Is affirmative action REALLY fair?

au1929 wrote:

Hard truths
Go into any inner-city neighborhood, Barack Obama said in his keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, "and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In a speech filled with rousing applause lines, it was a line that many black Democratic delegates found especially galvanizing. Not just because they agreed, but because it was a home truth they'd seldom heard a politician say out loud..
Why has it been so difficult for American black leaders to say such things in public, without being pilloried for "blaming the victim"? Why the huge flap over Bill Cosby's insistence that black teenagers do their homework, stay in school, master standard English and stop having babies? Any black person who frequents a barbershop or beauty parlor in the inner city knows that Cosby was only echoing sentiments widely shared in the black community..
"If our people studied calculus like we studied basketball," my father, age 91, once remarked, "we'd be running MIT." When my brother and I were growing up in the 1950s, our parents convinced us that the "blackest" thing that we could be was a doctor or a lawyer..
Yet in too many black neighborhoods today, academic achievement has actually come to be stigmatized. "We are worse off than we were before Brown v. Board," says Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at Yale. "And a large part of the reason for this is that we have abandoned our own black traditional core values, values that sustained us through slavery and Jim Crow segregation.".
Making it, as Obama told me, "requires diligent effort and deferred gratification. Everybody sitting around their kitchen table knows that.".
"Americans suffer from anti-intellectualism, starting in the White House," Obama went on. "Our people can least afford to be anti-intellectual." Too many of our children have come to believe that it's easier to become a black professional athlete than a doctor or lawyer..
Reality check: According to the 2000 census, there were more than 31,000 black physicians and surgeons, 33,000 black lawyers and 5,000 black dentists. Guess how many black athletes are playing professional basketball, football and baseball combined. About 1,400..
"We talk about leaving no child behind," says Dena Wallerson, a sociologist at Connecticut College. "The reality is that we are allowing our own children to be left behind." Nearly a third of black children are born into poverty. The question is: why?.
Scholars like my Harvard colleague William Julius Wilson say that the causes of black poverty are both structural and behavioral. Think of structural causes as "the devil made me do it," and behavioral causes as "the devil is in me." Structural causes are faceless systemic forces, like the disappearance of jobs. Behavioral causes are self-destructive life choices and personal habits. To break the conspiracy of silence, we have to address both of these factors..
It's important to talk about life chances - about the constricted set of opportunities that poverty brings. But to treat black people as if they're helpless rag dolls swept up and buffeted by vast social trends - as if they had no say in the shaping of their lives - is a supreme act of condescension. Only 50 percent of all black Americans graduate from high school; an estimated 64 percent of black teenage girls will become pregnant..
Are white racists forcing black teenagers to drop out of school or to have babies?.
Cosby got a lot of flak for complaining about children who couldn't speak standard English. Yet it isn't a derogation of the black vernacular - a marvelously rich and inventive tongue - to point out that there's a language of the marketplace, too, and learning to speak that language has generally been a precondition for economic success, whoever you are. When we let black youth become monolingual, we've limited their imaginative and economic possibilities..
These issues can be ticklish, no question, but they're badly served by silence or squeamishness. We can't talk about the choices people have without talking about the choices people make..
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is chairman of the department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard.

AU, you're right that there is no sense in tiptoeing around the truth. To fix a problem you have to acknowledge all of its facets, including unpleasant or politically incorrect ones. Just ask Bill Cosby.

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I'm just now jumping in, but how about this?

Is AA any different then Reparations? In my experience, these subjects go hand in hand, as people who tend to support or oppose one, support or oppose the other, inclusively.

And taking this a bit further, let's talk about this:

If Reparations are granted, should AA end?

It seems like nobody ever discusses what post-Reparation society should look like.

If the US Government comes to the conclusions that Black Americans deserve some sort of reparation for slavery, (as Japanese Americans interned during WWII received), should AA be over?

And would/should it still be available for Hispanics? Asians?

Should this be another topic? If anyone thinks it should, I'll re-post....

