Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.

Those disadvantages include, as you point out, echoed effects from discrimination and disadvantage from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago, and further.

But they also include immediate effects going on today -- like discrimination based on skin color or hairstyle or choice of name or an imbalanced school system or you name it.

Affirmative action is a broad brush, as you say. But to demand that only people whose ancestors actually owned slaves be disadvantaged by affirmative action, and only those whose ancestors actually were slaves benefit from it, ignores the rest of the black experience in America, and is, frankly, offensive.

As a bonus, I'll mention that every time I learn something about black history in America, I find a new way to be disappointed in my (our?) ancestors. The most recent thing I learned is that as recently as the '50s and '60s, since hospitals were segregated, blacks often had much worse access to healthcare. As a result, when they needed immediate treatment and no black doctor was available, they would go to a veterinarian for help.

That's terrible, but the cherry on the shit sundae is that, if the veterinarian happened to be white, the care had to be rendered surreptitiously, because white people wouldn't take their pets to a vet who had served a black person.

I think the question here is who is entitled to have the 'revenge' or the reparation or the 'affirmative action'

People who were persecuted or opressed? or their offspring?

For example German government agreed to pay reparation to Jews in (some?) Eastern European countries and Russia, that were alive at the time of WWII and lived on the territories that the Germany attacked.

The reparation from what I know were 2,000 or 4,000 USD one time payment.

--

So in that model a) the person receiving the reparation had to be alive at the time of the crime. b) had to be on the territory where the crime was committed c) I do not think the person needed to prove that they were directly affected by the crime

from what I know the reparation was selective. It did not cover Gypsys, did not cover non-Jews

--

I do not know what the right model is.

Can a nation be responsible for the crimes their government has committed? For how long?

If the answer to the above is 'yes' (that the nation is responsible) -- wouldn't that justify terrorism? wouldn't that justify blood-revenge practice?

But that revenge can go for generations, and at some point will be reversed -- that means, in turn, endless wars.

--

May be the correct answer is to limit the action of 'righting the wrongs' to the people who were the victims and alive at the time of the crime ?

But that does not seem to be fair to the victims either

Humans are a eusocial species, and history is full of group guilt, plight, dominance. I do agree with the direction of your thought though. We should strive at the individual level.

1. Life jackets are banned for anyone with brown hair.

2. A very large boat hits an iceberg and sinks. There are a lot of people in the water. None of the brown haired people are allowed life jackets.

3. There is a (for the sake of this silly analogy) rapid discussion, people realize this was probably not a good way to do things, and a new law is passed: people with brown hair are now allowed to wear life jackets!

4. No one gives life jackets to the brown haired people currently in the water.

Just because an unjust law is changed does not mean the people who were previously injured by the law are magically no longer injured.

I think this is specious reasoning. We accept this just fine in other tort circumstances e.g

1) lawsuits against a city after miscarriage of justice

2) lawsuits against corporations when X happens.

Often individual responsibility will be a portion of the trial but to my understanding it is

1) a secondary or even tertiary concern

2) used to deflect blame from the group

I think in general not allowing blame to be allocated to individuals will lead to poor results. We need methods to call systems bad and curtail them in addition to individuals

This is not exactly correct. Governments are composed of groups of people and governments maintain continuity of responsibility even when all the people in that government are different. Black Americans were discriminated against as a matter of state and federal policy and thus both state and federal government is at fault for the treatment of Black American. There is clear precedent in American law that in such cases, harmed individuals and groups are due financial compensation. Precedent for financial compensation due to government abuse of power is an incredibly old precedent and the only reason Black Americans haven't been compensated for the discrimination they've suffered is because the continuation of racism, the tradition of discrimination and the sheer size of the problem have turned what should be a fairly straightforward legal case into a complicated political question.

Then the words “accomplice”, “collaborator” and “facilitator” would not exist.

I believe countries, families and things in between can be guilty of stuff.

And yes, a pair of Ethiopian immigrants, even in 2023, face structural racism over and above their Ukrainian friends, alas, arising from America's legacy of slavery -- hence affrimative action.

Companies and governments can be found guilty of wrong doing.

