Every time the SCOTUS hears one of these cases they acknowledge that, but the justification is that these classes are/have been historically discriminated against and constitutional admissions which take race into consideration are a temporary measure to right these historical wrongs by leveling the playing field. So the end goal even according to SCOTUS is for these measures to eventually become unconstitutional.
So under that thought process... when does the temporary measure end? Is there a specific goal? Or is it something unachievable like "when income inequality is fixed".
There simply is not a quick easy solution and those who are not oppressed simply have no real frame of reference to understand the problem. I encourage every person who feels these programs are unfair to spend time volunteering in poor minority communities.
The idea that "oppression" is limited to dimensions of race and gender, rather than ethnic/economic/geographic/etc is as juvenile as it is political useful.
You have had up close experience with one kind of disadvantaged community, and act as if that is the only group that has it. The difference between urban communities and places like Clay County, Kentucky is that volunteers like you won't ever get sent to Kentucky.
Your line of reasoning did a dodge there, swapping out between geographic demographics and racial demographics.
I don't think all kids in poor immigrant neighborhoods are in worse positions than poor kids in Eastern Kentucky. I do think that all the white-looking kids in eastern Kentucky, regardless of other factors stacked against them, will never be denied a job, loan, or rental opportunity based on the color of their skin. I can't say the same for the kids from any of those regions who don't look white.
The idea that we have somehow magically eradicated racism over the course of a single generation astounds me.
Seriously, it's almost 2020. You should get how close to the 1960s that is.
And yet there is no trace of it now. I doubt you have set foot in Arkansas, because your implication that the attitudes haven't changed much is grossly inaccurate.
Frequently it is. Many laws specifically protect "national origin".
Good luck.
What laws? The US Constitution provides significantly greater protections to US Citizens than foreign nationals, as many of rights are not extended to non-citizens.
The data shows widespread economic disparity. It does not show the cause, which may or may not be discrimination.
[citation needed]
I think your point that oppression is not only racial but socioeconomic is not misguided. But as I understand it, the ruling does not preclude adjustments based on the access and opportunity limitations you refer to, which are not strictly limited to a particular race.
You have to distinguish affirmative action (in hiring/employment) and race based factors in college admissions.
Most colleges that use race/minority status as a factor in admissions also generally also use socioeconomic status as a factor. However, I am not familiar with any employment/hiring based affirmative action that looks at socioeconomic status.
Just as an example, I went to a top 50 (at the time) public high school in the country, the school is located in a large city (hint: where Jeff Bezos went). I had a 4.0 GPA and was the 50th percentile of the class, approximately #750 out of 1500 kids in my class. Colleges take that into account and I would never have made it to an ivy league (I did get 1 offer, but because I was an athlete and they wanted me to compete for them), but all things being equal if I came from that poor rural area you reference I would be looked at like a scholar, maybe even #1 in the graduating class vs #750, and I might have had multiple Ivy league admissions.
Why do you think this is the case?
Yet somehow you think you are enlightened by a little volunteer work. as far as immigrants in America go, Asians make more money than whites. When you compare Chinese, the difference is starker.
FWIW, I don't think you were really that poor. I grew up white, male, and poor from Appalachia. I promise you, there was no privilege in that. Its a crime against humanity that someone's test scores are worth less than another's simply because they were not born with enough pigment in their skin.
If you pick out students who had real disadvantage -- growing up with horrible schools, having uneducated parents, not speaking English, being poor -- I'd be 100% for them.
That's not what we've got.
We've got a system where Harvard will bring in black people from the "right" neighborhoods, and white people if their parents went to Harvard, taught at Harvard, or donated to Harvard.
I think America largely fails its poor, black and marginalized communities, and that a ton more can and should be done, but that doesn't mean affirmative action is the right (both effectively and morally) solution, or that it's not systemacially unfair to other groups.
Not that being "Harvard" would make it better, but to a lot of people the prestige of the name is important.
So to that effect, it is a zero sum game.