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I have to admit to not reading all of the post so apologize in advance if I am repeating anything.

My theory is that AA just ads to discrimination. Not only in the sense that you are showing preferential treatment to one group and not another but also by backlash of the second group. Someone on the first page stated that it is just white discrimination. It is just another reason for already racist people to justify their racism.

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Okay let me just clear this up now, white people have also been mistreated in the past. Do you think back when Rome was in power there were no white men participating in the Coliseum as entertainment for the wealthy senators? Everyone gets mistreated and if we handed out reperations to all the people who belong to a group who has been wronged, there would be no money left over to pay for more useful things such as our domestic defense and whatnot.

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While affirmative action and reparations overlap, their functions are different. Reparations are designed to compensate a group for losses suffered; affirmation action has the function of creating a greater balance of educated people in the country. If it were not for the Civil Rights movement and Affirmation Action we would have FAR fewer black, hispanic and female people in places of influence in business, the military, higher education and the arts. Without enhanced educational opportunities the country would retain a profile in which Blacks, Hispanics and women would be underrepresented in positions of influence. Bigots would love that. They would undoubtedly argue that that profile demonstrates the validity of their racist worldview. These same people could not advance to positions of influence no matter how much the pro-while and pro-male discriminatons of the past favored them.

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Good point, nobody. Don't forget that AA is/was applied to many venues in addition to education.

My point is while AA and reparations are different functions (as you pointed out), it seems politically many of the same people support and/or oppose both topics.

I think both of these subjects merge when a future policy is discussed. Some people, politicians, and judges who currently oppose AA might have supported it in the past. The question for them might be related to the discussion of whether or not AA is needed any longer.

As you stated, "If it were not for the Civil Rights movement and Affirmation Action we would have FAR fewer black, hispanic and female people in places of influence in business, the military, higher education and the arts. Without enhanced educational opportunities the country would retain a profile in which Blacks, Hispanics and women would be underrepresented in positions of influence."

Agreed. But has it reached a point of fairness, or is more time needed for AA to continue to work? Do we need 10 years? 20?

Or should the government pay reparations and call it even?

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'Friends' of blacks
Thomas Sowell

July 13, 2004

Reactions to Bill Cosby's recent criticisms of some counterproductive ghetto behavior patterns have ranged from applause from some in the black audience that heard him to a cheap attack from white liberal Barbara Ehrenreich in the New York Times. "Billionaire bashes poor blacks" is the way Ms. Ehrenreich puts it.

Over the years, Bill Cosby has poured enough of his efforts and money into advancing blacks that he does not need any lessons from Barbara Ehrenreich on how to help his own people. But her attempts to pose as a friend and defender of blacks has implications that reach far beyond this one silly woman.

According to Ms. Ehrenreich, "it's so 1985 to beat up on the black poor." Among her other radical chic comments is, "it must be fun to beat up on people too young and too poor to fight back or the elderly rich wouldn't do it."

This is just one of innumerable ways that the political left evades criticisms -- whether of young thugs or schoolteachers or anyone else -- by simply calling the criticism "bashing" and shifting the focus to the supposedly bad motives of those who criticize.

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk," a slogan says. You don't let anybody you care about destroy himself without warning him. Those who want to exempt blacks from criticism are not friends.

Criticism is part of the price of progress. Economics professor Walter Williams has said that a turning point in his education -- and his life -- came when a schoolteacher in the Philadelphia ghetto chewed him out for wasting his abilities on adolescent nonsense.

The criticism hurt -- and there was no Barbara Ehrenreich there to defend him. So he turned his life around.

My own moment of truth came when a roommate at Harvard said to me one day: "Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?"

Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. I thought I was working hard. But, when the midterm grades came out -- two D's and two F's in my four courses -- it became painfully clear that I was not working hard enough. I was going to have to shape up or ship out -- and I didn't have anywhere to ship out to.

