Should people be given preferences based on race, gender. etc..?
Does this equal the playing field or lower the bar for everyone.
Are white males of 2004 responsible for the mistakes of white males of the last 400 centuries?
Do preferences help eliminate racism, or fester it?

Have fun!!!!!

What I think a lot of staunch opposers of affirmative action overlook, is the fact that it has only been 150 years since African-Americans were still considered property in this country. That's a pretty far cry from, say, wealthy plantation owner.

Slave labor pretty much established all of the agricultural wealth that was acheived in the South.

Now, we come to the Civil War. The slaves are free. What now?? 100 years of segregation, that was extremely seprate, but not in the least bit equal. This went on until the 60's for god's sake!!!!

Do African-Americans deserve some form of reparation? Couldn't affirmative action be considered a reparation of sorts?

Yes and Yes

This one could get ugly cap'n.

If my grandfather commited a crime way back, is it my responsiblity now to fix his "mistake". Is there a point where things become "even-steven" ? Will we know when we are there?

...

Will Affirmative Action be in my favor, let's say 5~10 years from now, when the white people are a minority? Hmmmm.


THX,
Jason D

DJ_Statikfire wrote:Will Affirmative Action be in my favor, let's say 5~10 years from now, when the white people are a minority? Hmmmm.

You can't possibly be referring to wealth, right?

There are certain aspects of affirmative action that must be reformed. I don't think it should apply to job qualification. The best man should get the job, period. Affirmative action should apply more to education. The top student at, say, Ghetto High School aren't going to get offered a scholarship to Yale. Yale wouldn't consider Ghetto High to be a school that would provide a good enough pre-requisite education. George W. Bush can score a 1200 on his SAT and get in no problem 'cause of daddy's money. Is that fair?

Another good example:

I went to a state funded high school for the gifted for two years. They had a minority quota that had to be met each year. It was something along the lines of 8% black and latino students minimum. Otherwise, it was something like 67% white and 25% asian. Seems unfair, right? Shouldn't the school only accept applicants who are the most advanced and make the best marks?

No, here's why: The kids who apply are almost always straight A students with high standardized test scores, yet almost all the kids from E. St. Louis, as well as many others (not just minorities mind you), had to go to summer school to prep for the entry-level sophomore math courses. Why?? Because that level of mathematics was not even offered in their old schools.

My friend Gabe tried getting into that school and was denied. When I told him about the affirmative action quota, he was furious. Guess what happened to him? He got to go to Harvard for free on a football scholarship. Tough break, right? You think any of those E St Louis high kids would get the opportunity to go to Harvard, even if they graduated at the top of their class? even if they can play football? Nope. With an IMSA diploma, those very same students will be accepted into the college of their choice.

And, for what its worth, the same should apply in college acceptance. You have to gauge someones qualification based on what resources are available to them to advance.

I know this argument only subject to my own experience, but I still find it to be valid. Personally, I don't think it should stop until 'the ghetto' ceases to exist. With enough persistence and afforded opportunities for minorities (lets not kid ourselves about what races constitute the majority of the ghetto population) it could become a reality in a shorter time than you think.

capnreverb wrote:Should people be given preferences based on race, gender. etc..?
Does this equal the playing field or lower the bar for everyone.
Are white males of 2004 responsible for the mistakes of white males of the last 400 centuries?
Do preferences help eliminate racism, or fester it?

Have fun!!!!!

Preferences tend to irritate those they don't favor. In the specific case of black Americans -- a case unique in the world -- I think I can overlook some irritation in the interest of redress of past wrongs.

Honestly, I'm grateful that we have the chance to try to make some small gestures like this. If I had been a slave, on the morning of my emancipation I would have found a gang of like-minded fellows and killed every white person I came across. I would have happily joined with other such gangs. I don't know why there wasn't a French Revolution in Dixie.

The white race was spared such revenge. Making tiny adjustments in preferences as a means of slowly providing opportunities to black Americans over generations is infinitely less painful than the sort of satisfying bloodbath we probably deserved.

Being white in America affords me so many advantages that to ignore them and pretend that without affirmative action there is any kind of "equality" is preposterous.

It would be nice someday to believe that everybody has an equal chance in life, and that the best man would always get the job. That isn't the case now, and it wouldn't be the case without affirmative action.

Given a choice, I willingly give up a little bit of my advantage. If I assume that some black someone somewhere is benefitting from some un-named thing I didn't get sometime, well... I'm doing fine without it.

steve wrote:If I had been a slave, on the morning of my emancipation I would have found a gang of like-minded fellows and killed every white person I came across. I would have happily joined with other such gangs. I don't know why there wasn't a French Revolution in Dixie.

The white race was spared such revenge.

Yeah though this is thinking like a white (non-slave, to some degree) man. understandably, because you are.
This revenge will occur, but will be splayed out in a variety of times and places. ie gang violence and all kinds of subverted and possibly misdirected energies etc..
strife is strife, maybe like the law of conservation of energy...

Using affirmative action as a method for redress enables this. so I don't think that Affirmative action really does anything to shift power structures. Its just mass revolt is intuitively less threatening than many small revolts. Which may not be true, I'm not sure yet.

Anyway - I'm still for affirmative action for now.

AA is a tiny, tattered band-aid on the gaping sore of America's history of race relations. Why conservative types get so bent out of shape over the truly miniscule number of minorities that get assistance in this fashion is beyond me. Many more important axes to grind. Why blacks so fiercely protect AA is easier to understand (a history of being protected by the state rather than being accepted by society and an intimate, though in some cases residual, knowledge of what life was like before AA/Civil Rights victories) but no less oversized.

The assumption is that blacks are the primary recipients of AA. That is not so. Hispanics, women, and even asians (Pakistanis, Malaysians,etc.) get plenty. AA is not simply about righting past wrongs. In fact, if you use such an argument in the courts, you will lose whatever bid for AA you are attempting. AA is about addressing real discrimination in the workplace and real inadequacies in the availability of opportunities for advancement, including the availability of state schooling at the higher levels of education. AA, like any system of control over resources, can be abused or mishandled. However, given the impact that AA has had in bringing blacks into the middle class, I would say that it has done more good that ill. Moreover, when one reads of execs in huge corporations laughing about all the 'black jelly beans being left at the bottom of the jar' on realizes that discrimination is still lurking. For those reasons I feel it still has a place in our society. My only caveat regarding that last statement is that future incarnations of AA should increasingly be aimed at helping the poor who, as it turns out, are made up of populations wherein minorities are over-represented.