Affirmative action

Very good point. I was watching a debate between two black talking heads, covering the opposing views. The anti-AA guy said the same thing you did. He wanted to focus on why the black kids were not making it to High School graduation.

The pro-AA woman had to agree on that point.

"Affirmative Action" Through a Different Looking Glass
By Arthur L. Coleman, Attorney, Nixon Peabody LLP, Washington, D.C.

"There is a critical difference between admission policies designed to promote a more robust learning environment in which students from all backgrounds are more intellectually engaged and motivated and those that are designed to remedy the effects of state-sponsored discrimination affecting one or more groups of individuals."

Diversity or Affirmative Action

I think its interesting that there is all this vehement endorsement or "colorblindness". If they admitted strictly by merit, soon white people would be whining about how there were nothing but Asians being admitted.

There is another admission policy that was bantered around, which I think may answer this issue.

You get points on being in the top percentages of your class in High School. Blacks can compete in mixed race schools, and in predominantly black schools, fare very well.

Lash: as far as graduating in top of your class where does that put home schooled kids, in the top or the bottom of their class?

It is beyond comprehension that in a country with a 300-year history of slavery, apartheid and discrimination against racial minorities (that clearly persists to this day) the single most important equal rights issue presently on the table is the case of a relative handful of white people who maintain that they were unfairly denied access to the college of their choice because racial minorities were granted a small advantage roughly equal to that of a football lineman or an alumni's idiot offspring.

THIS is the country's burning civil rights issue that must be taken all the way to the Supreme Court, again and again and again?

Assuming the federal government should have any form of affirmative action (and I don't) ...

If the reason for affirmative action is to correct inequities of opportunity stemming from the legacy of slavery and institutional racism in this country, then it is logical to assume that those for whom affirmative action exists would by definition find themselves within our lowest economic ranks. (If not, it is reasonable to assume that they have moved beyond the hindrance of that legacy.)

Since basing an affirmative action-type program on ethnicity is clearly another form of racial bias, and assuming that we are going to have some form of affirmative action program, why not use economic need as the basis for the program, rather than ethnicity? If it is true that blacks are disproportionately represented among our poorest citizens, then they will be disproportionately helped by such a program. We would help those affirmative action is intended to help, as well as others who are equally in need of assistance, without regard to ethnicity.

I really doubt the authenticity of the altruism implied in the Republicans' professed desire for a color-blind society. Having said that, I'd like to answer the above post that proposes a system based solely on economic need. Diversity is supposed to be the goal. Color and ethnicity has to be a part of any undertaking with diversity as its goal, just as color was a driving force (well, actually the lack of color) in making the institutions and seats of power homogenously white for centuries.

Good point, snood. Diversity indeed is the species-benefiting goal, in a sort of Darwinian, long-term sense. We'll probably figure a way to get there, but we sure haven't come up with one yet.




timber

"Both administration officials and conservative opponents of affirmative action said yesterday that Bush's position was a political compromise forged amid intense negotiation. Justice Department lawyers, led by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, lobbied the president hard for a brief that would categorically declare that not even diversity can justify the use of race. White House political adviser Karl Rove and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, sensitive to the need to expand the Republican base to include minorities, pushed in the other direction, the officials said."

Bush Opposes U of M Admissions Policy

Good God...Ted Olson makes Karl Rove look like a moderate.

I disagree with your claim that diversity is a goal of affirmative action. I see no value in simply creating "diversity" based on how many of X can be found in this job or that classroom. Diversity is a natural result of a color-blind society, not the other way around.

But I am confident that we differ in that I believe ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual orientation should never be considered. As a society we should concern ourselves with the abilities, traits, strengths of each individual, and consider how best to help each person maximize his or her personal potential. This would be of maximum benefit both to the individual and to society.

That's just my opinion, though it is one I suspect you will assume lacks "authenticity". (I sometimes wonder what it would be like to go through life assuming most people lie about what they think and believe. When I do, I'm convinced I wouldn't like it.)

<I believe ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual orientation should never be considered. As a society we should concern ourselves with the abilities, traits, strengths of each individual, and consider how best to help each person maximize his or her personal potential. This would be of maximum benefit both to the individual and to society.>

A noble expression for a worthy goal.

Too bad we don't live in the kind of world that would enable it.

Which is why AA came to be in the first place.

When it comes to how we acquit ourselves, each to his or her fellow human beings, we choose the kind of world in which we live.

Based upon this article the problem will shortly disappear[Race Relations]

Mongrel America

The most important long-term social fact in America may be the rising rates of intermarriage among members of ethnic and racial groups. A glimpse into our mestizo future
 
by Gregory Rodriguez
Are racial categories still an important—or even a valid—tool of government policy? In recent years the debate in America has been between those who think that race is paramount and those who think it is increasingly irrelevant, and in the next election cycle this debate will surely intensify around a California ballot initiative that would all but prohibit the state from asking its citizens what their racial backgrounds are. But the ensuing polemics will only obscure the more fundamental question: What, when each generation is more racially and ethnically mixed than its predecessor, does race even mean anymore? If your mother is Asian and your father is African-American, what, racially speaking, are you? (And if your spouse is half Mexican and half Russian Jewish, what are your children?)

Further reading
selected by Gregory Rodriguez
Five decades after the end of legal segregation, and only thirty-six years after the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws, young African-Americans are considerably more likely than their elders to claim mixed heritage. A study by the Population Research Center, in Portland, Oregon, projects that the black intermarriage rate will climb dramatically in this century, to a point at which 37 percent of African-Americans will claim mixed ancestry by 2100. By then more than 40 percent of Asian-Americans will be mixed. Most remarkable, however, by century's end the number of Latinos claiming mixed ancestry will be more than two times the number claiming a single background.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/rodriguez.htm

Why Diversity is Good Business:

Business Week

And what happens on campus when there is no diversity:

Houston Chronicle

None of this SHOULD be an issue. Unfortunately, way too many folks on either side of the question are convinced its The Issue.
Racism is a two-way street, and the traffic is heavy in both directions. Real diversity is an empty parking lot by comparison.



timber

First the byword was equal opportunity now it has morphed into diversity. Diversity should be achieved by ability not force fed by discrimination.

I'm torn between feeling sorry for people that can't see out of one eye, or those that are blind in the other one.

I am more sorry for children, who are being told and conditioned to the false fact that they cannot make it without special help, and that their 'disability' is the color of their skin.

Well, at least those in each group for which you feel sorry have one good eye. The greater problem, as I see it, is those choose to see nothing without looking through glasses with a colored lense. I don't care whether that lense is white, black, yellow, beige... When skin color is the first thing you see in every situation, you fail to see the world as it really is.

When slave owners looked in their fields and failed to see human suffering there, it was because they saw skin color first, and everything they saw after that was colored by their internal biases as to what that skin color meant. Likewise when someone today looks at a white man and presumes that this white man is a bigot, that person tints everything he views relative to that individual, and does so based only on the color of his skin.