Of course the issues you raise are real, and there is a whole constellation of systemic racism issues that specifically affect black people in a unique way. But when it comes to affirmative action there's a fundamental issue that goes beyond privilege narratives:
> Or how about we don’t assume all black kids and women are diversity hires now, and maybe, I don’t know, treat each one as an individual and judge them based on the content of their character
That's a nice sentiment, but it overlooks the fact that AA introduces this doubt, the doubt is in fact real, and can't be papered over with good intentions and turning a blind eye to cause and effect. The question is whether the net good in counter-balancing other systemic racism is worth the cost. That's not an easy question to answer. Some individuals would be more than happy to take any advantage they can get, and others want to be judged purely on their individual character.
Maybe. Every once in a while we have someone I consider an AA-only hire, but they don't stick around. OK, I'll be honest, the most recent one I was wrong - even though they lacked experience, they were clearly better than the (white male) person they replaced... and they're still here so I'm happy.
I'm going to imagine a world without "AA hires". I think people still get judged based on their skin color. That's the way rascism works.
So, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Anyway, when an incompetent colleague sticks around for years... I wish I could blame affirmative action and feel good, but nope - instead I'm going to blame management.
Hey, I'm well aware of the doubt. As an Asian male who went to an elite university, I had doubts about everybody. Black kids, Native Americans, Latinos, women... definitely AA, it goes without saying. The jocks of course got in on their ability to hit balls rather than books. And the private school lifers who've been groomed like show horses since kindergarten are merely highly polished legacy turds. But wait, I think that one white kid from Alaska only got in so the school can say they have students from all 50 states. And the guys from rural Ohio and Nebraska? You know they're the token farmers of the class. The kids whose parents were professors? Nepotism of the intelligentsia. Really, the only legitimate admits beyond suspicion were the other Asian males. Well, except the ones who were the first generation to go to college in their families. You know they got in on some sob story. And the fresh off the boat Asians? They barely speak English, so don't tell me they got 760 on the SAT verbal. Immigrants getting special treatment again. And forget all those Asians who only got in because their parents had an Ivy League fetish. They're just grinders with zero intellectual spark. Perfect for a life as some kind of joyless doctor, just as their parents always wanted.
All these elite schools should not only get rid of AA, but they should only accept Asian guys who have perfect grades and SAT test scores, hails from one of the major coastal cities, have parents who went to non-elite universities, are not athletes, play no instruments, attended public schools, are not first generation immigrants, have no bullshit "altruistic" extracurriculars, and have no disabilities. They would be the only ones who are truly academically qualified without any doubt.
If you remove that discrimination, you'll let more of them in, and regression towards the mean will kick in.
For comparison, if you have a 'rich people' club, and they let blue people in when they own more than a million dollars, and green people only when they own more than a billion dollars, the green people in the club will be richer on average.
If you change the requirement to let anyone in who owns at least two million dollars, the gap in average wealth of admitted people from either group will narrow.
It won't necessarily disappear, because the underlying distributions of wealth might be weird. For all we know, after the change the average admitted blue one might be richer than the average admitted green.
You can build some real world example using data from https://www.statista.com/statistics/201426/the-richest-peopl...
Fun fact: a club that only admits Americans owning more than 150 billion USD would be 50% African American.
Just like when you see the the son of the CEO working at the company, there's a certain probability that he didn't get in based on his performance alone.
Of course, as you suggest, there are sons of the CEO who really are the most qualified candidate for whatever job they are holding. But there's also nepotism.
The titular point of the article was that class is really where the discrimination happens nowadays. Race and gender prejudices still exist but have taken a back seat to class inequality. The article also suggests the primary driver for this--deterioration of public primary schooling. It's very easy to see how wealth can allow some families to leap over this problem.
edit: sorry it sounded like you were being sarcastic? Now I can't tell after your other comment
> Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites. [1]
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
The expected consequence of eliminating race-based affirmative action is that URM students will instead attend less selective universities where they're more likely to persist. Sure, the university they graduate from may not be as prestigious. But on the flipside, they'll be more likely to graduate in the field they actually wanted to study. They'll also probably save a lot of money, since changing majors partway through usually means that these students take 5 or 6 years to graduate.
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14885/w148...
2. "Persistence rate" means the rate at which students complete their declared major. It's rare for students to drop out of university entirely, much more common is that they change to a less demanding major - that is, they don't persist in their initial major.
They would also graduate with a STEM major, which would likely enable more lucrative career options.
> this is the claim of some recent research
It looks like this working paper is over a decade old. Was it published recently?
Only racist losers assume I'm a diversity hire. And I'd actually rather they seethe at the "diversity hire" who just happens to somehow magically drive high-impact projects at every company he's ever worked at culminating in a career that's seen him work on everything from some of the most used apps in the world to self-driving cars.
For that particular brand of loser if it isn't affirmative action it'll be something else:
- Our CTO is from a West African nation, I'm from a West African nation, we bonded over that so actually its neopotism
- Affirmative action may be banned and we dropped D&I but actually the hiring manager has a personal secret agenda to hire blackies
- One of the people that interviewed him was black so obviously they gave me a pass.
But of course let's forget about the legacy admission that landed you in a school, let's forget how you bond with your interviewers over in-office beer kegs and inside jokes from your favorite shows in your shared culture, let's forget about that internship from a family friend, etc. etc.
If you think people who assume minorities are diversity hires only exist in movies I'm not sure if you're naïve, clueless, or both.
