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Affirmative action and its role in your life
Initial SCOTUS rulings on affirmative action were before my time. I agree with the concept. Do you? Has it affected you positively? Negatively? Now that affirmative action has “ended” and we’ve totally “solved racism”, what is the path forward? There’s a lot of opinions out there but I want to know what real people think about the consequences in all our lives, U.S. or otherwise. Let’s talk.
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As an ignorant teenager in the early 90s I used to rant all the time how unfair it all this "reverse discrimination" was.
The summer before my senior year I had ordered a huge book of college scholarships/grants. This book included everything from left-handed scholarships to lists of grants available in fields that were experiencing worker shortages. I was outraged that as a pretty starndard right-handed white male I qualified for something like 40% of the scholarships and grants in that book--and of the ones I qualified for also put everyone who qualified for the other 60% of the book ahead of me!! "Why, this is bullshit!" I'd pout. "Statistically I am part of the largest populations in the country yet I'm automatically disqualified for over half of the available help!" I'd proclaim to myself.
It was never explicitly taught to me but I grew up thinking of assistance as a zero-sum game (long before I knew the term). Maybe it was a subtle influence of the "welfare queen" narrative where the implication was that some are "more deserving" of help than others on my young mind?
I ended up paying my own way through a local community college (go go affordable $35 per credit hour classes and $30-40 used textbooks!). I could afford it since I worked full time for my parents slightly above minimum wage. (It was in a hot sweaty kitchen in the Florida heat so nepotism was doing me NO favors and since I lived with them I literally could never call off, lol).
Slowly it started dawning on me just how lucky I was and how much of a brat I had been about all this "affirmative action" stuff. I realized that I wasn't losing out of someone else had a gain (again, long before I knew the term zero sum game).
I'm much older now with less of an ego as my teenage self. I want what's best for everyone because, tangibly or intangibly, it will help all of us and I realize I'm part of "us". I've tried my best to reinforce this notion in my kids so they don't succumb to the same dumb line of "reasoning" I fell into for that short bit of my life.
I use this quote a lot whenever anyone talks about how "woke" is bad or inclusivity is somehow harmful.
This. Very well said. I have the hardest time in a work environment dominated by conservative white males that are so bought into the pull yourself up by your bootstraps narrative they ascribe to themselves to the point that they can’t see how much being a victim of circumstance plays into peoples lives.
Having worked with my share of lower class white men - some of them conservative - part of the problem is looking at someone who has lived a life where circumstances have been very difficult for them, where they find themselves still disadvantaged and still poor, and the only advantage they've ever had - being white - is an 'invisible' one that is then taken away by affirmative action.
I think the biggest problem with AA is that the organizations where it's needed most - small businesses that rampantly discriminate against applicants - will never be affected by it. Larger employers like colleges are already taking action themselves to try and mitigate these issues bc they realize the benefits of a diversified workforce and they have enough people in the organization who are themselves willing to push to make it happen.
The other issue is the narrative. Current politics has built the strawman "CIS white male" or "old white guy" as being to blame for most of life's ills. Until we stop framing the argument with the "white guy" as the enemy, you're just alienating someone who likely agrees with you on most points. I know that when I hear that phrasing, my mental response is "What the hell did I do?" or "Don't blame me, I had it damned hard too." even though I know it should be framed as "what they are denied" rather than "me personally to blame".
I see what you mean. I think my distrust of corporations to do the right thing is what predominantly informs my opinion on having something on paper requiring it. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic.
I think the current SCOTUS does not represent the majority of the average U.S. citizen (the current majority was put in place by a president who lost the popular vote) and they are acting as activists. Their actions are having real life consequences for people. I don’t really want to have a full on political discussion. Just want to hear from folks about any way your life has been affected directly or indirectly.
According to Pew Research, more Americans disapprove than approve of using race-based admissions in college admissions, and its not really by an insignificant margin.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/08/more-americans-disapprove-than-approve-of-colleges-considering-race-ethnicity-in-admissions-decisions/
The headline is that more Americans disapprove of affirmative action than approve of it. Not more of X type of Americans, just more Americans in general. That's not sensationalist, its just accurate.
Even among black Americans the combination of 'not sure' and 'disapprove' is more than half, with only 47% actually being in favor of the policy.
Desegregation of the armed forces, slavery, and Jim Crow laws are not anything proportional to race based selection for university admissions. I find the argument sensationalist, ungenuine, and posed to create an emotional reaction in its favor when on balance the selected examples are almost irrelevant in context.
Absolutely agree. My opinion won’t be informed by “most Americans think xyz”
ok but the original statement was that SCOTUS does not represent the majority of the average U.S. citizen. When, in fact, the three most recent decisions do represent the average Americans view on the issue.
This is what happens when people get their entire views from biased sources, left or right, they want to hear what they want to hear. So they assume everyone else is on their side and it's only the other side that's against them.
I mean “not sure” doesn’t 100% fall on the side of “disapprove”. They’re just unsure. Plenty of those could shake out in approval of it and bump that over 50%.
So I don’t really get what you were trying to get across there.
I'm guessing there are a number of Americans in progressive areas who think that affirmative action isn't needed anymore because they mistakenly assume that since it has achieved what it was meant to in their area, it must be true of the entire nation.
Obviously if looking at the country at large, it has not accomplished what it was meant to.
Do you think there is any significance to the majority of Asians being against AA?
I know a majority of my Asian relatives couldn't tell you why affirmative action exists, only that they dislike it because it's biased against them
Just a note ... the headline can essentially never represent the "entire truth". There just are not enough words to represent the "entire truth" in a headline about almost any thing.
On topic, if your objective is "fairness" then you have already failed. There is no "fair" solution. Every solution will disadvantage someone. In the case of affirmative action people of asian heritage (a minority) were clearly being screwed by it.
Citizens United was a result of the way the laws had been used was deemed to advantage one group over another, and while the court realized the decision was not good for the country they didn't have a better solution.
The important part is that it's not the SCOTUS' job to make laws, that is the job of congress. The problem there is that our legislative branch doesn't want to really do anything.
Congratulations to those Americans. They're wrong.
