<p>Here’s one: supporting socioeconomic AA requires presuming that being a poor minority is no different than being a poor and white. Unless you’re willing to argue that black kids from the inner-city ghetto have the same struggles as white kids from Appalachia, socioeconomic AA isn’t much of a solution either. </p>
<p>Here’s another one: The point of AA is to increase representation of minorities in fields in which they have been historically denied access to. To this end, socioeconomic AA is not a good alternative.</p>
<p>We could check figures about different countries, but I think I’ve read (please correct me if this is not current information) that the percentage of (for example) black Americans who obtain college degrees is higher than the percentage of all French people who obtain college degrees. Inasmuch as there are hundreds of United States colleges and not a few United States professional schools that have admission policies that are functionally much like open admission policies, who lacks access to college anymore except for lack of money? (At least three hundred United States colleges, many public and some private, have formal policies of admitting any student who applies. Many other colleges and some professional schools in various subjects have such relaxed admission standards that in practice they admit they great majority of all applicants.) </p>
<p>One well researched article about the trade-offs between ethnic affirmative action and socioeconomic affirmative action at selective colleges can be found here: </p>
<p>I fail to see how the educational attainment of the French are at all relevant to African-Americans and college admissions. </p>
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<p>I didn’t make an argument about access to college. I made an argument about the representation of minorities in fields in which they have been historically denied access to. If you’d like to discuss that point, I’d be more than happy to engage you.</p>
<p>Sweet straw man, dude. Did you make it yourself or borrow it from someone else? I never said anything about bringing lesser qualified people into any field. The fact of the matter is, there’s no strict measuring stick for qualification beyond basic competence. From that point it’s all soft factors. If that weren’t the case, Asians would dominate the upper echelons of law, finance, medicine, and pretty much everything else that requires academic aptitude. But they don’t? Why? Because softs matter. Being sociable, fitting, and other factors matter.</p>
<p>But those factors ONLY matter when the applicant is white because in the mind of the majority only whites can be qualified objectively, and when they aren’t THEN softs can matter; then a few points on the SAT or grades are less important; then people can write the Asian off for being too studious, too robotic. It’s obvious how the game works to favor whites: Blacks can’t have the objective qualifications and Asians can’t have the subjective softs.</p>
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<p>So I’m guessing your not familiar with baseball and soccer? Asians galore. Just because they don’t dominate basketball and football doesn’t mean they aren’t well represented in some sports.</p>
<p>Schools and businesses choose to practice AA because they want to. They aren’t forced. They get something out of the deal, be that business from minority clients or PR. As it stands, sports teams don’t get anything from more Asian players. When fans stop going to games because a given team’s lineup is majority black, we’ll get AA for sports. They’ll probably be less fun to watch and such a move wouldn’t be in the interests of athletes or fans, but whatever.</p>
<p>Maybe you should look at the Supreme Court decision. It didn’t eliminate Affirmative Action. It affirmed that quotas and point-systems based on race were unconstitutional, which is very different from declaring race-conscious admissions unconstitutional.</p>
Here’s an idea to chew on: each group receives very few educational benefits, and each group faces a unique set of struggles. Not only that but it is not reasonable to generalize that all poor black kids live in the ghetto and all poor white kids live in the country. Each area features a mixed demographic.</p>
<p>And I never suggested socioeconomic was a silver bullet. In fact, I’ll list off a few problems: the aforementioned issue of varied settings, the inability for need-visible schools to use it, and the vulnerability of dishonesty (it’s hard to lie about your race; it’s considerably easier to lie about socioeconomic status). And even with all of these prevalent faults and even in its most rudimentary form, socioeconomic AA stands far above racial AA in that it is, in principle, ideal.</p>
<p>Retribution denotes some kind of punishment. It’s possible to attempt to right a wrong without trying to punish anyone, see: Israel, reparations to Native Americans and Japanese Americans, etc.,</p>
<p>A young African-American adult doesn’t have to look far within their family to talk to someone that grew up during Jim Crow. A mom, an uncle, a grandparent. The opportunities their parents and grandparents were given definitely affect the opportunities they were born into today. Let’s not act as though the past has no bearing on the present.</p>
<p>Get this through your head: promoting race conscious decisions to increase representation of minorities in fields in which they have been historically denied access is not reparations. You’ll never create a coherent argument against AA until you understand the difference.</p>
<p>Answer this question with a “yes” or “no”: “Is being poor and black in America is the same as being poor and white in America.” If you can’t say “yes” then socioeconomic affirmative action isn’t good enough.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s unfair to say that poor blacks grow up in far worse circumstances in general. Poverty is only part of the problem. There’s the rampant violence, and familial instability. Cities are more expensive places to live in and offer no sense of community. Perhaps most importantly, there’s a lack of role models. The majority of professionals they meet are white, and the majority of similar successful blacks they’ll know of will be athletes or entertainers. </p>
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<p>The majority of blacks live in cities. Thus the majority of blacks, by extension, would live in urban ghettos. Whites are different. Their poor often live in more rural areas. You cannot reasonably contest this. But if you think you can, cite something that proves otherwise. The burden of proof is on you.</p>
Yes.
