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<p>No, fab, that is not what I mean by “pulling the AA card.” I’m talking about using it to rationalize why someone did a bad job at whatever they do. Saying that Justice Thomas is a crummy judge and he probably benefited from AA, is different from saying that “Justice Thomas is a crummy judge, and of course he is, because the only reason he is a judge is because of AA.”</p>
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<p>There is no point in worrying about what racists might think.</p>
<p>Answer to question asked one or two pages back:</p>
<p>Not URM; not married to one.</p>
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<p>I’m sure the economic wealth of the North did play a role in their winning The Civil War, IP. But, it was a long and protracted conflict, and the multiple variables at play often made it difficult to tell who had the upper hand at times. Among those variables, tactical error on the part of the South, as well as plain dumb luck benefiting the North, ultimately
resulted in an end to the longest and bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.</p>
<p>However, I believe the issue your brought before the forum was the idea that modern machinery via the industrial revolution, made the need for slave labor less needful in the South. However, clearly, with “Cotton being King” in the US South, the advent of the cotton gin called for a strengthening of the institution of slavery in order that the South might fully reap the economic rewards of this invention, not the opposite.</p>
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<p>I don’t believe I intimated that anyone on this thread ever made such a claim, IP. But I have been a member of CC for over eight years, and have observed and participated in many an anti-AA thread during which some participants not only claimed that AA accounted for virtually all URM achievements, but that because blacks are inherently intellectually inferior (a centuries-long held axiom ultimately “proven”, of course, by the likes of Shockley, Herrnstein and Murray), virtually none of them ever “earned” their academic spots or awards. That mindset, I believe, is largely behind the demand to “see the transcripts” or the SAT scores, or what have you. I don’t believe that you have ever expressed any such belief, IP—certainly not on this thread.</p>
<p>poetsheart:</p>
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<p>Well then. Case rests. We all know how incredibly accurate and objective American history textbooks are!</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned that I think a lot of AA supporters who are not URMs are actually vested in the whole diversity education complex. This illustrates this phenomenon quite well – it also express for many of us why we are suffering from extreme diversity fatigue:</p>
<p>[From</a> On High](<a href=“http://blogfromonhigh.blogspot.com/2011/07/maybe-california-isnt-basket-case.html]From”>http://blogfromonhigh.blogspot.com/2011/07/maybe-california-isnt-basket-case.html)</p>
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<p>At least you acknowledge an inconsistency among the supporters of racial preferences.</p>
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<p>Bay, I wish I could agree with you on this sentiment but I can’t. I don’t really see a lot of intellectual disparagement from the right of liberal URMs in high places. Do you actually discern disparagement of Obama’s intellect from the right? Certainly, there is criticism of his policies but I don’t see that criticism going to the “He’s Dumb!” level. </p>
<p>OTOH, we have what seems to be a very large number of targets for this on the right and not necessarily URMs: Palin, Bush are prime examples.</p>
<p>I guess we could say that Biden comes in for the “Dumb” derision. He certainly has had enough gaffes to fuel that sort of treatment, but it has not seemed to happen to any great extent.</p>
<p>So I’m saying here that I think the “dumb” accusation tends to be lodged by the liberal side at the conservative side. And very often the media fuels it. The elite educational establishment is, of course, saturated in liberal ideology so this all makes a kind of sense – the Ivy League symbolizes smarts in the country and it’s pretty much entirely left wing and so anyone who is conservative must be dumb! </p>
<p>This is one of the key sources of my ambivalence about the elite colleges and sending a second kid to attend one. I think there is a really unfortunate stranglehold on thought and discourse at those institutions. Of course, it’s a long shot for my second to get accepted so I’m not losing sleep over it. But I can honestly tell you that I am not sure HYPS would be the best place for her. She’s a contrarian thinker and I want her to keep that - not liberal, not conservative but a straddler of ideas and I want her to hold onto that. I don’t think the elite schools really incubate that sort of social theory creativity.</p>
<p>This exchange on the thread has had me thinking of Condi. To my knowledge, she is one conservative URM who has managed to escape the “dumb” attacks, and that is, of course, because she is ridiculously smart but also inoculated by her elite education pedigree.</p>
<p>This is getting to be too political, though.</p>
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<p>Do you see a difference between what I italicized and the following?</p>
<p>“[Justice Thomas] was a terrible choice for the Supreme Court, with very weak qualifications, which he has confirmed by his behavior on the bench. But he was chosen almost entirely because of his race.”</p>
<p>Indianparent wrote:
<a href=“JHS%20@post#4651”>quote</a>Quote:
“The legal definition built on multiple instances of case law? Essentially, in the Bakke case the Supreme Court enshrined Harvard’s approach as the model of legal behavior, and that has basically held for 35 years, including in the University of Michigan cases 8 years ago. It’s not like this hasn’t come up repeatedly. The current Supreme Court could change the law, of course, but the current practice at the Ivies has been legally blessed since I was applying to college.” </p>
<p>I am not talking of Bakke. I am talking of the hundreds of cases of racial discrimination lawsuits which I would presume John knows all about. I am asking him to take those as reference, and tell me if he feels private institutions should be allowed to discriminate based on race. He won’t answer that, for obvious reasons. As, he wants racial discrimination in favor of URMs.
