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.
The fact that all of the various workarounds end up targeting people nominally outside the scope is a feature, not a bug.
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.
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.
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.
Is it well meaning? The behaviour of the advocates for these sorts of policies fits vastly closer to
* Want to dehumanise people by seeing them only as a member of their respective groups
* Want an excuse to hate on a particular group of people
* Constructed a story where doing that makes them the good guys
than
* looked at the problems people have
* tried to understand them
* tried to come up with a solution which would improve things
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?
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.
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.)
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.
That is why I take projects like Urbit seriously.
Everyone gets discriminated against and stereotyped in subtle manners. All that varies is what way people are stereotyped.
Even in the USA, the people called "white" aren't considered the pinacle in every area.
(Also, if you want to see real discrimination try being of Chinese descent in Malaysia)
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.
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[0]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-wit...
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 bad, no matter how is done.
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.