Although I assume you're responding to OP's comment about whether or not SCOTUS represents the majority... I think OP was being more general, not just on this decision.
Also, as I said, they're wrong. Admissions without Affirmative Action are biased towards white students. There have been studies done (PDF Warning) that show people will introduce their own prejudices into the admissions process even if they don't think they are. The only way to be sure minorities get apportioned a reasonable slice of admitted students is to force it to happen.
How (and maybe more importantly why) is race visible to those handling admissions? Shouldn’t the first step be enforcing discrimination laws and making those handling admissions not allowed to see names and pictures and addresses?
If you really want race based quotas, you could first do a race blind admissions process and then change the results to get your quotas.
IMO if your admissions process ends up with racist results - your admission process is racist.
Alternatively, there just isn’t enough credibile applicants from every label group, but that’s probably more a sign of minorities not having a fair go earlier in life - and more should be done to give minorities access to education at all levels.
But this is the problem. You are pointing out the problem, but then saying "they should not be allowed to try to solve it, since it's systemic". Colleges can't fix the systemic issues of societal racism, but they can fix it at the admission level and have been trying to do so.
What is wrong with attempting to fix it by accounting for either income, or the income level of the school district, as opposed to just looking at race?
I'll use the example of Texas again, for a while now they've been attempting to improve results for people from poorer school districts. So the top 10% of any school's graduating class get to go to any big state school they want to, and the top 6% or so get to go to UT. UT is just more selective because it was getting to the point where 80% of the admissions were from this program, so this way it's more evenly distributed between them and other schools like TAMU.
On the surface this program has nothing to do with race. But the students at wealthy schools, who are predominantly white, probably could have been accepted into a state school anyway, and thus don't benefit. In fact this program hurts them by taking away spots they could have otherwise got. However, students at bad schools hugely benefit from this program, because now they're only competing against people in their own school and approximately their own income level.
And obviously these students are much more likely to be Latino than the students at the rich schools. So there you have a program accomplishing the same goal, but without the blatant racial discrimination.
Maybe that exact solution won't work everywhere, but the basic concept of targeting things like poorer school districts or poorer individuals will. And it will have very similar effects to what AA used to have, but if it's done this way nobody will complain about it. Again, Texas of all places got this 10% thing passed and nobody there (I went to TAMU) was complaining about it.
Thank you for this outstanding comment. I think people are taking being anti-affirmative action as being against helping minority advancement. I think that society has a duty to advance the lives of the underprivileged but that doing so by labeling and categorizing people based on something as superficial as skin color is horrendous. There are many other ways to accomplish this without resorting to racial classification. It's not helping the poor that people are against, it's about the racial aspects of it
I agree with you, affirmative action is a great way to address a symptom of a larger problem but does nothing to address the actual issue. There are some areas in this country that do an excellent job of preparing young people for college and others that don't. I can go into any McDonald's across the country and get a Big Mac of equal quality, it would be nice if that standard was applied to our elementary and high schools.
"The only way to be sure minorities get apportioned a reasonable slice of admitted students is to force it to happen." Why is that the only way? We can look at the data for Harvard and see that minorities are being excluded even though by all of their metrics they would be superior students than some others who are being admitted, and this is with affirmative action.
I think we should make all selection processes race and gender anonymized. If the race and gender were truly unknown to the people making the hiring, admissions, loan granting choices wouldn't that be "fair"?
Depends on what you consider "fair." I think I can guess that your definition of "fair" means everyone in the applicant pool has an equal chance of getting in. But if you think about that, you have to consider the sizes of the applicant pools.
Let's just use African Americans to start with. African Americans make up 12.1% of the US population. I don't have actual numbers, but I would put money down that African Americans do not make up 12.1% of applicants to, say, Harvard, and by that I mean, it's probably less. Much less.
Many applicants to ivy league schools have incredibly similar portfolios to offer. I don't know enough about the admissions process to say one way or another how people are selected (and many admissions processes are black boxes anyway, likely to both discourage gaming and obfuscate deliberate bias and selection), but it's not unreasonable to assume there is some degree of lottery to it. Let's say that all the applicants are assigned a lottery number, and they're on those little ping pong balls that you see on lottery drawings. All the white applicants have a lottery number that starts with X, and all the African Americans have lottery numbers that start with Y.
With a pool of applicants that are majority white, even if you could get 12.1% of the applicants to be African Americans, that's still an 87.9% chance that the first ball will start with X. And while the chances get better with each drawn ball, the odds are still extremely in favor of all applicants starting with X.
So, what is a fair measure of representation in admitted students? Should it be a full 12.1%? Should it be higher? Lower? It's a complex question, but anonymizing applicants is both very difficult, and not effective in correcting imbalances. For example, how do you anonymize an applicant's essay that specifically talks about the struggles they've had because of their race or gender? Do you tell the students to not write about that? If so, is telling people to erase parts of themselves from the application process actually viable?
What if we take a number, say 30% of available slots, and apportion them for minority students (not just African Americans this time). All minorities get lottery numbers that start with Y. Then, we have two lottery machines. One that has all the lottery balls that start with X (white people), and one that has all the lottery balls that start with Y (minorities). 70% of slots will be drawn from the X machine, and 30% from the Y machine. Does that feel more fair? Because when it's written out explicitly, it really doesn't. Fairness is really hard to quantify.
It's not a simple problem to solve, but it's one worth solving. And if your proposal of anonymizing applicants were feasible, it still means that you are much, much more likely to admit a white person than any minority on probability alone.
I agree with the challenge of defining fairness you outline but some 1 AM back of the napkin math suggests you are selling either the scale of the admissions process or the rate at which sampling converges to the large population limit a bit short in that first lottery.
The lottery is a simple case of sampling without replacement, and there is a positive covariance between any two drawings, however this decays like 1 / N where N is the number of lottery balls from which we are selecting. If you run the numbers for Harvard last year (roughly 52588 applicants, make the strong assumption assume as you did a target minority population of 12.1% for those applicants) using the sampling with replacement formula, you get a covariance of the order 1e-5. That’s quite small, and suggests the lottery result will capture the applicant pool’s make up well. In general, sampling without replacement is a well-studied problem suitable for analytic analysis, so I bet you can get some pretty sharp confidence intervals using the Chernoff bound here to come up with conservative estimates for the probability of the accepted pool having a similar composition to the applicant pool.