ChatGPT:

Yes, both companies and governments can be found guilty of wrongdoing. The extent and process of holding them accountable can vary depending on the jurisdiction and the specific circumstances involved. Companies can face legal consequences for actions such as fraud, environmental violations, or antitrust violations, among others. Similarly, governments can be held accountable through legal means, such as investigations, impeachment, or legal proceedings, for acts that are deemed illegal or in violation of their responsibilities. The nature of the wrongdoing and the applicable laws and regulations determine the process and consequences of holding them accountable.

Edit: Havard was ruled against as an organization. Of course organizations can be held responsible for what they do including the government.

IMO compared to helping the poor, its something that should have a stopping point, presumably at least several generations out.

Lastly its also about atonement and making amends, also distinct from poor and even other races / genders with a history of oppression. IE when i lived in austin tx I often walked by a statue near the capitol building, erected after the civil war, whose inscription rejects the outcome entirely. Its bananas that thing exists, or that replacing it would be contentious. Yet here we are.

Case in point: a black family whose great-great-grandparents 200 years ago were slaves, versus an Asian family that immigrated from a nation impoverished by colonialism last year. The child of the former will heavily benefit from Affirmative Action, while the child of the latter will be heavily penalized.

Why?

Who is to say that the child whose ancestors lived in a rich country for the past 200 years, is more "disadvantaged" then the child whose entire ancestry as far back as the records go always lived in a dirt-poor nation, further impoverished by colonialism?

Rutger Bregman talks about this quite a bit in his book.

I would agree with this. The best you can hope for is to try and engineer society such that the progress enjoyed by white people historically in this nation is enjoyed by other ethnic/social groups as well. There will never be a consensus on what is "made right" and "fair". And there is good reason to focus on black folks instead of all poor people - black folks are disproportionately poor, and they are because our systems of governance tried to keep them that way.

Affirmative action in college admissions was an OK way to start - but doesn't address other underlying issues. For example: Redlined districts still are majority black and poor, and the way public schools are funded means their K-12 schools generally suck. Education is of course one of the major ways to improve generational wealth, especially in today's information economy. Another way to improve generational wealth is enabling home ownership. This was another thing which prevented black folks from attaining generational wealth - people wouldn't give them loans to buy homes, sometimes even if they were buying in redlined districts. There are still property titles in the US which contain "racial covenants" which basically say "you can't sell or rent this property to a black person", although this is not enforceable any more.

I think we'll get there. It may take another few hundred years. I had a surprisingly frank discussion with a Burundian cab driver in Amsterdam about it once (we were stuck in traffic and just shooting the bull). Over time, people just mix and the past is dulled, lines are blurred and it's all sort of whatever. He drove cabs all over Europe and people don't care about the color of his skin or where he came from. It's... A bit different in the US he's found.

Coming back to poor people - we can and should help all of them too. We can do more than one thing at a time.

As is widely discussed and intuitively obvious, "the past is prologue."

What happened in the past is relevant to the present because the past quite literally creates the present.

As Eugen Weber[0] put it[1]:

   ...we are going back to the old country.  We're going back to where many of 
   our ancestors came from, to see where their stories came from, and their 
   memories, and their habits and the way they are, which has made us the way we 
   are.

   This is what history is about.  Where we come from, what lies behind the way 
   we live and act and think.  How our institutions, our religions, our laws
   were made.  

Because we don't exist in a temporal vacuum (thank you, Second Law of Thermodynamics). Rather, our pasts and the impact of the events of those pasts inform and shape the present. Ignore it at your own peril.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Weber

[1] https://youtu.be/XCyO8meahME?t=410

Suppose the war in Ukraine ends today. Time skips forward a year with no change from the present. A committee recommends reparations for the Ukrainians affected. Do you do it or not? I don’t have the answer but leaving the past the past is simply choosing a certain status quo, as is full reparations another status quo.

Germany was definitely punished through occupation, partition, forced resettlement of its people, forced ceding of territories to other countries, reparation payments, exportation of its industry, and forced labor by its POWs.

But in terms of feeling national guilt, that wasn't much of a thing immediately post war. The national reckoning for the Holocaust and dismantling of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht and such didn't happen until decades later, the 68 movement was a major catalyst in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_German_student_movement.