I had been on my own for years and had gone into debt in order to go to Harvard. Moreover, there was no Barbara Ehrenreich to defend me. So I got my act together and graduated with honors.

Today, how many white schoolteachers are going to chew out some ghetto youth? How many white college students are going to tell a black roommate to stop goofing off?

In today's climate, too many teachers think they are doing black students a favor by feeding them grievances from the past and telling them how they are oppressed in the present -- and how their future is blocked by white racism. These are the kinds of friends who do more damage than enemies.

Why endure all the hard work, self-discipline and self-denial that a first-rate education requires if The Man is going to stop you from getting anywhere anyway? People who have been pushing this line for years are now suddenly surprised and dismayed to discover that many black students across the country regard academic striving as "acting white."

Many young blacks likewise regard speaking correct English, or even observing the rules of polite society, as "acting white." White liberals often cheer them on in their self-destructive behavior or at least "understand" them and defend them.

Blacks have, in effect, been adopted as mascots by many white liberals. Mascots serve to symbolize something for others but the actual well-being of the mascot himself is seldom a major concern. Blacks have long been used by the left to indict American society.

People like Barbara Ehrenreich get their jollies saying clever things to needle American society, whether on race or other issues. The actual consequences of their liberal vision for blacks themselves get remarkably little attention.

So what if the social pathologies in the black community grew far worse after liberal doctrines became government policies in the 1960s? The vision is what matters to the left -- and the opportunities it presents for them to be clever with words.

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A Lone Voice wrote:

Agreed. But has it reached a point of fairness, or is more time needed for AA to continue to work? Do we need 10 years? 20?

Not by a long shot. I'd like to say have AA on par with every year slavery was instituted in the US, but I'll be generous and say half. So roughly 150-175 more years of AA sounds about right to me.

As for reparations? Forget it. It would be a waste. The trick is to create social change on a deeper level. Throwing money at blacks may help some, but its not really going to get any minorities in office or get more in CEO positions.

If something better than AA comes along, I'm all for it. But I'm not going to buy that line of bs of "well, we should just jugde everyone equally now". Certainly when blacks/women are about 4 steps lower on the socio-economic ladder from whites.

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JustanObserver
Those blacks who you say are 4 steps lower on the socio-economic scale than whites after 50 years of AA if that is so it is of their own doing. They had every opportunity and those who were willing to put the effort in can and have achieved to the level of their ability. One need only look around to see successful black people in every industry and profession.

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Asians were subjected to slavery, discrimination, and internment camps in USA.

Yet they are now overrepresented in most elite universities and command the highest average income of any race.

All this without any present benefit from AA.

Can someone explain why blacks & hispanics, for example, need AA, while asians have done great without it?

Isn't this, in a strange way, saying "these races are more incapable than whites and asians, so lets throw them a bone." Is this actually enabling them to operate at a lower standard? Is this a strange form of racism?

Let's say my brother and I regularly compete in a one-on-one basketball game to 20. We are equal in skill at basketball. But he always starts with a 4 point lead. If we are very competitive, who do you think we'll be inspired to become a better, hungier basketball player over time? Will these extra points actually hurt my brother in the long run?

I am not asking this sarcastically. There may be a reason why certain minorities need AA and others do not. I hope someone can explain a reason why certain minorities like blacks and hispanics may need AA, and other minorities like asians do not.

Before the flames begin, please note that on most issues I consider myself quite liberal. I have more minority friends than white friends. Its just that, on this issue, it appears that asians have proven AA to be largely irrelevant. Through hard work, focus, determination, and perseverance.

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extra medium
I have asked several times why Hispanics were included as one of the minorities included to reap the benefits of AA. Never got an answer. As for Blacks AA was to give them a leg up. Some made good use of it many others did not. It is time however, to level the playing field. Equal opportunity should mean just that.

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Some forget that other white men have been enslaved until they migrated to the U.S. I am tired of these double-standards which we all try and learn to accept.