In general, we is a society (in America at least) have decided that's not good enough. It hasn't been good enough since the time there was one facility for the whites and one facility for the coloreds.
so I guess you're making up for lost time? or setting the precedent for your own progeny? because I'm like 100% sure that during the era of slavery the same arguments were made by slavers - "my ancestors didn't participate in the crusades so I'm morally absolved..."
You should go start your own Harvard and you can exclude or admit anyone you want.
The judge was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by a Democrat controlled Senate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Dale_Burroughs
Federal judgeships are lifetime appointments so the current makeup of the Senate, short of impeaching her, has no relevance.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)
>The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point "assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself." Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S., at 510
>But such measures, the Convention instructs, "shall in no case entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate rights for different racial groups after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved." Ibid.; see also Art. 1(4) (similarly providing for temporally limited affirmative action); Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Annex to G. A. Res. 34/180, 34 U. N. GAOR, 34th Sess., Res. Supp. (No. 46), p. 194, U. N. Doc. A/34/46, Art. 4(1) (1979) (authorizing "temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality" that "shall be discontinued when the objectives of equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved").
The answer for all 3 for me personally is no. I have family members who make decisions based on different priorities which change their income. My coworkers differ radically in their abilities and work ethic. How can they have equal incomes in this scenario? There is a way to do this, and it hasn't worked any time it's been tried.
If a normal employee at say walmart brings in $100 worth of value a day to the company, and the CEO executes a few big multi-million dollar deals that month, then the CEO in fact would be significantly more productive (in terms of capital to the company) than the average employee.
> and that factors other than pure merit allowed them to amass that much wealth.
Yes like taking the risk of starting such a business to employ others and putting down the capital which might be lost.
I also don't know who you think would enforce some kind of "fairness" limit on how much money someone makes. The government doing so would likely be ruled unconstitutional and wouldn't likely ever be passed in the first place through congress.
If all the normal employees quit and Walmart can't replace them, how much money does Walmart lose?
Perhaps we should calculate value to the company based on that sort of reasoning.
If you're a self-employed craftworker who produces hammers, should your income be the same each year, without regard for the quality or quantity of hammers you produced that year, and without considering the world's need for the sorts of hammers you produced? How would you go about achieving that outcome?
Difficult to answer, and honestly not at all a priority to have an answer.
Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.
The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."
> Perhaps, once it becomes settled law. However given Roe v Wade is still up for debate means that defacto permanence is not really a problem.
> The answer then is "When the supreme court decides that the argument presented is sufficient to warrant no longer allowing race-concious admissions is a factor."
Are new Roe v Wade like cases being heard by the court? There's a chilling effect to people bringing these cases to consider.
I'm sure you're aware that like 10 other states have similar cases working their way through the court system
I suppose you can do a No True Scotsman and say that those weren’t truly enforcing equality of outcome since there were people at the top of that society doing the enforcing, but most would find that argument pretty strained.
Everyone should have the chance at getting educated, but not everyone needs to pass or excel - it is up to the individual to succeed, but it is up to society to provide the opportunity to succeed. That is why schooling (primary, secondary and tertiary) should be free for everyone.
You can't answer the question of "when" if a person has already decided the goal is unachievable. Again, those were his words not mine
The temporary measures will end WHEN people are genuinely interested enough to help regardless of whether they created the problem. That is my answer. You just don't like it. And that's ok....
If you/the people who support such a policy can't define an explicit goal then I'd say that's pretty unachievable.
Our system is based on equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. If there are issues with the opportunity then we should work to fix those (like is already being done in inner cities cleaning up the drugs/pushing out gangs/preventing fatherless homes/etc). But pretending that you're going to fix those socioeconomic issues by giving preferential treatment to people based on race is just pulling other problems into the mix and is blatantly racist.
No one is advocating wishing anything away. If you want to focus specifically on equality of opportunity you can't do so without recognizing that race directly affects which opportunities are available to whom. Any solution that ignores that is just more of the same. And doing more of the same only extends the timeline of "when" that the original comment took issue with.