However, as you said, this is predicated on the applicant pool reflecting the general population (I haven’t checked but I find that unlikely), and doesn’t impact your argument. I just like to use an opportunity for pedantry as a way to procrastinate bed time.
Yeah, I got a degree in English, and the time I learned about probability is more than 25 years behind me at this point, so I am not clear on exactly how the math works out. But a blind lottery is actually probably more fair than the actual application process. Affirmative action was conceived of as a way to ensure bias against admitting minority students was at least blunted, if not eliminated. So in reality, the admissions process puts its thumb on the scale for white people.
Correct. I was speaking generally about the makeup of SCOTUS, not the average Americans opinion.
I think this is a big part of why I don't like to talk about politics. It makes people try to assess my subjective opinions as being "right" or "wrong" and the person on the other side always has motivation to want to make me doubt myself.
You can't be WRONG if you disapprove of race based admissions because your approval is something you are tautologically correct about.
If I wanted to listen to people tell me every opinion I ever had was wrong I'd call my parents.
It's likely a combination of how the questions were asked and the improper education on what affirmative action has/is done/doing for minorities.
Simply, you cannot reverse centuries of targeted race-based discrimination without significant targeted race-based support and uplifting. Regardless of whataboutism regarding poor whites or of discriminatory measures, to fix one, you have to at least undo the harm.
True and agreed with, but a college of people who scored the best on a certain set of tests is also terrible.
I don't think you can argue that because affirmative action results in a racially distinct grading distribution that means it's bad.
A college needs the dumb jock and the person who has overcome adversity and the handicapped and the person who barely got in and, for some reason, the a cappella singers.
A student body of the real world because the opportunity is the privilege. That's what a university is all about.
Universities will presumably adapt by using some sort of income-based equivalent, if they can't get it out in time for this year's classes they'll definitely have it ready for next year. Because black people are generally more poor than everyone else, it will have about the same effect as it was before, if not quite as pronounced because of all the poor people from other races.
Texas has already been doing a program with a similar goal by automatically accepting the top 10% of every high school into one of the big state schools, on the surface that doesn't target people by race, but it does dispraportionately effect people from worse school districts (since people from better school districts would have been accepted anyway) and the people in those bad school district are more likely to be black/latino.
So maybe it'll be a box that has you put your family's income, maybe they'll go by how wealthy your school district is, or maybe they'll do something like Texas is already doing, but the schools that were choosing to use affirmative action before now have all sorts of alternatives at their disposal.
I can literally type in a zip code online and get the average family income for that zip code. I would imagine it wouldn't be hard for colleges to come up with a school district or zip code prioritization based on income levels. I honestly think this court ruling will have almost zero impact on African American getting into college and if colleges successfully switch to an income based approach, this will likely help minorities, immigrants, and poor whites that are currently not helped by AA.
Public support for affirmative action is strongly dependent on how the questions are phrased.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/american-opinion-affirmative-action/
All polls are like that. It's very easy to trick people into supporting one side or the other via yes or no questions.
I want to take a moment to point out that SCOTUS, by definition, should not represent the majority of US citizens. The role of SCOTUS is to represent the US Constitution in as unbiased a way as possible. Whether or not what they did was the right thing can be an entirely different argument but SCOTUS's function as constitutional arbiter is a critical separation of powers. Promoting otherwise is a very dangerous line of thinking
A recent example is President Trump's suits to change the results of the last Presidential Election. Because SCOTUS represents the constitution and, supposedly, not other interests they soundly rejected his suits.
The Constitution is not some holy document. It is loaded with its own biases due to being ancient and written by folks with very different values.
The problem is the court is packed with literalists whom ignore precedent and use circular reasoning and lies to get the outcome they want (ie repealing Roe v Wade under the guise of 'no defined right to privacy'), instead of the spirit of justice.
The court needs to serve as a function to preserve justice. Ostensibly the constitution is supposed to enshrine that, but the system is flawed in so many ways its laughable.
I don't think anyone here is claiming the system is not flawed, what's important not to lose sight of is that separation of powers helps to alleviate those flaws. The Constitution shouldn't be open to interpretation as, logically and foundationally, that would defeat its entire purpose. We as a society have been given the power to change the Constitution through amendment as the time and our values changed and we should feel free to do so now as we have done in the past, otherwise there is no justice in disregarding the primary legal document underlying our entire system of government and a delicate balance of power.
As for Roe and speaking as a staunch pro-choice adherent, I have to say that I think the court was right. There is no defined right to privacy in the constitution as much a I'd like there to be, Roe was an overreach. Congress could legislate abortion or we could take it a step further and amend the constitution but that hasn't been done, instead people point the finger at SCOTUS because it's easier to do nothing and instead make up an enemy to blame. Have you called or written your representatives in congress to have them legislate abortion?
But that's the fundamental problem here, isn't it? The Constitution was written over 200 years ago and signed by dozens of people (much more if you include the Amendments), each of which had their own personal interpretation of the document. So how can there be an objective interpretation? The originalists on the Court pretend to do this by roleplaying as either James Madison or some other Framer (original intent) or by roleplaying as Zephaniah the Colonist (original meaning), and what do you know, by some totally random happenstance those 18th century colonists always agree with the conservative outcome!
Take the second amendment:
I mean, how do you even parse that? The sentence is a grammatical mess! It wasn't until 2008(!) that the Court -- under an "originalist" interpretation -- decided that this amendment applied to individuals in their home.
As for Roe, take the 9th Amendment, upon which Roe v Wade was partially based:
This Amendment essentially enshrines the idea that people have more rights than those enumerated in the Constitution (like privacy). I mean, right there in the founding document is an invitation to extend its own scope. How could it possibly be objective?
And Roe itself was based upon other, prior cases that upheld that right to privacy. Cases that the majority opinion held in their repeal they would be open to revisiting on similiar grounds.
The right to privacy basically arose over time, because combining the logic of the various parts of the constitution makes it foundational, if not explicitly stated.
