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<p>Not necessarily. Again, you cannot fault individuals for recognizing that minorities receive enhancements in the college admission process or heeding the illogicality in statistically substantiated claims like those promulgated in Post #201.</p>
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<p>It does if one of your goals is to have someone who will go out and do exactly what Dbate is considering doing.</p>
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<p>I completely agree. I do not think, nor do I desire, that AA be a permanent solution to advance people of color. Instead, I foresee a future where (perhaps because of AA) ALL people have equal opportunities and can all be judged on merit, and merit alone. The job ahead of us is eradicating the damages of a long, entrenched history of discrimination.</p>
<p>(Even then, defining merit will be tricky, but hey, can we ever have a perfect system?)</p>
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<p>On this topic you are wrong. The reason race matters at all is because of the history of discrimination in our country. That is why race is important when evaluated the potency of any individual to motivate others. If black people were not systematically told that they were less intelligent than they would not need to look for a black role model to emulate. But historically black people were denied education to perpetuate notions of inferiority, that is why when there is a highly intelligent black male or female others of the same racial classification are receptive as they directly repudiate past notions of inferiority that a white male could not.</p>
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<li><p>I am speaking only from experience. I do not say that everyone who disagrees with AA falls into these two categories, but rather those I have come upon.</p></li>
<li><p>I cannot fault them for seeing that URMs get some kind of “leg up” in the admissions process. I can fault them for devaluing the obvious efforts and hard work that they have put into trying to excel and succeed in order to make it to a top university.</p></li>
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<p>Actually yes necessarily. At my school number 3 and number 2 in my class were both happy I got in and personally congratulated me. The people who questioned my acceptance were not even in the top 10% of our class. People only assail others to make themselves feel better about their mediocre accomplishments. It is the same reason that NearL is not on here bashing AA, because he was successful. It is only the unsuccessful who feel the need to insult others.</p>
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<p>Again, the social effects of the policy that we support does consider such injustices into our framework. It is irrational to dismiss that racism exists; thus, we do not suggest that racial matters are admitted. In fact, I believe that we all agree that racism need be one of the most heeded concerns in forming a more effective policy since contextual circumstances invariably include racially-based afflications. However, to mention that racism is the exclusive detrimental factor in establishing one’s scholastic, personal, and contributory merit is demonstrably false.</p>
<p>For the people in this thread who have denied the extent to which minorities like myself are discriminated against, let me tell the story of a close friend (dark-skinned Native Hawaiian):</p>
<p>1) A few white teenagers set fire to his house when he was very young. Both of his parents died, while he and his older sister survived.
2) His sister and him moved into their aunt and uncle’s house, a tiny trailer. His uncle and aunt then moved away when my friend was 12, and his sister and him moved into a tiny home on the outskirts of town, living in squalor. Nobody would hire his sister because she wasn’t white (yes, because she wasn’t white).
3) Eventually, she managed to find people that would hire her and began to work two demanding jobs while he worked another to help.
4) Despite all of this, he performed excellently in school; he did volunteer work and earned very high SAT scores despite the fact that he could not afford any SAT study books or classes. He was beat up at school because he wasn’t white, but he still excelled. White “gangsters” tried to vandalize his house but they were scared off by his sister’s boyfriend.</p>
<p>He was at a disadvantage because of his race. His race put him at a financial disadvantage. I’m not going to try to debate with you about AA, but I wanted to put this out there because many of you are completely oblivious to the amount of racism that is currently taking place in the United States. It’s happening.</p>
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<p>To say yes would be wholly quixotic, so no we can never have a perfect system that is inclusive of every personal factor. However, current racially-based AA is far from the effective policy. If we can agree on this much, we have truly made progress.</p>
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<p>you know what the irony in this is? my older sister(asian, chinese) went through similar experiences. but ironically, the perpetrators were not WHITE, they were BLACK(poor neighborhood). so what do you make of that?
it’s like only WHITE people can be racist. no. when black people are racist toward someone, it is 100x worse. because they live in poverty, they have nothing to lose.</p>
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<p>Yes, again, race is an inevitable factor to include into the social context of an AA policy, but do you honestly believe that ethnicity is the * exclusive * factor to consider? If we can mutually agree that race is not the exclusive element that need be considered into AA policy we will all be enlightened to the proper direction to guide AA guidelines and take a progressive, open-minded approach to efficiently and more objectively identify the context in which academic and personal achievements were attained and molded one’s future contributory promise.</p>
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<p>Were her parents killed because of racism? Was she at a significant financial disadvantage? Were the words “leave our town, you don’t belong here” painted on her driveway? Did she have to work a job to support her sibling(s) because her parents were murdered?</p>
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<p>Like someone had previously noted, I apparently have a very “naive and optimistic” outlook on current admissions process and how schools treat AA. That is, I personally do not think that schools practice the racially-based AA that you, and others, seem to think they do. I do not have the data for it because a) I do not wish to look it up (I am on break after all!) and b) I’d rather have a more optimistic outlook on the admissions process (since it’s intrinsically filled with injustice). [I’m also not fully convinced that your data definitively proves that what’s at work is the race-based AA that you have argued. However, I do commend you for going out and looking for it and perhaps if I sit down and sift through it, I might see what you see. Oh, but I will say that I DO think public schools practice full out race-only, quota-minded AA.]</p>
<p>However, I can agree with you that the racially-based AA of which you speak of is far, far from the effective policy. I guess progress has been made?</p>
<p>so sorry you went through that amerindian, if that is true. where was this?</p>
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<p>It all actually happened to my best friend, but we live in southern Oregon, which is actually much more “hickish” than one would expect anywhere in Oregon to be.</p>
<p>you live on an indian reservation in southern oregon?</p>
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<p>pigs<em>at</em>sea does assert an important consideration. Whites (and Asians) are far from the only perpetrators responsible for ontologically preserving racism and, similar to those of majority groups in areas in which they are less represented, undergo the same misconduct commonly viewed as exclusively subjected to minority groups. Yet, there are no oversight mechanisms in current AA policy to account for this.</p>
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<p>No, we don’t live on a reservation.</p>
<p>I stated before that I am not going to debate affirmative action, and while I have a response for your statement, I do not want to be sucked into this argument.</p>
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<p>Yes. And since we are not in the proper positions of power to proceed with this mutual insight (nor will I ever be since social policy is not my future field), I cannot see any points that deserve further discussion.</p>
<p>affirmative action for whites from poor black neighborhoods?</p>