Also related: California Alien Land Law of 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Alien_Land_Law_of_1...), targeting mostly Asians (Japanase, Chinese, and Koreans). SCOTUS reaffirmed this law in 1923, it was finally invalidated in 1952.
And Jewish people are a protected class, even defined by SCOTUS as a race for purposes of Civil Rights/Anti-discrimination laws
Do you think their kids might be affected by say, the economic troubles their parents might've gone through, or the fact that they lost family due to the racial animus at the time? Or how about if those families were relegated to places designed specifically for them, to keep them away from the rest of the populace, with less opportunity for education or work. Do you not think that might have a multi-generational effect?
If Jews have had a hard time getting into Harvard in the past, and Harvard uses legacy status, then that means that Jews will.habe a harder time in the future for getting into Harvard.
No, that is not the justification being used.
The argument used to justify this racism is that a rich education requires exposure to diverse people and ideas, and so the educational mission of the school requires that they bring in sufficient numbers of otherwise-underrepresented racial groups. If they can't do this, they say, they won't be able to give their students a good education.
[Note that I'm just playing devil's advocate by citing their view; I actually think it's bollocks. Sure, being surrounded by diverse ideas is important in education. But if they were truly interested in this, then they'd be trying to recruit based on that actual argument, by looking for Protestants and Catholics and Mormons; tall and short people; introverts and extroverts; right-handers and left-handers; city folk and country folk. The fact that the only dimension along which they measure diversity is race reveals that the justification they give is nothing but a convenient rationalization.]
Similarly, coming from a minority religious or cultural background can also be a plus for a college application. Perhaps your complaint is that the process by which these benefit an applicant is less systematized than it is for race? Or that racial preferences are too systematized?
The other categories you mention are likely to be diverse by default---colleges already have a pretty good distribution of short and tall people, and the hand dominance distribution is also pretty representative. There aren't any mechanisms that impede the society-wide distribution of these traits from replicating itself in the student body.
Do they present any evidence to support this claim? I'm only aware of studies like that of Robert Putnam showing that diversity is extremely detrimental to community engagement and cohesion, among many other things.
This shouldn't be an acceptable justification, "righting historical wrongs" is a highly subjective policy goal which shouldn't be relevant to a verdict of "constitutionality".
But that's not what's at stake here. Chad is doing great, legacy admissions are alive and well. Meanwhile Cletus and Liu are being discriminated against on race despite their real history that flies in the face of your framing.
Why must they be thrown under the bus? Why not Chad?
This is actually incorrect. The only rationale SCOTUS has ever accepted for affirmative action is to create diverse student bodies. They have never accepted past discrimination as a rationale. For what it's worth, I'm a (former) lawyer. But you don't have to take my word for it! See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/#tab-opi...
Actually, SCOTUS specifically identified this motivation ("right these historical wrongs") as improper and affirmative action programs premised on it are illegal. That is why affirmative action programs instead talk about "diversity" -- SCOTUS blessed "diversity" as an exercise of judgment by the school that would allow otherwise impermissible race-based admission.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) (link: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/539/306/)
>The requirement that all race-conscious admissions programs have a termination point "assure[s] all citizens that the deviation from the norm of equal treatment of all racial and ethnic groups is a temporary matter, a measure taken in the service of the goal of equality itself." Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S., at 510
If it were about diversity as you claim, rather than righting historical wrongs of inequality, there would be no concept of a termination point of these programs as diversity would be an ongoing concern ad infinitum.
But race also matters in terms of starting position.
Asians need to organize like people of other races and take bigger pieces of the pie.
It's a little crude to use race maybe, but it probably isn't a terrible approximation. What would be great is if people had to disclose any paid preparation for the SAT or the hours their parents spent with them growing up but that's probably a long way off.
Overall, this issue is framed to be as controversial as possible by political interests but it really isn't that big a deal.