Its one of those basic logic things like:
And the court basically disregarded numerous upheld case law in order to invalidate C being True, while making soft claims that A and B are also still True.
If you get rid of some commas, it parses reasonably:
Your points are fair and although I agree that SCOTUS isn’t specifically meant to represent the American majority but instead interpret the constitution, to say that having a supermajority doesn’t matter if they’re doing their jobs right makes a lot of assumptions. It fully ignores the multi-decade effort put forth to stack the court because of its potential power. Not to mention that the majority should unarguably be 5-4 if it weren’t for congress acting in bad faith refusing to confirm a judge while pushing through another judge years later in a similar, but worse, circumstance. None of that can be written off because they “just interpret the constitution”.
The current method is obvious. Make laws all across the country that challenge a precedent with the intent for one of the inevitable legal challenges to make it to the Supreme Court. That’s being done knowing full well how the “constitution will be interpreted” with the current makeup of the court. We can disagree on how it’s supposed to be, but the results are the results. I don’t think that can be ignored.
I will whole heartedly disagree with you on the second paragraph, the court has found an awfully balanced reading of the constitution IMO. Abortion and affirmative action were both ruled according to conservative expectations but so many other cases absolutely have not been: Trump, gerrymandering, Native Americans, Immigration, death penalty, COVID vaccination, and executive privelege. The great conservative remaking of the US via SCOTUS is a political scare tactic as SCOTUS has shown restraint in making rulings that everyone else would have thought were shoe-ins for either Trump or conservative causes in general.
As for the former paragraph, whatever multi-decade efforts you're speaking about or actions of the Senate to avoid consenting to a president's nomination speak on the other two branches of the government. Neither has anything to do with SCOTUS's role as arbiter of the constitution and comes off as Whataboutism
As a former bystander in this conversation, I don't find your arguments persuasive in the least.
I can't believe you can make the "balanced reading" argument after the backflips just done to invent standing and reasoning for student loan forgiveness strikedown within the plain text of the law: "waive or modify" apparently doesn't mean "waive or modify".
The court is even more broken than the US Senate, and that's saying something.
Again, all ruled on "along liberal lines" by a conservative dominated court. What you're arguing is a commentary on the larger system and something else entirely. I'm sorry but I won't engage as you're pulling the argument very far from the line of discussion that brought us here
They weren't ruled along liberal lines, most were eventually ruled as far as they could be twisted to advantage conservatives without completely destroying the text of the law. But a lot of those were slow-walked so hard as to make the results meaningless or they were gutted in final effect.
Remember the abortion bounty case where Texas offloaded the ability of people to sue for damages from abortions to any Jane/Joe? That should have been slapped with an immediate injunction, not allowed to stand until it didn't matter anymore and the damage was done.
I'm pointing out how your statement flies in the face of observable facts and context using mostly your own examples, not pulling the argument very far from the line of discussion.
I was showing you how your contextually devoid analysis of the final rulings means nothing in the context of the applied law. The damage has already been done in most cases. Republicans already successfully stole the House of Representatives multiple times with their gerrymandering antics and the court cases came down after the elections took place under the disallowed maps. If those were Democratic favoring maps to be struck down, they would have been under injunctions in a heartbeat. Meanwhile in reality the Republican maps are allowed to stand and we have a jokester as a Speaker of the House.
It strayed far from the "if you blindly look at which way the liberals and conservatives voted on the court, it's wholly balanced and reasonable" line that was being pushed.
Ignoring the practical application of the laws, the timing of the decisions/injunctions/lack of injunctions/etc., which cases were taken up in the first place, the backflips to justify standing, who wrote the decisions and the doors left open, the ignoring of jurisprudence, and the straight up lying about facts/history by the conservative majority does make it easy to say they're being a reasonable branch of the government.
Here's the thing though: The basis that they did so was unwinding the firmly established (via decades of precedent) right to privacy, "because its not in the constitution"
They blatantly ignored the precedent that was pretty solidly based on the 9th amendment:
In the dissent a very relevant segment:
Emphasis mine. I encourage you to read up on Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. That is one of the most foundational cases to many of the rights we take for granted today. Reconsidering that means allowing the return of the government policing your bedroom, porn habits, and interracial marriage... For starters.
The court's current makup is how you get insane rulings like 'Computer documents are not constitutionally protected personal documents because they are not literally made of paper, as described by "papers".'
Thats right, to a Constitutional literalist (the kind conservative presidents have been pushing in the court), this is true:
I think this is the mythology that the conservatives want people to think.
There is, quite frankly, no way to interpret anything in an unbiased way. If it was actually true that someone like John Roberts was able to simply "call balls and strikes" then how can someone explain how conservatives always appoint conservatives and liberals always appoint liberals? It is a branch of government that is 100% pure activism.
I am a Poc, a woman, and grew up in the US in the 70s and 80s. I was negatively affected by racism throughout my childhood (eg social exclusion, name calling). As one example, I knew that I’d never be selected for student council, cheerleading, the dance team, or the cast of the school play (anything that gave girls social currency) because I wasn’t white. But academically I was a stand-out student. I was accepted to an elite college and earned several scholarships. Did my race or gender help get me into college? I will never know. But it felt good that for the very first time, not being white was an asset. And I do know that my college was very very white, and it was and still is in the school’s best interest to keep increasing its ethnic diversity. I was also a stem student, and female stem majors were even more rare then than now. It was important then, as it is now, to decrease discriminatory practices and therefore allow women equal opportunity to study and work in stem fields.
For colleges and the workforce, AA is really important IMO to overcome unconscious prejudices that application readers have and to make sure the best applicants are admitted. (In contrast to my childhood without AA where a poc was inherently assumed to be less worthy). Even though there is less acceptance of overt racism now than when I was young, there is still a natural tendency to choose someone “like you” when hiring — this means that female and poc job applicants are more likely to be turned down or not promoted as “not a fit for our staff culture” — which continues the predominance of white men in good jobs.
Here’s an example of AA really working: right now half of med school students are women. That was not the case just two generations ago. It was thought that women just weren’t capable or interested in being doctors. Nope, turns out it was discriminatory practices in education that weeded out qualified women. With those practices actively changed, women are half of all new doctors.
