> How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago?

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.

That's missing the point: how does giving person A preferential access to college recompense person B who is distinct from person A?

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.

> the ~99% of people who don't have that privilege

What percentage of accepted students have that privilege? It's pretty high.

That's irrelevant, though, when you're talking about the vast majority of people who apply who don't get accepted because of those factors. Telling someone "you're privileged because a child of a Kennedy gets a leg up in going to Harvard and shares your skin color, even though you don't get that same leg up" is ridiculous, to say nothing of Asians who are discriminated against despite having relatively few legacies.

A quick search suggests that for Harvard (one of the institutions specifically sued here), it's 36% of the class of 2022.

Victimhood can be passed through generations if the parents' harm was not remedied. Merely ending harm does not remedy it. If someone is prevented from getting a home loan, job, raise, education, etc. because of racist policies, that absolutely affects the kind of life and opportunities that their children will have.

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.

How? By having the kid get a smaller inheritance? Or by having the kid not having the privilege of having college educated parents?

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."

> How exactly does present-day affirmative action recompense the victims of racist policies from half a century ago?

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.

You cannot have a world that has generational wealth and privilege while not having generational disadvantages. Your definition of victimhood is incredibly narrow here, and wrong.

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.

We agree that there are still racial biases in the present day that disproportionately affect Black applicants. But that's not the only disadvantage, and as AA is set up, a Black kid whose parents are doctors who goes to a ritzy boarding school is considered "disadvantaged" compared to a poor Viet kid in a crappy public school who has to spend all his evenings doing deliveries for his parents' restaurant. That is, frankly, ridiculous.