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au1929, as I understand it, Hispanics are included not because of their ethnicity or Latin American descent, per se. They are included--and many should not because of their middle class and/or recent immigration status--because of the poverty which has been historically produced by systematic discrimination. The Asians have suffered an ACUTE form of discrimination, as seen in the internment of Japanese Americans (and the brutal and crimminal confiscation of their lands on the false pretext of their anti-Americanism). They have deserved much more reparation than they have received. Blacks and Hispanics, on the other hand, have suffered a CHRONIC form of discrimination. Unlike Asians, Blacks have suffered the breakup of families and were principally united by their local Christian churches--a force that provided communal solidarity and support but no fountain of sophistication. Mexican Americans had their land (the entire southwest) taken from them in 1848, and some today see themselves living in occupied territory. Some Hispanics, like the journalist, Jorge Ramos, describe, half humorously, a process that frightens many anglo-Americans. This is the so-called process of demographic re-conquest (named after Spain's Reconquista of Spain from the Arabs). Undoubtedly, Hispanics will enjoy an increasing political influence in the U.S. because of their higher rates of reproduction. In Europe there are some fears of the demographic advantages of Muslim immigrants. The situation is quite different from that of the U.S. southwest. Hispanics are not ideologically united. Indeed, they are notoriously divided. Americans of Hispanic descent, especially as they become internally more class stratified (and this will be furthered by Affirmative Action), will undoubtedly have the same distribution among political parties as seen among anglo-Americans.

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JL
Hispanics are included based upon a Spanish sur name and nothing else. Whether they came from South America, Central America, Mexico, A Caribbean Island or wherever. In addition they could have been recent immigrants or ten generation American citizens. And I might add their financial position is irrelevant.

Regarding Mexicans living in occupied territory. There are 11 or 12 Mexican illegal aliens in the US with more arriving each day. I guess they would rather live in "occupied" territory than their native land.

As for the Asians you speak of they were not included under the rules of AA. In fact they faced the same discrimination as whites I believe. And guess what they did not need it They as all immigrants before them made their own way.

IMO the umbrella of AA if it was to make up for the evils of slavery it had much to great a spread. And certainly there was no justification for including Hispanics and recently arrived Blacks.

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This could be an example of how AA doesn't work. True example:

My neighbor family's last name is Ramirez. The dad (Mr. Ramirez) was born in the USA, as was his father and grandfather. Spanish has not been spoken in this family for 2 generations. Mr. Ramirez' mother is white with blond hair and blue eyes.

Mr. Ramirez also married a blond hair, blue eyed woman. Their two children look like aryans; both are very fair with blond hair and blue eyes.

My other neighbor (Mr. Gomes) came to the US from Portugal when he was a teenager. He speaks heavily accented English. His wife came from Portugal when she was in her mid 20's; she is still learning English. Portiguese is spoken in the family home, and the whole family has a dark complexion.

Ironically, both couples have children applying for college at the same time. The Ramirez' are much more financially secure, as can be expected from their deep roots in the US. The Gomes are struggling, as a language barrier is keeping the parents from quality jobs.

Guess who benefits from AA? The Ramirez children! Since the Gomes are from Europe, they are not considered a disaffected class. So the Ramirez children are provided with a crutch, while the Gomes children are considered to be 'white', and therefore inelgible.

And it may go on for generations.......

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A Lone Voice
The same would be true if it were a poor white family VS a wealthy black one.