Still, medicine is also an example of AA’s work not yet being done: Women doctors are more likely to become general practitioners, pediatricians, and family doctors —- men still predominate in surgery and several other specialities that are definitely more financially lucrative than family practice. It’s not because of women’s preferences, but because the culture and employment practices in those specialties actively discourage women. So, AA would be a help to get more qualified women into those fields & change their culture from within (which has already happened in the other specialties).
You just have to look at the US congress to see that racism is not yet over — it is nowhere near representative of the US ethnic diversity and women.
It’s amazing to me the way women are underrepresented and flat out mistreated in my particular STEM profession. There was a woman of color I helped to get hired in my department. Very intelligent and hard working, but she had the audacity to be opinionated and not take any one’s shit. Now she’s gone to a different department. It’s a shame to have lost her.
There’s are two recents hires in my department that are in supervisor roles. One has a background in engineering while the other does not have a STEM background. They are both women of color. The vitriol I hear about these women because they got the job over other people hoping to be promoted to it is infuriating. There is a third who has transferred in from another department for the same role and I just don’t hear the same stuff about him (he is white).
I think a lot of the people I work with, like many in the southern U.S., have varying levels of prejudices they don’t recognize they have. That makes having open discussions with them about all this especially difficult.
Affirmative Action helped to get me to where I am today. A twenty-year career spanning the globe, being fortunate to build up a small personal-fortune through earnings and saving, my life is pretty damn good comparatively. When I applied for my first real adult job, the one that lead me to where I am today, I checked a box stating my race as other than white (it is). This helped me to get the job since my employer was a government contractor that favorably selected for diversity. I wasn't even that qualified for the job, at least on paper. I don't know if anyone else even applied for the job but if someone who was white or even a POC who declined to give their race but was very qualified lost out because I checked a box that makes it wrong and I accept that. I used the system to my advantage, much like majorities do and have done in their home countries forever, but that does not make it right or fair
Do you mean you might consider your using the system to your advantage potentiallly wrong or unfair?
I thought that it was clear as I did say it twice at the end of what I wrote but, yes, the fact that the majority often uses systems to their advantage does not excuse minorities to also do so. Society should seek equity not tit-for-tat.
I was a lazy student and underachiever in my younger years, this should have disqualified me against someone who had actually applied themselves to gain the qualifications but the fact that I checked a race box and that may have given me a leg up is morally wrong to me. Wrong and unfair
Is it not society’s responsibility to right previous wrongs? Honest question.
It completely is but two wrongs don't make a right
In either scenario someone is winning or losing based on skin color and neither of those scenarios is right. There are other ways to help the advancement of the disadvantaged, of all races, that do not involve reducing people to the color of their skin. Myself, as a minority, certainly does not appreciate being sorted by a physical feature
I also don't appreciate what appears to be innocent question asking that is just thinly veiled signaling that you don't agree with what I say and want me to justify it. Please, if you have your own arguments either for or against articulate them
I agree there are other ways to help disadvantaged people and affirmative action does not have to be the answer. It’s fair to not want to have your race be what defines you first. I get that. The concern for me is about those potentially harmed in the interim to if/when another answer is given. At the same time, we have a political climate where there are actors who would do away with safety net programs entirely if they could. I don’t have faith in our current system to find another answer.
You clearly have some strongly held beliefs that are informed, like anyone else, by your experience and observation. That’s great. We don’t seem to agree. That’s fine. I understood how me asking that question sounded so I followed it up with “honest question”. There are plenty of people who do not believe it is our responsibility to right wrongs from the past. I asked the question to get perspective on where you were coming from.
So we agree or we don't? That's rhetorical, I don't expect an answer.
The answers are already there and in practice in certain jurisdictions. Zip codes closely align with race in many areas. Selecting for family net worth and income levels, levels of education, etc. Admitting equal percentages of people from schools with poor funding and children from poor households. Literally any of these can be done overnight, schools already have this data.
This feels like a way to allude to my experience because of my minority status since it's the only way that I've talked about how I've come to my status. It's not fair for you to place this comment there and allude to my "strongly held beliefs," a synonym for something that you find erring towards irrational. I make no claim that someone's race entitles them or disallows them to comment on something in society but I want to point out that while my observation as a minority is informed by experiences your observations and commentary, as a white man, are informed by the lack of them. Until very recently, white people were never categorized based on the color of their skin the way other minorities are (in the US).
I almost always think that agreeing to disagree is fine but in this case I don't agree with you at all and don't allow you to settle our argument in such a way. I will never endorse racial categorization outside of where it actually informs on a person's inherent qualities (i.e. medical care) because it's demeaning to people even when they benefit from it. You believe that it's okay to treat a black person different from yourself because they are black, I don't think that's okay. Why should the son of a billionaire black man get into college before you, the son of a poor white woman in the South, all things else being equal? Why should Asians, a group of ethnicities that has suffered horribly under racism in the US, be discriminated against just because they're culturally better at instilling values of education and attainment than others?
Why did you even start this thread?
You opened this conversation asking people for their experiences with affirmative action. I came in here in good faith thinking that someone here actually wanted to hear different perspectives, that their question was legitimate. Now I feel that it's easy to see that your (three times now) "honest" questions were and are really just ways for you to set up your pro-affirmative action arguments. You don't actually want to hear about my negative experiences with it, you just want to tell me that I'm wrong and why. I'm sad to say that I find your conduct here pretty dishonest
In that light, please feel free to respond as is your right but I'm no longer engaging on this topic with you in this thread
I really don’t know a lot about affirmative action except that, as I said, agree with it conceptually. I did want to know personal experiences. I’ve had multiple other interactions with other people in this thread that don’t have the same opinion as me and none of them devolved to this.
I certainly don’t think it’s okay to treat anyone different because of their skin color and shame on you for implying I do. You “know me” through less than 10 interactions over the internet. I do think it’s the job of people and government to close gaps that were made by racists practices of the past. Individual institutions can implement the practices you’ve stated, but are not required to. I don’t trust businesses to do the right thing because they often don’t.