And by the way, location-based affirmative action already exists, albeit to a lesser extent than it should be IMO.
And so what if it does? The poor white kids and Asian kids and Hispanic kids, no matter what their past situations were, are all similarly more. It matters how they got there for the purposes of affirmative action because…?</p>
<p>Every one of these ideas can be solved with programs other than racial affirmative action. You argue that poor black kids often end up in more difficult situations than poor white kids because of the setting? Fine, then you install some sort of objectifier through the idea of unequal settings, NOT through race.</p>
<p>Last time I checked the only semi-chinese person in MLB is that taiwanese dude ChingMing Wang or something. Sure there are a few japanese people, but hispanics and whites still are much much more well represented. </p>
<p>Sure a lot of asians play soccer, but how many world cup contending teams have asian players? </p>
<p>Yes, I agree “soft factors” do come in to play, and are more indicative than a few SAT points.</p>
<p>However, those factors include personality traits, mostly. You can’t put skin color on the same level as that.</p>
<p>So you would rather sacrifice your credibility on this issue for the sake of consistency rather than reevaluating your original stance. I can’t say I approve. Check the statistics. Poor blacks live in violent ghettos with little in the way of community. Poor whites do not. Poor blacks are far more likely to come from unstable homes. Poor whites are not. Poor blacks are more likely to grow up with little in the way of role models. </p>
<p>I don’t see how you can reasonably argue with these facts. And given these facts, I don’t see how you can’t at least support a racial component to AA given that race is essentially a proxy for all the additional problems poor blacks face.</p>
Race isn’t WHY African-Americans from ghettos struggle to get into top schools. They struggle because of reduced opportunites, exposure to crime, and a lesser education. These are DIRECTLY attributed to income and location. How do you combat a problem whose roots are income and location? You do something that addresses income and location. Now, did they get there because of their race? It is a possibility, but there are nevertheless thousands of non-African-Americans situated in ghettos who got there for other reasons, and yet they face the encompassing difficulties of location and income. </p>
<p>If you instill a racial-based affirmative action system, you are solving the issue for low-income URMs ONLY, and at the same time you are giving help to already-wealthy and privileged URMs, and on top of that you are entirely shunning countless other impoverished, ghetto kids of different ethnicities because of their ethnicity. Once again, it is not something that, in principle, is efficient in its purpose UNLESS the purpose of affirmative action is political leverage. And if it were known by the public that this is the true purpose of affirmative action, I guarantee you that all institutions, no matter how wealthy or powerful, would face near-universal opposition for facilitating what is essentially a campaign of reverse-racism.</p>
<p>I have learned through this thread that what I truly despise the most about AA is the misinformation that isn’t difficult to divulge but nevertheless fools those who can only afford to mildly glance at this deep issue.</p>
<p>I don’t care how you account for growing up in a violent ghetto so long as you account for it. Just keep in mind that doing so will inevitably create a system in which the average poor black student gets a bigger boost than a poor white student. Race is essentially a proxy for the uniquely potent problems of violence and community stability that plague poor African-American communities, but if you want to ignore that in favor of a superficially fair system that’s fine by me. Results are ultimately the same.</p>
<p>Now I’d like to argue another point: Being rich and black is not the same as being rich and white. Rich blacks face unique problems that rich whites do not, many of which stem from the differing professions of the median rich white and median rich black.</p>