[quote=“lecti, post:22, topic:48160, full:true”]Affirmative action IS racism by another name - and for Asians who are constantly discriminated in this country it’s not even “reverse” racism.
The ‘discrimination’ faced by Asian, White, and Male students in getting into those schools is not even remotely comparable to what affirmative action is intended to rectify, especially at those universities.
And I’ll buy this supposed commitment to equality and meritocracy just as soon as those folks are suing over legacy admissions, and not just the admission of Black people through affirmative action.
[quote]It’s good to provide opportunities for disadvantaged minority. Just don’t do it by lowering the bar for some and raising the bar for another. There are better ways.[/quote]Like what? What magical policy will help Black people out without negatively impacting anyone else? More to the point, which policies like that will the right wing groups spearheading this assault on affirmative action support?
Affirmative Action is attempting to solve not the tactical issues of inequality, but the generational inequality in access and wealth. The fact that certain segments have been repressed for, what, 400 years means that the wealth of knowledge, land, inheritance, and other valuable assets have been largely suppressed. So yes, there is an immediate detriment to other segments of society at this particular time in history, but that is to attempt to heal the very real systemic economic issues caused by centuries of the most brutal kind of repression.
The destruction of any sort of generational wealth due to discrimination, separate-but-equal, and the big S is the national shame of the United States. Fast tracking those that were discriminated against to be able to have generational wealth–and btw, that takes more than a few decades–is in everyones best interest.
As if dollars had anything to do with wealth. Sure, let’s help everybody to play their stupid old game better, instead if tearing it down so we can play better ones.
Harvard was literally built by slaves. It’s endowment for centuries was primarily funded by slave owners, and by the sale of slaves the university received as gifts from alumni.
So how does that justify limiting admission based on race? It doesn’t. It’s equivalent to saying someone deserves preferred entry to university because their family paid to build it. Do you think that’s a good policy? I don’t. And yes, that means legacy admissions are unethical.
The ‘discrimination’ faced by Asian, White, and Male students in getting into those schools is not even remotely comparable to what affirmative action is intended to rectify, especially at those universities.
So what you are saying is that Asians deserves to be discriminated because of what white guys have done to black folks, because Asians suffered “less”. That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Like what? What magical policy will help Black people out without negatively impacting anyone else?
As I mentioned before, these so called “Affirmative Actions” are just a token - a fool’s gold. People in the minority who would not have gotten the admission without it will gain the degree that they did not deserve, and people in the minority who would have gotten in anyway would be unfairly regarded as having an ill-gotten gains from preferred admissions. It’s cheating. What worth is an academic degree that was not based on academic merit? Nothing.
Who cares either the left- or right-wingers support it? It’s simply an unethical discriminatory policy in the guise of so called reparation. It’s pure BS on fundamental level.
It can’t just be down to housing. In the recession, housing prices fell sharply, so if the main difference between these groups was ownership of houses then inequality would have decreased at the start of the recession.
No, the problem is poverty and wealth. The recession was awful for poor people. Wages vanished as jobs became scarce, and unemployment soared. Savings were run down to cope with the loss of incomes.Those that were struggling to buy houses faced foreclosure and repossession. Assistance from central government was cut back as politicians threw macro.econ. 101 out of the window and cut spending in the face of a huge recession. And the “recovery” has been skewed towards the 1%. Most of the growth has been in assets that re held by the 1%, employment has increased very slowly (but better than some places), wages are stagnant while profits are soaring.
The difference between “racial” groups is because in the USA, being Black or Latino means that you are much more likely to be poor, and much less likely to be wealthy and powerful.
The only thing that is going to solve this problem is an attack on the level of poverty and economic inequality in the USA. Prioritise wages and employment over asset price growth and profits. provide support for the poorest in society, aid social mobility (which is now lower in the USA than in the old aristocracy-obsessed countries of Europe)
. In other words, move policy in the opposite direction from the way it has travelled for the past 35 years.