On the other hand, a great many people today all around the world, and of many skin colours are descended from slaves. I am mostly familiar with this history in Europe and Africa, though I have no doubt it went on to a greater and lesser extent elsewhere. Supposing that the average reader here, who does not consider themselves to be "minority", is a "white" American, how confident are you that your ancestors do not include many slaves? Slavery in Europe still exists, but in the traditional sense with open buying and selling and large-scale enslavement it was openly and widely practiced in England and Germany and Poland and wherever you trace your ancestry no more than a thousand years ago.

You may consider it inappropriate to put a time limit on suffering, but in practice it's implicitly done all the time. The US is exceptional in having so many people who bear clear marks of historically nearby enslavement. Other parts of the world have been more successful in forgetting.

If I proposed to some Ivy League admissions panel that the descendants of biblical Jews should be favoured over those of Egyptians on account of enslavement would anyone listen?

I'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically?

To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc).

What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.

You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.

For example, apparently not all the slave owners were white:

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/applied-and-social-s...

That's likely to complicate the heck out of things.

Which is directly tied to the above mentjoned issues.

However, it's clear to the outside observer that your single-digit hispanic or black prospective classmates at Caltech are generally more miserable than your prospective classmates at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etcetera. They are usually the only person like you in their dorm, or in their year, or in their major. So you don't go to Caltech.

This is the hope but banning race-based Affirmative Action that favors ethnic minorities, blacks in particular, will not particularly benefit Asians in college admissions.

Harvard (as a proxy for elite colleges) admitted 1,942 students to the class of 2027, 15.3% of whom identify as African-American, or 297 students in total. [0] (Harvard fielded 56,937 applicants for the class of 2027)

Assuming every single entering African-American undergraduate at Harvard "displaced" a more qualified Asian due to Affirmative Action, 300 spots at what is arguably the most prestigious college in the United States is not likely to accommodate all the Asians who believe they may have been unfairly rejected because a "less qualified" African-American student matriculated to Harvard.

In other words, the number of matriculating African-Americans at US elite colleges and universities is dwarfed by the number of Asian applicants who will be rejected for reasons unrelated to Affirmative Action.

As a side note, the notion that college acceptance is a rigid formula determined by grades, test scores, and extracurriculars is misguided. Turning the elite college and university system in the United States into a reward for cram schoolers will not improve acceptance outcomes for the vast majority of all individuals, including Asians, who are rejected by elite academic institutions.

Affirmative Action is an issue that prevents people from seeing the larger problem which is: why do American elite universities fail to increase their enrollments for qualified individuals given the size of their endowments? (Harvard's endowment as of 2023 is 50.9 billion [1]) Were such well-endowed elite institutions to increase their enrollments in proportion to the meritorious student population, the controversy of Affirmative Action might become moot.

[0] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/college-makes...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

> putting a thumb on the other side of the scale and artificially increasing their rate of admission

That seems pretty fair to me. Unless you want to focus on the color of the skin of students and not the content of their character.

450 is 18x times larger than 25. But lots of legacy whataboutism. It’s not as big of an impact as people like to think / eat the rich, etc.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/discrimination-on-the-...

Last statement is, some religious people, of different groups, were absolutely and completely against slavery, preached against racism, wrote laws that were fair and impartial, from the very first days. The founding groups of the United States included deeply religious people who opposed slavery and did not practice it, and therefore got no monetary support from that system. And some of those deeply opposed to slavery, grew and built a great society. You or others cannot just ignore those founders and claim now that "everyone did it" , it is the fault of the USA, etc .. The USA was a place that broke away from the Old World systems, including a LOT of slaving, but the progress was uneven, and the slave system was profitable so their masters had a lot of money and things that go with that.

> Yes, there are still some poor and intensely disparaged communities of predominately minority populations.

And there are poor, intensely disparaged communities in majority populations. A great example is “American Hollow”, a 1999 documentary by Rory Kennedy about an Appalachian family, their life with poverty, and making ends meet in the mountains.

Generational wealth exists, and Blacks are certainly affected, but I’m not convinced that trying to “shift” wealth so unnaturally (and especially in such racist ways) really helps anything.

That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

---

It's gonna take a very long time. Reparations are valued in the trillions. Truly insane violence has been perpetuated on racial minorities in America. It's gonna take more than ~60 years of Jim Crow-free America to make things right.