You’ve been argumentative from the start when I really was just looking for clarification on your first comment because I didn’t get out of it what you intended. You’ve accused me of things I haven’t done because you interpreted my words the way you wanted. I wasn’t trying to convince you one way or another. You engaged in ways where I felt like I needed to reply. I have no illusions thinking I can change your mind.
You’ve dealt with me dishonestly as you consistently assumed any questions were meant to trap you so I could score some points in an argument. Good luck to you, friend. I’m happy to see this discussion end.
Thank you for your thorough replies. Your replies show me the other side of the discussion. A side which I don't see get a lot of representation. Umfortunately, I get the same idea that the post was not started in good faith and it is confirmed by OP's last reply, I hoped to read a better outcome.
The problem is the elimination of affirmative action without a better or at least a working plan in place. In a comment I wrote earlier I brought to light a study on the effects of California banning affirmative action in 1996: https://tildes.net/~life/17m7/affirmative_action_and_its_role_in_your_life#comment-9bkn
Peer-reviewed articles:
(2022) https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/115/6360982?login=true
(2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272300021X?via%3Dihub
NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/30/1185226895/heres-what-happened-when-affirmative-action-ended-at-california-public-colleges#:~:text=An%20affirmative%20action%20ban%20first,public%20universities%20in%20the%20state.
I understand you feel like you took advantage of a system, but the data is there that minorities are at a collective disadvantage from early childhood education all the way up to employment success. Perhaps there is a better route to achieving the same benefits, but that has yet to be seen. California has spent 25 years working on a new method, and while improving, are not meeting diversity standards. On the bright side, the rest of the US has some ground to improve on thanks to California's ban.
I feel like a lot of people have no idea what affirmative action is/was. I feel like most people think it was some arbitrary quota that universities just looked to fill with no concern for any other metric. In reality the way it was implemented was to value the experiences and systemic issues that POC face daily as a plus instead of an inherent negative.
In the US, being a POC of any kind is an extremely unique experience. I’ve been followed in stores, I’ve been stopped by police for being parked in front of my friends house to pick him up, I’ve been stopped by police parked in front of my own home and all of this was before I was 18. My father is half white, so my last name is not a typical name you would expect someone like me to have, so my parents chose to give me a more common first name, so that my name didn’t give away my race. You know what? It worked! Every interview I’ve ever been in begins with the same question, “So your name is X, that’s so interesting what is your family background?” I’ve been told to my face, “Wow, you are very articulate for someone like you” In that specific instance I even tried to give that person an out and deflect to my age, to which they specifically corrected themselves to mean my race (I quit that job pretty quickly)
All affirmative action seemed to do was make sure that these hardships were weighed in favor of a candidate and not against them. It was made to make sure that admissions valued a candidate overcoming these challenges to succeed as opposed to succumbing to them.
Without affirmative action I expect a lot of these considerations to be lost or removed. I expect admissions for black and Hispanic kids to plummet. I also expect this to bleed further into the job market. It’s exhausting to be headed backwards.
I have the opposite side of that: it's rare for someone to not make some sort of remark about my name, and many won't even try to pronounce it (and say so explicitly). Growing up it wasn't a big deal, but over time I've come to realize it's kind of rude.
And I suspect it's been a factor in job applications in the past. Retail kind of stuff before college...it's completely not a factor when you're working for highly diverse software companies.
I'm white, but I have Slavic ancestry. So I have a non-Anglo surname, and once in awhile get comments suspiciously asking if I'm Jewish or not in a roundabout way. I'm not, but that makes me very suspicious about their character.
So I definitely have something of an understanding, and fully support AA policy.
Thanks for your input. I agree with you. Its very frustrating.
Not American, but I've personally been stung twice in my career by our local analogue of "affirmative action", both times quite early - this was all decades ago.
In my case, the measures were implemented using a promotion quota (in all but name). I distinctly remember that the first all-staff meeting on the topic went very poorly, and that the second was dead quiet. In both cases, I moved to a different job when it started looking like there weren't enough qualified candidates applying for the earmarked positions.
I don't know if it hurt my career appreciably in the long term, or if it actually helped members of the equity-seeking groups on the same timescale.
I do recognize that there are systemic forces in play that benefit people with some characteristics over others, and that there's a need to counterbalance those forces with some kind of selective enablement. Affirmative action in the way I experienced it felt like a blunt instrument; I'd like to see something with a little more finesse applied.
So, you got passed over because someone else had been handed an advantage that seemingly looked unearned.
I'll bet that sucked. Except for the part where, you know, you just decided to walk away and get a new job. Twice. And that wasn't at all a problem.
Have to wonder what the minorities would say about both the first and second half of those quandaries.
I feel like your comment is unnecessarily adversarial. Affirmative action can be good, but if it isn't implemented in the right way - to Handshape's point - it might do harm, also (to other employees' and to the company's growth, if positions can't be filled or promotions aren't just merit-based). Getting annoyed with someone for pointing it out takes away a chance to have a conversation about a solution.
If something isn't perfect, we shouldn't just say, "Well, tough luck, others felt that way too." We should look at continuing to improve, so that no one feels ostracized for their gender, race, culture, religion, sexual orientation, or age. Instead of affirmative action in promotions, why not support only looking at experience for promotions, in time? Then there's the downside of everyone being promoted even if they don't do good work, but that would be the new risk. Or maybe a promotion based on some score of work - easier in some fields than others, but other fields could lead to biases.
From the first article discussing the first study you linked: "Color evasion [ignoring race] was not associated with greater levels of prejudice" and did not "increase anti-Black perspectives and give a pass to racist behaviors and attitudes". The problem was denying racism, i.e. power evasion. So that study and article seem to contradict you.
The second article is, I have to say, poorly written and also not relevant to this discussion from what I could see. The author writes about colourblindness in psychotherapeutic relationships - of course you should consider your patient's race when discussing their mental health, racism could naturally affect their well-being greatly.
The second study you linked doesn't seem to support affirmative action or similar programmes. They write about affirmative action in a very neutral way, but I just skimmed through it - maybe you could quote the relevant sections?
