frog_squid

Yes, in Thomas Sowell's Affirmative Action Around the World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_Action_Around_the_...

"They tend to benefit primarily the most fortunate among the preferred group (e.g. black millionaires), often to the detriment of the least fortunate among the non-preferred groups (e.g. poor whites)"

Yes, for other minorities, instead of observing the rise in the educational and financial success of Asian Americans and using it as a motivational example, in some ways what Asian Americans took away from Jewish success in America, they point to Asian Americans being too competitive and try to enact racist quotas so Asians only compete with one another.

They took the easy way out. They can make a huge movement out of going into their own communities and educating their members on the value of hard work and knowledge and encouraging their own kids to excel from a very early age in the same way asian parents do. They can attach an underdog narrative to it and show the world that through sheer motivation and will power they were able to, as a community, in a couple generations, rise up and improve themselves in a radical way. Instead they allocate their time to protesting and complaining that the system is unfair.

If I were to go along with your metaphor I would say what affirmative action is doing is starting with a a car that pulls slightly to the left. Then, instead of taking the car to the mechanic and having the root issue fixed, laws are passed so all roads are rebuilt to consistently meander slightly left so the car can still drive down the road while hitting the gas and not have to course correct the steering wheel to stay on the road.

I.e. it's the wrong solution for the problem, is absurd and makes things worse.

What I find really funny is that the current American far left, who are very vocal about any kind of racial inequality towards Blacks and Latinos, are the ones most vocal in their support for affirmative action.

They don't see it as racist at all, but actually they believe they're supporting the fair and moral choice and patting themselves on the back for being such virtuous people. They only care about the end goal, which is equity not equality, and it's clear that any method used to get there is fine by them.

It's absolutely sickening the delusion and hypocrisy these people have. Their principles are not set in stone, like holding a set of ideas that must be applied similarly across differing situations, but rather, their supposed principles, like tools, are selectively used or ignored for particular situations that they stand to benefit or lose from.

What happens if you're a poor Asian kid in America? You get screwed over twice! Once for being poor and once again for being Asian and having a racist education system that requires you to meet a higher bar in order to get into the same kinds of universities as other kids.

What happens if you're a rich Black or Latino kid in America? You Get Two advantages! You get to be raised in a wealthy family and you need to accomplish much less than other kids to be admitted to the same prestigious universities.

Trying to fight inequality from birth with racism is not the right approach.

Yeah, but the system is gamed and a huge proportion of affirmative action admits don't actually fall in the wealth category that the majority of the people in that minority group would, i.e. most affirmative action admits come from very wealthy families. The data shows this if you search online. In my Ivy League college, several of the Latino students living in my Freshman house were actually bi-racial with white dads and came from upper middle class, well-educated households.