Claiming that a 200 point difference is accounted for by other factors can ONLY make sense if you are talking about an individual candidate. To claim that the average 200 point gap between URMs and whites or Asians does not demonstrate that a significant advantage is given to URMs is beyond credulity.</p>
<p>Whether AA is good for our country or not is a premise that can be argued either way. But what is not arguable is the existence of AA advantages.</p>
<p>From the tenor of my entire posting, I’m saying that there ARE advantages, and there SHOULD be advantages, for enough individual candidates to have a group impact. It needs to be enough to help mend the country regarding equity of economic opportunity, one family story at a time. </p>
<p>The country has been broken, which disadvantaged everyone. You’re not immune from the damage: doesn’t it bother you that the downtown core of so many major American cities, once beautiful, are now in disarray? It bothers me. Even if AA is one small piece of the pie, it’s a good piece.</p>
<p>As for being beyond credulity, as a teacher I’ve just seen ALL THE TIME the role of motivation, and how individuals coming in September with weak grades decide to make the push and end up among the top students by Spring. The SAT is a predictor of academic success, research showing it the best tool we have so far, even trumping grades and the like. I would argue from experience, however, that any number measuring a kid’s achievement to date can’t compare to what keen motivation and hard work accomplish in the course of one academic year. That certainly also explains how some white individuals who waltz in with 750’s but have such weak motivation and character that they burn out (or booze out) quickly at college. You know which one I’d rather have in my class? Guess.</p>
<p>Datdude: Why are you putting words in people’s mouths? You asked for data, you got data. No one has argued here that “white students are just smarter and more capable”, or that black students don’t bear the burden of centuries of systematic, enforced disadvantages, or that black students don’t belong in the colleges they attend. (I’m sure you can find someone to argue those things, if you want, but why?)</p>
<p>Paying3: There is a statement in your last post (before the cross-posted last post) that is almost certainly inaccurate: “When I was growing up in Baltimore (1960’s) there WAS no middle-class Black community to speak of.” Of course, I don’t have Baltimore data at my fingertips, but if it was like most other mid-Atlantic cities there was a substantial black middle class. It just wasn’t easily visible to the white community because the black middle class didn’t share institutions (schools, clubs, businesses) with the white middle class, and unlike the white middle class they lived side-by-side with their less well-to-do neighbors. Someone like Thurgood Marshall didn’t come out of thin air – he came out of a functioning, hard-working, education-valuing middle class community.</p>
<p>I think that “bad neighborhood” means “neighborhood that you don’t feel safe in”, so whether or not it means black depends on who’s asking. I live in a racially mixed, lower middle-income urban neighborhood which doesn’t feel at all dangerous to me, but I often hear it described as a bad part of town - almost always by white people from upper-middle income neighborhoods who don’t know where I live. There are really dangerous, almost exclusively black neighborhoods in my town, but mine isn’t one of them. Yes, there are pawn shops and check-cashing places and storefront churches and lots of dark skin to be seen here, but there are also interesting little ethnic markets, wonderful family-owned restaurants, people who keep vegetable gardens, chickens, etc, people who walk or bike for transportation instead of for fitness, and lower real estate prices. My son has probably seen more people pulled over by the police and arrested than his friends from the suburbs, but I don’t think he has been unsafe growing up here. It really surprises me when interesting and intelligent people I know worry about trying out the new Peruvian or Ethiopian or or Iraqi restaurant in town because it’s in a “bad neighborhood” - mine!</p>
<p>Paying3tuitions, you should be running for president this term. I’m overjoyed by common sense and competence, and you have an abundance of it. </p>
<p>And yes, the majority of these posters are just mad that someone has decided that the blatant discrimination against black people in one area out of about 1 million areas should be rectified in the most miniscule way. If Berkeley has approx. 800 black students out of about 24,000 and their admissions policy towards blacks is one of allowing them an “advantage,” well I think that states my point about it not being an advantage at all, but an attempt to right some very blatant wrongs.</p>
<p>^^You’re right, JHS, I misspoke there. Growing up in a white urban neighborhood
we only drove through and saw “black neighborhood” not making the realization that there was a healthy blend of poor and middle-class people living there.</p>
<p>I attended a citywide high academic, non-neighborhood magnet public school for girls only and there was a male equivalent to it, both of them l00 years old. They drew from the entire city without any entry requirement and by the late 1960’s (so, too late for Thurgood Marshall). That’s where I met black middle class students. They chose (as I did) to come on 3 public busses to school rather than attend their neighborhood school. Their parents were policemen and teachers. One went on Radcliffe (her Harvard) over the objections of the GC who would only support an app to MOrgan State Teachers COllege, historically Black. </p>