Why do you think it is that "racist" race blindness allows Asians do so disproportionately well?
Race blindness perpetuates racism? What an absolute non sequitur.
It may read that way, but our standard modes of thinking tend towards only seeing our own plights as worthy, and those of others less so. It doesn't take much time to realize that by earmarking something as intended for a minority group, whatever hostility you might feel towards that system is something these minorities feel in nearly every aspect of their lives.
That’s really interesting. I did not consider the job market aspect. I always hear people around me complain about it even though where I live/work almost everyone is white. In the U.S. I’d say if that happens, we aren’t having a staff meeting about it. The hiring folks would be the ones who know. I’m also in a STEM profession where the field is overwhelmingly male and white.
Here's a thing I've noticed in life:
The more a company complains about affirmative action, the more likely they are a workplace that needed the rule in the first place.
I work for a wildly diverse organization, and affirmative action never is a topic. We are able to select qualified candidates freely, without needing to even factor it in, because diversity is valued. And being a diverse organizaton helped foster qualified applicants applying. Because they don't have to wonder "Even though I'm applying as a Programmer, am I going to be asked to take notes and make copies because I'm a woman?"
Ancedotally, the only friend I have whose workplace complains about affirmative action is for a rural engineering single-owner firm that throws out applicants with Black-sounding names.
Engineering has a real bad rap as an old boys club. I've met plenty of highly qualified female engineers, and their tales of discrimination sound out of the 1950's.
When I started my current job in 2016, a guy who had been through the application and interview process twice told a room full of other recent hires (all white men) that he didn’t get hired those times because of discriminative hiring practices. Around 1,000 people work at the site and the town demographics are not reflected here, especially so in our department. I was astounded. There were maybe three persons of color at the time in a department of around 200 people.
Would you say you were as informed then about the need for some kind of selective enablement as you are today? Or as cognizant of the advantages you had at the time that someone else may not have had? I wonder if contemporary education about affirmative action and the need for it was that missing finesse. When you look at Gen Z and even millennials, they generally don't have the same hangups on race that their parents and grands did, and a lot of it is down to exposure to marginalized viewpoints growing up - essentially, cultural education about privilege. That's not to say that there aren't problems with how that exposure happened and its results (that's a whole other conversation), but they seem to have a measure of understanding/acceptance to where they don't get hung up on it. Or maybe it's just because they never knew any different, I dunno.
That's a hard one. I don't have records of my younger mind the way that I have photos of "me, but with more hair and fewer wrinkles".
To be fair, I'm not sure that I am cognizant of the advantages I benefited from, nor can I ever be - I can't live the experience of an equity-seeking person and then compare it to my own.
I think what I've come to accept is that there are going to be barriers for everyone in their lives and careers that stem from the circumstances of their birth.
I think that the aspect of hard-quota AA that rubs me the wrong way is that both times I ran into it, it was formalized after I had invested myself in building expertise and seniority in the organizations where it happened. Not a glass ceiling, but a brick wall erected after the fact.
AA has given me the resilience and confidence to know that when I encounter it, the best move is to move on... and that I'm strong enough to let go and restart when it happens.
Just curious OP, what is your ethnic background and age if you don't mind me asking? Answer whatever you're comfortable with.
I just ask because I'm a Native tribal member, and it's hard for me to overlook my own bias on this subject. I can agree that there is systemic oppression creating an inequality of opportunity, and yet I also understand that I'm not really in that category, my father being a 2nd generation Norwegian entrepreneur, despite still being a beneficiary of the policy.
So, ya, I'm all for affirmative action, but I'm not entirely sure if it's mainly because it might benefit me. I'm mostly out of the age range where it'd actually benefit me, so I can say in pretty good faith that my bias isn't really affecting my stance here, but I'm biased.
So ya, what's your background and how do you think your biases are at play?
I’m 32, male, and as white as they come. I was raised in a middle class family until I was 11. My dad passed and we moved to the southern U.S. where I would say I classified more as a poor white southerner. My immediate and extended family was very supportive so we always had that to fall back on, which is not always the case for other poor families.
I am a college graduate with degrees in engineering and physics from a public university. I qualified for government assistance (Pell grant and state income based scholarship) but was in school long enough that I needed loans to the tune of about thirty grand. I now work in a supervision role at a nuclear power plant where I’m well paid.
I worked hard, but a lot of doors were open to me. I know that my hard work means very little without those open doors. For instance, I got in some trouble that could have put me in prison for a short time when i was in college, but instead was looked at favorably by the court systems and afforded a way through without a felony conviction. Statistically, that doesn’t go as well for me if I’m a POC.
All that to say that I don’t think I’m biased in this instance. I recognize that there are people that need help for different reasons. I was one of them and that help was readily available to me most of the time. I can see how that help is less available to others for the wrong reasons.
Awesome job my friend. I really couldn't agree more with you. It's just hard for me to faithfully have my belief without recognizing my bias. I'm glad someone of sound mind has it too though! LOL.
Do you think targeting race specifically is the best way of addressing systemic racism though? I can't help but recognize the shortcomings of it given my position. I don't think it's bad either though. If we'll never give them reparations I think this is a good alternative.
I don’t think targeting race is the answer. I think targeting income groups is the answer. It just so happens that POC are statistically more likely to belong to lower earning income groups, which I believe to be a different discussion of a different problem. Just my opinion on it.
IMO AA is one of the most blatant examples of systemic racism in modern times. There's no reason e.g. the children of Nigerian doctors should be given preference over poor whites or Asians due to "privilege".
To answer your question, if I were a different skin color (even white) I would almost certainly have had a much better chance of admission to better institutions than where I am currently attending.
My experience in past (late 70-s to mid 80's) was that Asians were treated as a monolithic "model" minority that did not require assistance programs such as financial aid or employment assistance. At the policy making level, everyone visualized Asians as 3rd generation middle class Chinese or Japanese. You were basically shit out of luck if you were Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian or 3rd generation Chinese or Japanese but poor or working class.
I’ve heard this about Asian Americans and hadn’t really ever thought about it in regards to affirmative action. The idea of “model” minorities is messed up. I know it has been a talking point to compare other minorities unfavorably.