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<p>I have to side with JHS on this one. What’s the point of agreeing to a blanket statement when you yourself can’t think of an example that fits the topic of this thread?</p>
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I am white, and so are my children. What do I win? So you admit that my opinions count more than yours? Woo-hoo!</p>
<p>As for Justice Thomas, I don’t know whether his achievements before going on the Supreme Court were due to AA or his own abilities, but at the time he was chosen for the Supreme Court, his achievements were far below those what one should expect for a Supreme Court nominee. But he was, apparently, the most qualified African-American conservative jurist, so he was given Thurgood Marshall’s seat.</p>
<p>To bring this back to the subject a bit, I think this is an example of how the “mismatch” problem can really occur–use of non-academic criteria really could result in a person being admitted to a college (or appointed to a position) where he is unable to perform adequately. Indeed, many colleges do this all the time by admitting athletes who can’t do the academic work and don’t graduate. But the most selective schools, in my opinion, don’t do this. That’s why they still have a relatively low number of URMs, and so many of those URMs are high-SES kids or immigrants. That’s also why they use the Academic Index to (at least in theory) prevent the admission of athletes who can’t do the work. And this is why I think they are going to continue to consider grades and scores as important criteria–to prevent that kind of mismatch.</p>
<p>fab,
Yes I do.</p>
<p>sewhappy,
That was an interesting article (#4687), but I am not surprised at it. UCSD has only 1% Black students in its recent freshman class, (and the highest percentage of Asian students 50%). Now that the UCs may not use race as a factor, the campuses will need to find other ways to educate their students about race, and cultivate an environment that is attractive to URMs, in order to get more to apply.</p>
<p>[btw, I think you provided yourself with an example of the UC’s ‘dysfunctionality’ that we alluded to earlier in this thread].</p>
<p>By the way, if you think only liberals attack URMs for having benefitted from AA, I will point out that the Politics Forum, although closed, is still searchable, and you can go read what conservatives said about Obama’s education, and even about his selection as the President of the Harvard Law Review.</p>
<p>I agree that I can’t recall anybody making this kind of criticism of Condi Rice–but perhaps they would if she became a vocal opponent of AA.</p>
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<p>I don’t, but the main point–that there is inconsistent behavior among supporters of racial preferences regarding Justice Thomas–has already been acknowledged by poetsheart, so I’m happy.</p>
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<p>I don’t, and that wasn’t my point. I was attempting to point out an inconsistent behavior: the same people who insist that "URM"s admitted are every bit as qualified as their white and Asian peers are the SAME ones who question the qualifications of "URM"s who criticize racial preferences.</p>
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<p>I still don’t think you’ve proven that Justice Thomas is out of his league in the Supreme Court, since you cited behaviors that Justices Brennan and Marshall also had and since almost every Justice’s opinions are written by clerks. Moving on…</p>
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<p>I never said “let’s do away with grades and scores!” I questioned whether "URM"s would disappear from “HYPSM et al” in the absence of racial preferences. You yourself pointed out that there are ~10,000 blacks nationwide who scored at least 600 on the CR section. </p>
<p>According to Bay, that’s all you need to “do the work” at Harvard. As is, 10,000 is more than enough for A LOT of top schools to have their “diversity” fills.</p>
<p>Well, I never said that the URMs are every bit as qualified. They aren’t. But at least at the Ivies, they are qualified enough to thrive.</p>
<p>Note: I just looked up Condi Rice on Wikipedia, and her educational pedigree is very interesting, and not what I expected to see. She may have never really faced the question of whether AA got her where she was.</p>
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<p>To be fair, Bill Clinton the Rhodes Scholar, Al Gore, and John Kerry were also criticized on the politics forum for not having intelligence which matched their reputations.</p>
<p>By happenstance, I knew a lot about Condi Rice when she was fairly young, because we shared a mentor for a while. I am certain that affirmative action, formal and informal, helped her along early in her career. I also know for a fact that she was knocking people’s socks off with her intelligence, hard work, and skill in every position she ever had.</p>
<p>Affirmative action will give you both Condi Rices and Clarence Thomases, and everything in between. But, Lord knows, so will any other selection method you try. William O. Douglas was appointed to the Supreme Court at about the same age Clarence Thomas was, and he had all the qualifications Thomas lacked. I don’t think he was significantly better as a Justice, politics to the side.</p>
<p>Thomas’ autobiography is very affecting, by the way, at least to me. As a supporter of affirmative action, I am glad that he got the opportunities he did. I wish he had done more with them – I think he has it in him, somewhere. But even if he never rises above mediocrity, his prominence provides inspiration to later generations of conservative African Americans, and teaches white conservatives that a Black man can be as backward-looking, self-congratulatory and self-deluding as they. There’s real value in that.</p>
<p>There is something else I want to bring up, a thought I have been having about the EC thread: Is is possible that some of the disappointing results for Asian applicants at HYPS is due not to how they are viewed at the colleges, but to how they are viewed at their high schools? We always discount recommendations as an element of college applications, mostly I think because we can’t read them or grade them. But instinct tells me that they can be very powerful, especially when they help distinguish among candidates.</p>
<p>Based on my experience in high school years ago, I know that students, no matter how smart, who don’t conform to the school’s concept of what a great student should be, often fail to get the respect of the faculty, regardless of what grades they earn in courses. Teacher recommendations can easily (and subtly) communicate that Applicant A is a great student and a self-centered, asocial jerk, while Applicant B is a great student and a stellar member of the community. If Applicant A is a stone genius, he may still be accepted, notwithstanding the recommendations, but below that level Applicant B is far more likely to be chosen.</p>