Are their children materially worse off statistically? Yes, and that should be remedied, by the same methods that everyone who's materially worse off should be uplifted. What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
Near the top of this thread one specific "how" was discussed.
Legacy admissions are affirmative action which offers preferential access based on ancestry. If your parents, your grandparents, or anyone of their race was (legally at the time) forbidden from attending, how else would you have representation in that process?
Affirmative action is an artificially generated membership in the "belongs at this institution" club for people who may otherwise be excluded.
As far as legacy admissions go, they're noxious, but you're not accounting for the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege.
What percentage of accepted students have that privilege? It's pretty high.
As an analogy, if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
Affirmative action programs are specifically designed to seek out and uplift people who have been generationally affected in that way. It recompenses them by giving them job/education opportunities that they would likely have had if their parents (and their parents, etc.) weren't artificially held back.
If those are the metrics we're using, then use them directly: prioritize first gen college applicants, applicants whose parents rent, applicants whose parents don't have professional jobs. Otherwise, why should a poor Asian immigrant going to a crappy public school be considered "more privileged" than a rich Black kid who goes to Andover?
> if I have stolen money from you for years, stopping me from stealing further money doesn't repair the damage I've done. You would rightly expect your money back, or something of comparable value.
The comparison here would be more something like "your grandfather killed my grandfather, therefore I should get privileges over you."
Referring to five decades in relation to a century makes it sound like a lot more time has passed than has actually passed.
> What racism exists now against their children should be remedied. But victimhood is concrete and not something that's passed on from generation to generation.
How can it not be? If a parent is traumatized how can that not affect their child? Do you think that the black children from the 50's were not affected by their parents showing up beaten, bruised and bloodied or by seeing their parents hanging from a tree after they didn't come home the night before?
Entire generations of people were victimized in ways that are hard to explain to someone who has not lived through it, and acting like everything needs to be calculated as a 1:1 transaction if it is even to be considered is not a constructive way to enter the discussion.
Using the Federal policies is simply a stark example of how recently racism was aggressively state-sanctioned. The purpose of affirmative action is to help directly break the racist biases in a complex process to being able to attend college.
It is not a singular solution, nor is it a perfect one. I feel like you are attempting to topple AA since it's not a magic bullet to the complex problem of racism in the US. It is an imperfect effort in part with many others to try and tackle the various inequalities in the US.
Even if the US was able to have a truly holistic effort to solve racism and the wrongs minorities have experienced, what good does funding k-12 schools, scholarships, etc. do to help disadvantaged college applicants right now? Nothing. The common dissent is that if they are poor or otherwise disadvantaged then they should receive benefit from programs targeting those disadvantages. But those still are unable to directly address the various unique ways in which a black person with some set of disadvantages is different than a white person with the same checklist. The problem is simply too complex and the breadth of experiences of minorities in the US far too broad to be tackled any way but directly imo, which is what AA attempts to do.
for example it took so many years to get to this:
https://www.santamonica.gov/blog/statement-apologizing-to-sa...
Chinese-Americans worked largely as indentured labor on railroads and various other large projects both before and after the Civil War. How are their descendants faring today?
Howabout Ashkenazi Jews, who have suffered probably the worst through all of recorded history? We're talking TWO MILLENIA of oppression, not a measly two centuries or so. Where are all the Jewish kids killing each other and flunking out of school for all of their historical oppression?
The generational racism trope/excuse is played out, has been massively contradicted by every model minority you can think of, and needs to die. It has no basis in reality.
Do people who regurgitate this insane idea just think Asians and Jews don't exist? The only way one could possibly entertain an obviously incorrect hypothesis is if you intentionally blind yourself to the voluminous countervailing evidence.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/07/anglo-saxons-deserve-re...
Would you agree that older wrongs are only different from newer wrongs as a matter of degree, rather than a matter of kind?
That is disingenuous, Slavery didn't end until the 13th amendment was ratified in 1865 which is 65 years later than you said, but really, slavery was not even a crime.
Systemic abuses continued long after that and even into today. Those are not crimes either...they are written into law like how property taxes are used to fund public education which ensures that people of means get a good education and those that struggle will continue to struggle.
Lynchings, murders, beatings, being forced by gunpoint to not vote...those are crimes and (while they do happen even today) they happened a LOT in the 50's and into the 60's. The people who committed those crimes are grandparents/great-grandparents and a lot of whom are alive today.
Wrongs against minorities are not some long-ago, almost mythical events that we need to just move on from. They are still happening, and they are indicative of a society that values sameness and predictability over the individual rights and freedoms of the people.
That being said, giving a leg-up to a minority applicant over someone else is, in fact, one way to decrease the effects of the abuses that were experienced.