I read the wikipedia page on it and it seems to say that it isn’t a myth at all. The page is long and details why being perceived as a model minority has negatives, but generalized statistics seem to confirm that many minority groups are doing very well.
Okay, but WHY are some “doing better”? Selective immigration, especially, right?
The racist “myth” is not that some groups are doing better than others, it’s that there’s something inherent to Asians and to Black people, and not to anodddoublesix’s “national institutions,” such as immigrarion selection for starters, that causes such disparities.
First off, I am not arguing that there is a gap. Clearly there is.
But I don’t understand these numbers.
The white numbers seem really high, even with a two income family for the “average person”. Does the super rich skew it that much? Would the numbers look like if you took out the top 5 or 10%?
How are the black and Hispanic numbers so low? I mean that is less than a single person on full time at minimum wage. A two income household on minimum wage earns ~$25-30K a year. I know there are a lot of single income families, and I know there is a lot of unemployment, but I still don’t understand how the numbers are so low.
It’s median values - as someone else pointing up upthread it probably means the median white household owns a house and the median black and Hispanic household doesn’t.
I think missing here is an expression of household debt. The median black family in America is probably not operating with 1/7th or 1/13th of the material possessions, but it probably saddled with considerably more credit card debt, etc. – That is, their gross wealth is probably a lot closer (no doubt still behind) to white families, but they have – for many reasons – put themselves in the hole with consumer debt, at least relative to white families.
And if so, of course, it’s largely because they made the mistake of not inheriting generationally transferred wealth.
Because of such intergenerational transfers of wealth, the authors make a philosophical case for racial reparations but also argue for more feasible policies, such as government-supplemented accounts to make education and home-ownership more available, as well as the modification of tax policies (mortgage deductions, capital gains) that subsidize the rich.
I know I’ve talked about this on other BB threads.
The G.I. Bill allowed returning vets from WWII the opportunity for the first time in U.S. history (other than pioneering/homesteading) to be able to afford to buy homes en masse. Prior to this bill, buying a home meant putting down between 80-90% and having a good enough relationship with a bank to negotiate a loan for the rest (which was usually due within 5 years or so, not 20-30). Thus, most families lived their entire lives in rented accommodations. The G.I. Bill guaranteed mortgages to vets so that banks were willing to offer long-term loans with only 5-10% down. Wow, right?
The problem was redlining. White vets were able to buy new homes in sparkly new suburbs. Their equity grew, which enabled them to borrow against it for things like college for their kids or starting a business. They were able to pass down this equity to their kids and then to their grandchildren. Lo-and-behold, their families’ net value soared in three generations. Meanwhile, black vets were redlined: they were only allowed to buy in urban areas where only other black people were allowed to live. Neighborhoods with poor infrastructure, cheap housing (from the days of slum landlords), lack of public amenities such as good schools, public transportation, and retail. Equity doesn’t grow so much in these conditions.
Now here we are. Three generations later, and no one can figure out why black Americans don’t have the equity that white Americans do.
No. Actually, it’s about being white, or classified as such, and how in the U.S., that’s always been better than being racialized as a minority. It’s about the fact that the U.S. is still a functionally white supremacist society.
I’m 35 and no one in my family has inherited anything of any value yet, perhaps when my parents pass (assuming health care doesn’t consume it all). I mean my grandparents were farmers and poor by today’s standards and even somewhat back then…my father only had 3 pairs of pants growing up.
“I, personally, have not inherited anything and so the assertion that the cumulative benefit of intergenerational wealth transfer has gone largely to whites must be a lie.”
And I believe that when you drill down and look at different ethnicities and national origins, the “Asians do well” thing pretty much falls apart as a useful generalization. Descendants of Indian and Japanese immigrants (many of whom came on highly-skilled work visas) fare much differently than those of Vietnamese and Cambodian origin (many of whom came as political refugees with barely the clothes on their backs), for example. In San Francisco, Chinese immigrants are some of the poorest people in the area in aggregate.