Isn't that contradictory? Are you saying that african americans achieve the same as asian americans even though they did not have to study hard? Then why would affirmative action be necessary?
Affirmative action is applied to upgrade the scores of candidates with lower scores if they are of a disadvantaged minority. So, an asian american with higher scores (and who worked harder) will miss out on an opportunity to an african american with lower scores (who did not work as hard).
Also not sure why the parent user is posting it multiple times. Not cool...
Sorry for posting it a lot, its just relevant to what I wanted to say in my other comments.
They claim that East Asians develop cognitive capacity at an earlier age than other races and that gives East Asians a compounding practice advantage that gives them the edge in academic scores. The article claims, based on this premise, that universities like Harvard should actually discriminate even more against East Asians.
The article is full of obvious leaps designed to sound smart but are actually logically vacuous.
Much of the article essentially boils down to this: Young East Asians test highly > The quantity of older East Asian who are successful don't reflect the quantity of young East Asians who achieve academically > Therefore, East Asians start smart and then other races catch up cognitively in adulthood A) Racism is likely factor here. East Asians are less represented in leadership because leadership perceives East Asians are being less leaderly. Now we're using the symptoms of racism in order to justify the racism itself. B) Nurture versus nature is a complicated and unsettled debate yet the author tries to claim that because China has a creativity problem, it's proof that East Asians as a race has a creativity problem. Never mind that Japan is a world leader in innovation. C) Article repeatedly use test scores to say something qualitatively about the characteristics of a race. For example, East Asians test high on math therefore East Asians have more quantitative reasoning capabilities. You could just as easily attribute this to cultural differences in study priorities.
2) "If these children are scoring as high as 120 on average at the age of four (despite being hospitalized for malnourishment) and 110 to 112 at the age of ten, it is implausible that their IQ goes up as they grow older" Come on. Why? You can't just assume that hitting a high IQ at an early age means that it cannot continue growing. Especially when these IQ scores are being compared against age groups.
>East Asians are less represented in leadership because leadership perceives East Asians are being less leaderly.
Can you provide evidence that this is what's going on instead of something else? Plenty of leaders in the US are East Asian.
>using the symptoms of racism in order to justify the racism itself
You didn't present your own evidence that the 'symptoms' are actually due to racism. The author presents a compelling explanation backed up with data that explains what we see.
>Never mind that Japan is a world leader in innovation
The article quotes the Japanese government stating it believes it has an innovation challenge as well.
>You can't just assume that hitting a high IQ at an early age means that it cannot continue growing
IQ is relative to others the same age. This is evidence that East Asians develop cognitive ability more quickly than other populations. All healthy children continue getting smarter as they develop. This is all discussed in the article.
There are more Asian leaders in the world's top tech companies than there are Europeans. Why do you think that so many Asian people in Asia are able to assume leadership roles and grow their companies at breakneck pace and yet Asian Americans are somehow unfit to do the job in America?
It's wonderful how much economic progress China has made, and serious academic progress as well. But that's not relevant here.
China discourages non-ethnic Chinese from having control over Chinese companies, and has extremely few foreigners to begin with so that's not a valid comparison.
I don't know about silly, it certainly looks unlawful to me.
I quoted wrong number. It's 25% vs 40%.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics
Affirmative action doesn't actually bother me as much as legacy based admissions. Just absolutely idiotic that it's accepted.
The major factors pushing down that percentage are legacy admissions and the vague "personal rating," which seems to be the knob Harvard admissions turns to get the demographic ratios it desires. Asians are systematically given a far lower "personal rating" than other demographics.
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/harvard-admissio...
I really don't see how anyone justifies this kind of thing in 2019. This is like the barest possible fig leaf over obvious prejudice. They could rename it to "Cromulence Factor" and it'd make as much sense.
Kid didn't get into Harvard? Donate to the school he or she did get into.
Secondly, why doesn’t Harvard just admit Asian Americans that score poorly to bring the Average down and chalk it up to amazing character?
If a higher court overturns your decision, then there should be consequences.