Is ending systemic injustice that hard to grok? Certain races in the United States face discrimination on a daily basis, and in addition to the social effects of this they are also significantly disadvantaged on education and family income. You can measure things like "how many people in your family went to college," as well as family AGI and do breakdowns by race. You can draw a direct line to racist social policies, even ones less extreme than slavery or Jim Crow. Ones that come to mind include redlining, the historically rough medical treatment of black folks, and, I don't know, the frequent shooting of unarmed colored people by police?

> If you came to me and said every white person has to pay e.g. $5000 this generation, 4k the next, then 3k, and so on to balance out slavery and then we’re done talking about race and we can move on I would pay up immediately even though I disagree with the idea of reparations and holding future generations accountable for the sins of their fathers.

The problem is you want a "clear goal" a.k.a simple solution when there just isn't one. This is a multi-faceted issue that requires thoughtfulness. Yours is the same mentality missionaries bring to Africa -- "just give them clothes, food, and shoes" with no regard to the more important things like building an economic engine that lets people self-sustain, contribute, and compete.

There are a _lot_ of kinds of reparations that could happen beyond affirmative action (e.g. better investment in black-majority communities via schools, favorable loans, etc) and they don't have to come out of just white folks' pockets (just spend taxpayer money so we all share the burden).

> The hard reality is that we have made a lot of progress and it’s almost impossible to argue that we’re missing equality of opportunity anymore.

Opportunity is a function of preparation and people taking chances on you.

- Preparation costs time and money and racial minorities have measurably less time and money on average.

- People taking chances on you requires network. Folks from historically disadvantaged races don't have the benefit of legacy, or even role models (consider being a mexican high schooler visiting Google campus -- would you think becoming a software engineer there is attainable for you?) The psychological impact of stuff like this is profound.

A black friend I met in college went through high school assuming that would be the end of his education because that was just how it was in his mostly-black neighborhood -- is that something you can internalize at all? Is that not evidence against "equality of opportunity" ??? The year was 2010 for pete's sake. This is a frequent thing.

> What I can’t get behind is being perpetually discriminated against as a white person under a framework of ever-evolving goalposts chasing racial equity of outcomes into the sunset.

As a white person, your individual chances of going to Harvard are not meaningfully affected by the presence of affirmative action. Consider their admission rate of 0.04, then consider affirmative action affects 10% of applicants. Your chance of admission is now 0.036, which at the end of the day is basically the same. You have a 96.4% chance of not being admitted vs 96% chance.

More importantly, as a white person _you started with a better dice roll_ so you should compete against folks who started with similar dice rolls. Affirmative action doesn't mean black folks get guaranteed admission to harvard; they still have to compete against other high-achieving people of the same race.

I'm Asian -- affirmative action is technically worse for me than you because Asian-american immigrants historically have optimized against college admission metrics very well. But I fully support it, because the continuing legacy of slavery and race-based discrimination in this country is too egregious to do nothing about. Equality of opportunity is the long term goal, but to get there you need to create less-unequal outcomes to prime to pump. It's just too lopsided as it is. My child will do fine at a solid state school if their 0.036% chance at Harvard doesn't pan out.

Take yourself out of it for a second: consider whether your child will be more or less discriminated against than an average black person's child. They have some solid advantages: they won't get killed for calling the police, they have you as their parent (you're posting multiple paragraphs on hacker news about paying $5k+ in reparations, so you're probably doing fine), they probably won't have problems booking an AirBnB or with a doctor treating them like they're 5 years older, and they probably won't do jail time for smoking marijuana or even doing coke if we're being honest.

We should not force equality of outcome, but we should observe it and use it as a guide to whether or not we are being successful in providing equality of opportunity.

And when you do quantify it, you end up usually looking at something that is an outcome.

Example: assume that a) whether or not your parents are married when you are born and b) how rich your parents are affect your opportunities for success.

These assumptions seem reasonable to me, but please tell me if you disagree with them.

In order to equalize opportunity for a new generation across different groups of people, you need to equalize outcomes amongst the current generation.

More generally, drastically unequal outcomes can often point to unequal opportunities earlier in the pipeline.

Assuming intelligence and conscientiousness, the two traits most correlated with success, are more or less equally distributed across all gene pools, then it does seem likely that if some groups tend to be less successful than others, it may be a cultural thing, because as a far amount of data has shown, having rich parents greatly increases the chances that you end up rich.

See for example all the legacy admissions at Harvard.