<p>I’m not sure what all this proves, exactly, except that there must have been many more Black middle class families than were visible to my young, white eyes. At least I got to meet a few at my high school. The pull away out of neighborhoods was a great equalizer. There were NO entry exams or bussing quotas, and yet these schools were 50% black, 50% white the year MLK was shot. This self-selected many motivated black and white students. By being all-girls or all-boys, you missed the fun of social things like regular dances or knowing who to ask for the prom, so the neighborhood schools still appealed to plenty of whites and blacks. Also it was a nuisance to get to these magnet schools by city busses, so convenience helped; it was truly self-selected to go to these schools just because you wanted the harder classes! </p>
<p>I do appreciate your headsup, JHS, I think I didn’t write carefully enough on that important point. There was a Black middle class then, but the housing etc. patterns made them invisible to white eyes growing up, except for that great h.s. experience. (Lousy prom, tho…) Thanks.</p>
<p>No, no one here, as far as I can tell (maybe there’s an exception or two), is mad about anything, least of all some modest attempts to rectify a history of horrendous discrimination. Really. Almost everyone has agreed with you, and what disagreements they have expressed have been matters of emphasis and nuance, not fundamentals. I’m sorry I used the word “advantage”, and it offended you, but I don’t disagree with any of your larger points.</p>
<p>As for Berkeley, the main reason it has so few black students is that the California constitution was amended several years ago specifically to shut down its affirmative action program. While Berkeley (and UCLA) continuously look for ways to boost their enrollments of African-Americans, they are severely hampered in those efforts, unlike most of their peer institutions.</p>
<p>“Welcome to life in America. Race is still something of a big deal here. But I am pretty certain it means less now than it did when I was 18, and I have every reason to hope that it will mean even less when my grandchildren are 18.” </p>
<p>JHS, what in God’s creation are you talking about?! Don’t tell me I got data when the data is skewed and misleading. And stop being mad because there is someone on this forum who has backed me up. You are beginning to start an exchange that is going to be very nasty.</p>
<p>Oh, wait, Datdude…thanks for the compliments BTW, but honestly JHS is
one of the most fairminded people I’ve ever read on CC. Well researched, and he needs not my defense. His writing is SO direct and sometimes wry it can be mistaken. He’s a friend of fairness and truthtelling, so of all people, JHS isn’t hostile to you! </p>
<p>JHS, I think this is a more factual representation of Baltimore life; thanks for urging me back into the knowledge base. Actually I was looking up THurgood Marshall, just wondering if he, too happened to go to that all-boys school (the Baltimore City College High School) partnered with my h.s… But it was surely still racially segregated back then. Instead, I found all kinds of schools and the airport named after him </p>
<p>Anyway, here’s a better descrip of black middle class neighborhoods than I gave above, to correct the record (wiki, oh well, when in a hurry it’s there for quick answers):</p>
<p>On bad neighborhoods: Clearly, many white people are conditioned to think of black neighborhoods as “bad,” even if they really aren’t. However, neighborhoods that really are bad (in terms of crime, gangs, etc.), are likely to be minority neighborhoods, especially in large cities. A thoughtful person will recognize both of those facts.</p>
<p>On the “advantage” of being black: In many settings, it is obvious that it is still to one’s disadvantage to be black. However, in some particular settings, policies have been put into place in which being black is an advantage. College admissions is one of these settings, at many colleges anyway. At these colleges, a black applicant with lower grades and scores will be admitted over a white applicant who is otherwise similarly situated. This is a simple fact–it may be justified on policy grounds, because you might think that it’s because of institutional racism that the applicants aren’t similarly situation with respect to grades and scores. (In other words, the guy from my high school who got into Princeton would never have done so if he had been white–unless, perhaps, as a white person with more advantages, he might have had higher scores. It’s pretty hard, though, to make this kind of speculation as to an individual.)</p>
<p>datdude, your original post essentially raised the question whether all the CC discussions about “bad neighborhoods” were equating “bad” with “black”. Various posters responded with different versions of “no one means black, they mean high-crime”. I came in, because I thought you were right to raise the issue, and said, in essence, the only high crime neighborhoods anyone ever talks about here are minority neighborhoods, and yes, even though most people aren’t intentionally racist I think race affects the way some people perceive them. I then said – and you are free to disagree with me on this – that I think things are better than they used to be in that regard, and I think they are still getting (slowly) better.</p>
<p>“even though most people aren’t intentionally racist” </p>
<p>That is one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve ever heard in my life. You should not be so naive, really.</p>
<p>I didn’t have a problem with anyone’s post about the bad neighborhood issue.</p>
<p>And no Hunt, there is no policy that makes it advantageous to be black. Not in the areas deemed as important to white Americans. Good try though.</p>
<p>I wonder what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot in America in terms of race relations and opportunities. I wonder how you all would take it. The entire notion that blacks are advantaged in the college admissions process is a racist idea, held by racists–people mad that an attempt has been made to level the playing field. Has it worked wonders? No, but it’s a start, whether they continue the practice or not.</p>
<p>I went to the University of Chicago in Hyde Park - a multi-racial and socio-economic neighborhood that was bordered on three sides by high crime neighborhoods (the fourth side being Lake Michigan). I used to bike all over the city of Chicago (yes, that was foolish at times) going initially through those high crime, low income neighborhoods and then on to higher income, quiet areas that were predominantly black on the South Side and white on the North Side (with mixed racial neighborhoods as well of Asians, native Americans, etc.) </p>