I guess I should weigh in as a PoC. I'm considered half, and due to discrimination against my family in the 40s and 50s we were always told to put White down as our ethnicity/race (along with to never speak Spanish in public).
I really only started putting Hispanic down as I got older, and maybe it's just me, but that seemed to open up way more doors than my white colleagues. I hope it wasn't the only factor that got me into my doctorate program or following up my jobs because I could also speak another language, but I guess I can't shake that feeling that it tipped the scales.
Part of me is pro affirmative action just because it helped tip the scales in my favor, but I understand why it's unfair. If you're clever and smart you can use it to game the system, but we need solutions to solve systemic racism, and people will always find a way to game it.
Speaking another language is a big deal especially in the US, it is an actual skill that differentiates you from other candidates.
It only differentiates you if it has an actual bearing on your position/in your field which could be the case but OP didn't specify that.
I mean 1 in 5 us adults speak another language other than English despite the negative "stupid american" narrative that gets pushed we're a pretty bilingual society.
I mean, it's an uncharitable stereotype but it didn't come out of thin air. If you take out immigrants and first-gen Americans those numbers likely dwindle, and no doubt they wouldn't exactly have been praised for having ties to another culture/language.
California banned the practice of affirmative action in 1996. What arose from the ban was a case study that showed a decrease in black student diversity in highly selective schools and increase in black student diversity in low selectivity schools. Graduation rates of black students decreased after the ban, and job prospects/success was also negatively impacted. https://youtu.be/T-pLmNTyut4
What was observed in California may be what is coming for the whole US. Anyone can argue that affirmative action wasn't a silver bullet, and that there is a better way to fairly increase diversity at universities, but striking something down before a better plan is in place is like quitting your job before you have new work lined up.
Human psychology studies shown that we value the dollar we lose far more than the dollar we might gain in an exercise. It's called "loss aversion." https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion
The same goes for what we notice. We don't see the advantages we get from our race, we see the downsides - and we don't notice the downsides for others. So one person's racial reality might be a few benefits they can see but mostly the negative experience of affirmative action, and for other their racial experience has been profoundly negative and affirmative action has seemed paltry in comparison.
Neither of these people is wrong in what they're feeling - its the same as loss aversion.
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding with these selection processes, from college to jobs to the Supreme Court, they are not picking the 'Best', they just want 'qualified'. When you reach a certain point it doesn't really matter if your GPA is better by .1 or if you graduated top of your class, all that matters is if you will fit in/ succeed/ contribute.
I believe (but don't know for sure) I benefited from affirmative action to get into the university I wanted. Both of my parents are 1st generation college grads and thanks to them I was able to grow up in a middle class up bringing. My university's Hispanic population was probably less than 1% and within the engineering department it was even smaller.
Now there is a belief that affirmative action is to help minorities out of poverty and that is true to an extent but the primary reason is to simply have organizations better represent the population at large. I should also point out that many of my colleagues had generations of college grads in their family, and while helping first generation minorities go to college is huge it is important to solidify those gains over multiple generations.
I should also point out that I struggled a lot and graduated towards the bottom of my class, despite this I never really entertained the idea that I didn't belong, or that I took a spot from someone better qualified. I am fortunate that I had a supportive group of friends and family, and I realized that someone has to be at the bottom of the class and that it is fine to be the worst of the best.
This is a good point. I think it’s a positive thing to push for institutions that more closely resemble the demographics of the population, but perhaps affirmative action wasn’t the best way of doing that? I don’t really know.
Do you like the way things are right now or do you want they to change? Should I support change if it's not for my benefit or, even worse, might harm me somehow?
Those are the questions that are not asked that guide the answers for the other ones. A lot of things are unfair from a personal point of view. There aren't infinite resources that are being denied to specific groups to oppress them. There are finite resources that need to be allocated following some kind of principle. In this game, you're not a person, you're statistic.
My thoughts are a bit all over the place on this. The original executive order required government contractors to take "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Color-blindness seems noble but tends to erase a significant contributor to a person’s life experiences.
I’m reminded of the “equality vs. equity” illustration that highlights how giving someone an equal opportunity does not necessarily set them up for the same success if they are already disadvantaged.
I also think about the college experience. University in America is different from daily life. You can walk from place to place on campus; there are places to hang out for free; and the diverse composition of your peers, a reflection of the country’s demographics instead of just the area you’re from, is something that you may never get again.
Sure, you can focus on income instead: blacks are 3x as likely to live in poverty as whites — but as an absolute number there are more poor whites. It’s not equivalent to
considering race as one factor.
AA was probably imperfect, but it at least sought to correct some of the disadvantages placed on certain groups. If Americans disapprove of it at large, I’d say that has to do more with the hyper-individualistic culture: people being offended that someone other than them, or different than them, might be afforded just one opportunity they didn’t get.
I went to a college that would accept you if you had a pulse, and as a result they were very happy to give scholarships to basically anyone who had slightly more than a pulse. As a result, affirmative action probably didn't affect my life at all, except maybe for impeding my ability to get a job after college, but I ended up getting one locally got a company that probably wasn't practicing anything of the sort at the time
I can't say a directly benefited from affirmative action (though it's entirely possible I did benefit from it without knowing) but I can say I have felt low level/microaggressions that come with systemic racism and having others define you. I want to say that I am a firm believer in the concept of affirmative action and that race is inextricably tied to outcome in America. Whether that's legacy students, college athletes, first in family to attend, or the likelihood to take on college debt, there is a racial component to all this. That said, I highly recommend the recent NPR Throughline episode featuring Jay Caspian Kang which was released a week before the decision. In it he and the hosts discuss how affirmative action was used at Harvard, our relationship to elite institutions, and what should be done to replace affirmative action.
I don't really like AA, but simply removing it isn't enough. Legacy admission is also unfair and should be removed. Ultimately I would prefer a system that makes college more affordable and accessible to all, but if we want to uplift the nation we should prioritize low income communities, this can be done "race blind" and still greatly benefit racial minorities.
My problem with AA was, even if these are "fringe cases", a rich black student should not have an easier time getting into a university than a poor asian student, or even a poor white student.