Affirmative Action has now ended in the United States.
We just had to lock a thread in politics over this, I suspect we may have to lock this one as well. If your only take is “affirmative action bad” you might as well just leave now.
A little unrelated context that sort of lends a bit of background to this will make things equal claim.
I was at one time an international non-white student at a US institution. After joining, during orientation I find out that the test scores and metrics required for international students is insanely high compared to US citizens. Like in a subject based international test, I had to score above 95th percentile while most of the students from the US did not even write the test or if they had, scored on average around 75th.
To add more context, I come from a country with far weaker education system and it cost me around half an year of savings to pay for this test.
So, I find it hilarious ridiculous when people think that any of these institutions are remotely fair. I understand how for these institutions citizens > aliens. Now try transplanting this context on to different race groups within the country.
I’m not a huge fan of affirmative action or its local equivalent, but I understand why it is needed and it is the responsibility of the government and judiciary to assess it’s impact before deciding to do away with it.
I also wish they would focus more on things like, nutrition, good school environment, truancy, access to healthcare and so on for disadvantaged groups instead of trying to act at a level where most of the disadvantaged people cannot reach. Still something is better than nothing.
Obviously Affirmative Action wasn’t something that should be in place forever, but any reasonable person has to see that it sought to un-tip scales that were already heavily tipped. The process for removing Affirmative Action should not be “well let’s ask some old people whether we should remove it”, it should have been a long term study showing the impact of the measure, and perhaps come up with a plan for scaling it back until it was no longer needed. Removing it outright without any kind of intelligence behind it is just…irresponsible.
There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.
The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: “wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans”. (I’m using ‘wealth’ as a stand-in for all the good experiences we’re trying to optimize for, and ‘black’ and ‘white’ as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.
We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I’m willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.
But I don’t think that it’s a useful metric in the first place. And I can’t really articulate why. I’d welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.
I guess… it just seems racist to me to be comparing “oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let’s make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians”. That doesn’t seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.
Like I said, I’d welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.
There’s plenty of discussion in here if you’d just read it instead of posting inviting someone to reply
My first sentence was:
There’s a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we’re losing sight of the forest for the trees.
As I indicate, I’ve read the discussion that was here at the time, and appreciate it. I’ve even responded to a couple of posts. In this comment, I was hoping to bring up a different angle.
If you don’t agree and/or don’t want to engage, that’s fine, but don’t assume that I’m just blindly soliciting responses without reading what people are saying.
It’s extremely naive to think that those traits don’t have impacts on academic performance and capability. Not to say that black people are biologically more <whatever> than white people, but their experience living as a black person in this country has direct impacts on their academic experience, both historical and future. A pure meritocracy ignores the benefits of diversity, both to society and at the individual level.