Of course, if you can reasonably show that, much like say the genes that make for good sprinters (lots of fast twitch muscle fibers), the genes for intelligence are not evenly distributed, then you could argue that a an imbalance of outcomes does not necessarily imply an imbalance of opportunities.

In practice, however, I do no think that American society is equal opportunity.

I'm a heterosexual white male, and honestly I think I've had an easier life as a result of it than I would have with pretty much any other set of gender/skin color/orientation.

I think the hard part is that "Equality of Opportunity" is either so strictly defined that it is pointless, or it very quickly becomes really squishy and feels like "Equality of Outcome".

Most college applicants today are going to be something like 2 - 4 generations removed from official, legally sanctioned segregation (a situation I think most people would agree doesn't count as equality of opportunity). Would you argue that the average white student and average black student have equality of opportunity today?

Yes, I agree!

But what if my ancestors did not steal your ancestors stuff? Am I still responsible, because I have the same skin color as the folks who harmed you?

Fundamental issues I have with aiming for basically equal outcome by artificially tipping the scale until some metric evens out:

- Which dimensions do we make adjustments based on? is it just race or do we consider wealth etc?

- How much do we adjust? Black Americans had it tougher, boost by 10, Hispanics by 7? Chinese by -5 because they somehow succeeded without tipping the scales?

- Where does it end? We tip the scale for 200 years and if things are still out balanced keep adjusting?

No, because this assumes that different groups have equivalent values. This is plainly false. There are some broad similarities for sure, but each gender, ethnicity and culture values different things which will inevitably produce different outcomes.

This is why obsessing over outcome equity is doomed from the start. It implicitly relies on either enforcing homogeneity, thus erasing cultural uniqueness, or outright discrimination in preferring some groups over others to overcome any cultural values that might impact outcomes so the final numbers look pretty.

Another issue is we're talking about group level outcomes here - which means we're already accepting that there will be biases in measurements, otherwise the group wouldn't be a 'group' (unless it's literally just skin color which is - a pretty arbitrary/racist way to group people all else being equal).

Those that advocate for equality of outcome desire to make again a slave state, where they as "superior educated white people" can ensure that black people are "taken care of" by ensuring they all have jobs, they all have housing, they all have healthcare, they all have food, and that they have no freedom.

For people who are in the military, I point this out in its internship form. The Skillbridge program was designed to facilitate internships for departing servicemen to address difficulties with veteran unemployment, but the spoils mostly go to officers with highly marketable skills, like submarine and cryptography officers. After all, those officers have each been practicing the art of finding and utilizing beneficial programs to their advantage for decades by that point in their lives; why wouldn't they use this one too?

Given that the majority of people in the United States do not have even an associate's degree and still transition into adulthood, even if your assumption that it gives people a structured way into adulthood was correct, it's serving less than half the population. The majority of people do complete high school, or an equivalent, though. It's pretty plainly clear that preparing children to transition into adulthood needs to start earlier. That goes hand in hand with the failure of the elementary and secondary education systems in the United States.

Also, just philosophically, I am morally opposed to the idea that people who don't or start complete college for one reason or another should be subsidizing those who can and do. College degree holders earn dramatically more money in their lifetime over non college graduates.

I understand that the goal is to expand the number of people that can attend college. I think that you would expand that number more by improving the K-12 system and you'd leave everyone better off by doing so. If you want to increase the number of disadvantaged people in university (i.e. the people that would go to college if it were free but can't afford it so they don't) you should look at expanding the Pell grant, not subsidize college for everyone.

The alternative is mostly that a lot of people shouldn't be going to college. We shouldn't be guaranteeing loans and the government shouldn't be in the business of handing out student loans. That is a large contributor to the massive inflation in student fees. When you improve elementary education, the negative effects of less people attending college are offset by the general working knowledge of the populace being higher, of better quality, and with a mindset that allows people to really think and learn.

Without that, all we're doing is basically setting people up for failure and a whole lot of school debt. There is a large percentage of Americans who have absolutely nothing to show for their time and money spent on college because they never completed their degree.

> And as is any policy would probably benefit schools that need that support less.

The entire public school system is one that favors the privileged. They are funded largely by property taxes and so obviously the wealthier your area is, the more funding and thus better education children have access to.