> They may look at you and wonder where you rank, so it forces you to prove yourself
I mean you want to tell yourself no one cares, but you also want to say that removing AA forces me to prove myself? (actually that's just a really vaguely written sentence, removing AA? or being black? what is "it"?)
Why do white people get so uncomfortable at the thought that other whites can be racist? I didn't say you think of me as a diversity hire, yet you immediately feel the need to start throwing yourself in front of the bullet with statements like "this isn't a movie".
Is this some sort of cognitive dissonance from the people who have this thoughts deep down or something?
I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist. It is part of mainstream media. What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Interesting... when race hadn't been specified, people wondering that about me was something that only happens in movies.
But the moment I specifically mention white people then "well black people are wondering it too!!!!!"
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It's almost like you don't care either way as long as you're running interference for the people I'm describing... but why are you doing that?
Again it's not all white people, not even most, assuming minority = diversity hire, and for that reason I initially didn't mention a specific race at all until the first reply I got was someone in full denial mode...
The only people who should feel the need to defend against what I'm saying are people who hold these thoughts. But I'm sure you don't, right?
> I doubt white people are surprised by other white people can be racist.
Yet, again, you felt confident enough to open a comment with patronizing levels of denial at the idea that there are people who think most minorities can't hack it outside of being a token hire... despite page full of comments essentially saying that!
> What may surprise you is many black people can be racist against other black people too.
Please don't project personal naivety and ignorance onto me. YOU are the one who thinks that someone assuming a minority is a diversity hire only happens in movies, not I.
The western world weaponized racism amongst blacks across the continent I'm from and we're still seeing the results today in places like Sudan. Maybe you should brush up on your social studies if you were not aware.
Do you believe everyone who visits here is white? I would guess half of the people on here have various shades of color.
Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
I am black and I didn't say I live in Sudan. Sudan is not in West Africa.
I knew you were white because you said people who think minorities are token hires is something that only happens in movies.
Minorities can be racist, but a white person would be the first to say something so naïve.
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> Your views are white and black and that's not reality. The world is not a movie. Most people in the world are not even white or black. Why are you excluding them?
Scraping the bottom of the barrel until your fingers bleed here... I didn't mention your race until you outed yourself with your ignorant remark.
You're white, I'm black, that's the only reason why white and black were mentioned. Which aspect of my original comment relies on a specific race to be true?
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> Why do you think it is fair to let in less qualified black students over more qualified asian and Indian students?
When you're out of things to say it's best to desperately shove words into your detractor's mouth.
You're clearly not convinced of anything you just wrote, but you felt the need to say something after being trounced. Unfortunately this wasn't the answer we were looking for.
Maybe just reflect on this conversation and grow as a person.
I don't think affirmative action affects "sleeping their way to the top".
I mean... this isn't what AA does at all.
No, it doesn’t.
"Despite this assertion, the development of the Griggs doctrine has proved anything but friendly to meritocratic objectives. Although the Supreme Court has never held that all workplaces must be racially balanced, lower courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which is charged with administering Title VII, have firmly embraced the presumption that the racial profiles of particular workplaces should reflect the racial composition of the broader population."
"Recently, prompted by the racially adverse impact of measures of verbal and abstract analysis — areas in which some minority groups underperform — experts have also developed alternative instruments that employ audio or video techniques, or that make use of so-called "assessment center" protocols based on job simulations, real-time problem solving, or actual work samples."
"Although few disparate-impact lawsuits are actually filed, and though defendants win most of those that are, the specter of disparate-impact lawsuits nonetheless dangles like a Sword of Damocles over employers' heads. The prospect of onerous, unpredictable, and protracted litigation provides employers with a strong incentive to find some way to avoid being sued. One temptation is to satisfy diversity targets by relaxing personnel-selection standards across the board. Firms can also switch to more haphazard staffing methods that tend to obscure informal affirmative action or other race-conscious practices. Some of these tactics pose the risk of yielding a less effective work force, while others (such as the use of race-based criteria) are legally suspect or even expressly forbidden under Title VII."
At least, that's with the typical meaning of "affirmative action". It's a nebulous term that some use to encompass things like blind orchestra auditions. In the tech world this could be equated with anonymous resumes and blind zoom interviews with modulated voices. But few tech companies seem to be interested in this type of affirmative action.
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
But every generation finds some excuse that their prejudices are "rational".
Certain people just refuse to accept certain groups of people are capable of accomplishment without outside help or uniquely uncommon circumstances.
Those seem like quite distinct issues, like you might as well lump in 'good at office politics' into it
These days, when I hear discussion about inclusive hiring, regardless of whether people are for or against it, there is a common assumption that allowances will have to be made for employees of lesser ability.
My impression is that this change in attitude started in the mid-1990s.
In some ways, someone arbitrarily opening the door for you sheds a lot of load in the short-term. You still need all the grit that a chip on your shoulder gives you in order to succeed in the long run. When you do succeed you'll have to shed that load unless you want to sound like a bitter ass the rest of your life. My point here is, I didn't really need anyone to tell me that I was looked down on (by certain people) for a period of time to know it, and I'm not sure college admissions or jobs that are attracting diversity hires are attracting people who give a shit what you think in the short term.
Your opinion of me will be established long after the initial thought of, "Oh this guy is a diversity hire" has left the space between your ears.
And, hopefully a few years later, they'll no longer be looked at as diversity hires.