian, white), that they need to focus on what they CAN control, rather than what they can't.
In the meantime, policies in the federal government designed to help descendants of slaves brought to US from Africa are benefiting wealthy people whose highly educated parents came here from Nigeria, because the policies don't differentiate beyond a superficial level. Simultaneously, my good friend whose family came here as barely literate refugees from Cambodia is lumped in same category as an Asian kid whose dad is a surgeon.
It's as idiotic as it is well meaning. Just remember that life will always be unfair, and that anger isn't an ideal way to handle it. You're going to dominate no matter how much these elitist morons try to hold you down.