So yes, there is extreme deficiencies in equity when it comes to educational opportunities in the United States. Providing subsidized college doesn't fix that issue and it doesn't target the right people, either.

I wouldn't necessarily oppose actual public (completely government funded) universities that compete with the private schools, but that's serving such a small population of people for it to really see much benefit.

https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/selectivebias/

https://www.city-journal.org/article/college-admissions-bias...

As I understand it, there was some evidence: Asians applications were being suppressed, due to volume to maintain...a more diverse student body (or maybe just every elite school was racist?). https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2023/02/27/what-...

Don't get me wrong, politicians and elites are absolutely using identity to play the populace against each other. But this is less part of a grand conspiracy and more the oldest trick in the book of politics, there's evidence of it going back all the way to classic antiquity.

"Name another," was my response.

I know few friends from Lake Travis who disagree though but I think that has to do with not making the top 8% (back then I think it was lower?).

You seem to be ignoring the earlier statistical complaint by the other poster. They are implying a null hypothesis where names signal socioeconomic status and discrimination may be on that status rather than race.

To test for this, you cannot start with unequally characterized populations (black and white) and compare equally popular names from each population. You need to first stratify by socioeconomic status and then draw popular names from equivalent sub-populations. E.g. equally popular black and white names among babies born to households with lowest quintile income and high school as the parents' terminal degrees; equally popular black and white names among babies born to households of middle quintile income and 4-year college degrees; etc.

Modern people are spread out all over the regions they occupy.

It really seems like on this one topic people accept arguments on behalf of other people that they know with perfect clarity make zero sense when they try to apply them to their own lives.

Brown v. Board of Ed, to start, seems to pretty clearly dictate that public schools may not discriminate on the basis of race because it is a violation of the 14th amendment. What is affirmative action if not a discrimination based on the color of one's skin?

> When did school attendance become a right?

I don't really feel like in 2023 I should have to be arguing that the right to attend a public school shouldn't be conditioned on a pupil's race or ethnicity.

Equality based: Fund the schools, and use evidence based educational reforms, with the result that California schools were top ten in the US.

Equity based: Not everyone can do math and stem, so defund science and art programs (already done) and try to discontinue funding for calculus (almost happened this year). Schools are now 43rd in country, but rich districts can have parents fund the missing programs via donations, and are some of the best in the country. Further fuck with things by forcing UC admissions to be based on standing within each school’s graduating class, so illiterate minority kids end up being admitted to the top schools, and need to be weeded out.

Same reason everyone doesn’t just walk out of restaurants without paying.

But there have been high profile cases where it has come to light later and people have endured some social shame.

I resent the implication that any claim of genetic differences amounts to racism. We need to be able to have a reasonable discussion about genetics that doesn't come with all the value judgments that people assign to different genotypes. It's a bald fact that there are genetic differences, and that shouldn't be controversial. The inferences we draw from that fact can be racist, but the fact itself is just a fact.

The only conclusion that I'm arguing for is that people are born and raised differently, and we should expect to see different outcomes as a result. It's pretty obvious that we have not yet reached the point where the differences in outcomes are due exclusively to different choices, but we should expect to eventually reach such a point! People prioritize different things in their lives, and sometimes people prioritize things that the majority doesn't believe are important. That doesn't make them flawed people.

It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.

http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/legacyathlete.pdf

the process (this isn't Google's fault) feels quite a bit like a semi-objective judgement about my competency and worth (both as a professional... and individual). sure, I know I "shouldn't" think like that, but it's overall very very tough.

thanks for a clear headed view on it all.

Maybe you’re just being too kind.

I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list.

A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale.

At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.

Maybe my (large, relatively well respected state school) lectures were uniquely bad. But I found MIT lectures to be leagues ahead of what we got. They covered more content, went deeper and were faster paced. The lecturers were more talented and engaging, and the problem sets were harder and more efficient. It really was night and day.

Don't throw out numbers like that unless you are willing to back them up, because your claim seems completely insane.

I sure as shit am buying qualifications for my kid, fully recognizing my role in participating in this flawed system. Kid's in robotics, language classes, gets to travel. We switched the kid's school to go to a school with higher standards. We teach the kid both reading (100 Easy Lessons...) and writing (workbooks from the non-US country with better public education) -- small expenses in $ but nevertheless expenses. I'm sure someone will happily tell me that the last part is just good morals on my part, or something, but you can't tell me that $100/day for a robotics summer camp is just good morals. I am buying that kid qualifications.