<p>With the understanding that “bad neighborhood” indeed equates in my mind to high crime, I agree with other posters who have accurately stated that in large urban areas these tend to be predominantly black and Hispanic. On the other hand, clearly the ones who suffer the most in every respect from high crime are the current residents of those areas.</p>
<p>I do not agree that discussing “bad neighborhoods” are equivalent code words for racist remarks. (I believe persons of every color harbor thoughts that are “racist” to one degree or another toward other racial and ethnic groups.) At the time when I was biking in the various Chicago neighborhoods, I would try to avoid parts of the low-income, transient Uptown area of the predominantly white North Side because of its high crime. I would try to take my bike route through “Pill Hill” on the South Side, a neighborhood of upper middle class black professionals (whose homes were considerably more upscale than my white blue collar textile mill factory town outside Philly.)</p>
<p>To summarize, high crime urban “bad” neighborhoods indeed are predominantly minority, but not exclusively. Except for the rare Mother Theresa’s among us, we are all racists to one degree or another. And - most importantly - let’s not forget that the victims of crimes in those “bad neighborhoods” are the current residents themselves. Those residents don’t just read about the high crime rates but experience the fear and the actuality of violent crimes day-to-day. And they do not often have the money to move out of those “bad” neighborhoods like their higher income counterparts in other sections of town.</p>
<p>From what I can see, the original question was actually a different (although related) question. Now, it seems that it could have been any of these.</p>
<p>1.-Is a bad neighborhood’s synonym a black neighborhood? - No
2.-Is a bad neighborhood’s synonym a hispanic neighorhood? - No
3.-Is a bad neighborhood’s synonym a poor neighborhood? - No
4.-Is a bad neighborhood’s synonym to any ethnic or minority neighborhood?- No
5.- Does the term “bad neighborhood” carries a different connotation to different people? - Yes
6.- Are people’s opinions, impressions or views of what a “bad neighborhood” is shaped by personal experiences, stereotypes and time? - Yes
7.- Would most people feel safe in a neighborhood were gangs, and general crime is rampant? - No
8.- Is a neighborhood where crime is high and were most residents are black or hispanic or chinese or white a bad neighborhood?- Yes
9.- Are there any schools located in neighborhoods that at any one time in their history had high crime and where most residents were black?- Yes
10.- Have some traditionally known high crime ridden neighborhoods changed in the last few years and become gentrified? - Yes
11.- Have some traditionally known high crime ridden neighborhoods stayed that way?- Yes
12.- Does anyone (regardless of race) feels safe walking through a neighborhood known as crime ridden? - No
13.- Does a well maintained, manicured urban area gives the impression of being a safe neighborhood, (regardless of the race of the residents) - Yes</p>
<p>In 123 posts, no one has offered anything that could be construed as a different answer to any of the above questions.</p>
<p>“I do not agree that discussing “bad neighborhoods” are equivalent code words for racist remarks.”</p>
<p>lonestardad, call it racist remarks or not, but the vast majority who refer to a neighborhood as bad do so without sufficient knowledge or stats and are only saying that because the neigborhood is predominantly black. That’s why I posed the question in the first place, to get a different (hopefully, more educated) view on the topic.</p>
<p>Here’s a tidbit about racism, intended for those who claim everyone’s a bit racist. It matters more from what source the racism comes from that is the real factor. I’m not saying a black person could run down the street yelling racists insults and not be racist, but what I am saying is that it’s not the same coming from those who don’t have the advantage of history, privilege and the majority on their side. It’s not the same when one does not have the power to enforce those ideas by oppressing other people.</p>
<p>The racism that happens to blacks everyday for hundreds of years is in the form of biased court rulings, racial profiling (highway stops), incarceration rates, in the job market, in housing, education, medical care and the media. This racism is very much institutionalized and carries a very heavy burden through the relatively short life span all humans live. </p>
<p>Now, there are blacks who are racist against whites and many other combinations of racism perpetrated between different cultures in America. But let’s be honest, besides the degradation of being the victim of bias that we can all attest to, what hardships do whites experience coming from blacks or other minorities in regards to racism? How prevalent or crippling is it compared to when the institutions dish out their brand of racism to us?</p>
<p>I guess I’m more hopeful that the seething cauldron of racist this and that is ever so slowly easing in America. In the stores, churches, neighborhoods, etc. I see more interracial couples of all kinds - black, white, yellow, brown, etc. It’s very heartening. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and other Americans of prominence all represent the synthesis of what America is slowly becoming - a genuine melting pot as represented by its people of increasingly mixed race. Let that day keep coming.</p>
<p>In the commonplace I see hope for racial reconciliation. The other day on my train to downtown Dallas a young Hispanic woman with a months old infrant got on the standing-room-only car and a black male teenager without hesitation offered his seat to her. I had to compliment him on this brief, but meaningful gesture of humanity. There’s hope.</p>
</p>