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au1929 and Lone Voice, I agree that AA is spread out too broadly (at the same time I think that children of some deprived white families should be helped if they show ability despite the inequalities of their educational opportunities). The sole function of AA as far as I'm concerned is to provide "compensatory" opportunity for Americans (regardless of ethnicity or gender) who have suffered systematic discrimination. I think that neither the Ramirez nor the Gomez familes, in LV's examples, should be eligible. And, yes, there is considerable corruption of the system. I know a Hispanic man, a professor with a Ph.D. and former colleague,who never, as far as he knows, received compensatory aid. He graduated with all kinds of hard-earned honors (Phi Beta Kappa, NIMH scholarship, Magna Cum Laude), won university and presidential scholarships, etc. And, at the same time, worked during his eleven years of university work. His wife, an anglo, worked as a public school teacher, and fought the administration's efforts to include her as an hispanic for quota purposes--because of her Spanish married name. They were both disgusted. Obviously, I agree that qualification for AA assistance should be improved (it should not include immigrants, just because of their skin color or minorities of financial means). Moreover, the program should be an aggressive and affirmative effort to seek out children who have suffered from historical discrimination and who demonstrate the promise (motivation and ability) of success. It is in America's interest to do so.
au1929, your response to my occupied territory point is deliberately facetious. You know perfectly well that illegals come here because they must feed their families and becaused construction companies, farmers and hotel and restaurants want them. These people risk their lives to come here to support their families. They are sometimes given going-away parties by their villages and neighborhoods, who consider them heros knowingly entering a situation where they will be exploited and may even die (in the Sonoran desert). They come because it is better to be exploited than to watch your children starve. Have a heart man.

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JLN
It would appear that you agree with me and lone voice regarding the abuse of the AA legislation. It may have been needed in some instances but it was ill conceived in respect its eligibility requirements. And at this point has outlived it purpose and need. It is time for people to stand on their own feet.
As for my bit regarding Mexican Illegals it was in response to your statement about occupied territory.

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au1929. Yes, I agree with much of what you say. I think my underlying attitude differs, however. I do NOT think or feel that we have arrived at the place where affirmative action is no longer justified. I don't even think Bill Cosby thinks it is no longer warranted. I understand Cosby's frustration. So many young Blacks have adapted to their situation, their general feeling of intellectual inadequacy. They seek instead the fantasy of "Black" success in sports (a long shot for a short career) or pop music (also a long shot with a non-lasting career). It's a shame that they do not realize that they can be just about anything any white can be. Cosby has a Ph.D. in child psychology; this suggests to me that he should have a more nuanced understanding of the situation of young Blacks. He does want the best for them, and that explains for me his anger with them.

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I have an acquaintance who legally changed his last name to a Hispanic name, to increase the chances he would be hired by a large law firm. The way the system is set up, he didn't even need to lie on any applications. Just had that new last name. Prior to the name change, he had been searching for 6 months, with no jobs. After name change, he had offers from 3 firms in the first month. They were underrepresented and they desperately needed to fill up their quotas.

The current system has too many loopholes that allow abuse and often helps those that don't need it, while letting those who truly need it slip through the cracks. The irony is that the people that are truly in poverty are the very ones that don't know how to plug into the AA system. Often, its the middle class minorities who benefit from it more than the truly needy. It needs to be cleaned up.

A socio-economic factor needs to be added in, also. Why should middle & upper class minorities benefit from AA, when poverty stricken white kids living in trailer parks, or homeless white kids, get nothing?

I witnessed one of those white kids. Raised by a single mom. Homeless, lived in cars some of the time while attending school. Then, the homeless white kid has to outscore the middle-class minority kid by 20%+ to get in the same school. Good luck. Sure seems like reverse-discrimination sometimes.

The socio-economic background is every bit or more important than the minority status. We need to give the poverty kids a chance, regardless of race. In my opinion, homeless white kids probably need more help than rich minority kids. That is not happening currently.

Bill Cosby has some points. By virtue of him being wealthy, his kids have (had) better opportunities than poor white kids.

I'd like to see us become color blind. As long as we ask for race on applications, etc., there will be racism one way or another.

Its not so much a race thing these days.

Its a money thing.

If your parents are rich, you have a lot more opportunity in our nation. Regardless of race.

Take a drive through Beverly Hills and take a look at the mansions. Tell me the minority kids there don't have a better shot at life than some white kids across town in the drugged out ghettos of broken glass streets. Its not a race thing any more in this nation.

Its a money thing. AA is behind the times. It needs to catch up.

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Is affirmative action REALLY fair?

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