And then someone will tell me that's not race-based, but look at the perpetuation of wealth disparity thru US history, from chattel slavery on through the robbery from the Freedmen's Bank to the riot that burned down Black Wall Street to the fact that Black servicemen couldn't get mortgage assistance or GI Bill college assistance after WW2. Follow the money.

If schools can reserve spots for legacy admissions or international students to the detriment of merit based then they can also reserve spots for a lottery system

I don't know what's right or wrong really but I can say that the rapidness of the shift was definitely shocking to me. There's a lot of disagreement between Gen X, Millenials and Gen Z on the topic because of it.

Believe me, this has been considered and tried in various contexts. The problem is that in the end schools and companies find out that they don't achieve the "right" mix of ethnicities and genders and so it's back to square one.

It is, but it is an attempt to right a wrong, which isn't an easy thing to do or measure. It's a moralistic endeavor and moralistic endeavors can become monsters in their own right.

>To me as an outsider, the US focuses wayyyyy to much on race.

It's become a political football, because of this, I think it's perpetuating it more than it would be naturally. Morgan Freeman articulated this well many years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpnpIhqSLto

>Even asking for ones race or ethnicity in my country would be considered descriminatory as there can be no purpose for collecting that information that isn't descriminatory.

It's funny, this is done to ensure that historically oppressed races are measured for success / failure. It seems to support to your reverse racism comment.

>Discriminating based on race (among other things) is forbidden in the constitution, and that is absolute.

I agree, that's why AA was struck down. It's a clear violation of the 14th amendment. This was known at the time and known in the early 2000's (2003?) when this came up before. It's always been considered an emergency measure that would need to end because it was a clear violation of equal protection under the law clause of the 14th.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Even Clarence Thomas is referred as “the second black Supreme Court Justice”

Every time you will see this first black baseball player, first black governor, first latina… as if it were an achievement instead of an indictment on the country

Minorities, like the Uyghurs, were exempt from the 1-child policy and they got extra points on the national college exam.

It's not even reversed racism, it's just plain old racism. The only difference is the targets of the racism are European descended and Asian descended people instead of African and Latin American descended people.

In America, the socioeconomic class of people of non-white races has been systematically kept as low as possible, through racist systems. Affirmative action (race based admissions quotas) is one tool to breach that ceiling.

In an already racist system, doing something like economic class based support (example: 20% of college admissions need to come from poor households) would just mostly go to the privileged race and perpetuate the systemic racism.

Your post is also an illustration of what white privilege can look like. I know you said you’re not American, but the tone matches to a T. White people don’t realize the negative effects of racism on others and others family history and can’t even conceive of it. From having cab drivers not willing to pick you up, to not getting a job or being passed over for promotions, let alone going to schools that are under funded. And as a side effect of that racism towards non-whites, white people benefit by getting the can, the job, the promotion, the good schools that the non-whites, but equally qualified did not.

And as the head paragraph states, that gets embedded into society in the socioeconomic trajectory of the family.

Affirmative Action is talked about as positive discrimination, but it is still discrimination none-the-less.

As The Boss said, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"...

Well, if we follow the meritocratic ideology that everyone has the same opportunities available to them, it would be a natural conclusion. There is nothing that inherently causes a specific skin color or gender to have the ability to capitalize on an opportunity.

But, not all things are equal, so IMO we need to give folks help in ensuring that the same opportunities are actually available to them. Provide help with ensuring that everyone has the same tools available to them to capitalize on those opportunities.

Now then, WRT disabilities, this gap in opportunities and tools to capitalize on the opportunities is even greater. However, given that the one constant in life is that "you will become disabled, unless you die first", it makes no sense to leave those with disabilities behind.

Equal opportunity to participate, yes.

It starts with a basic belief—do you agree that US Society is disadvantageous for certain racial demographics?

One potential industry to consider, especially considering the site we're on, is startup entrepreneurs - especially those who are able to get VC and Angel funding.

And helping some groups of people - yes, sometimes the grouping is determined by race - is not discriminating against everyone else.

In other words, lifting Asians, Blacks, Hawaiians, and Eskimos is not being racist towards "Whites" as is asserted elsewhere in this discussion. I use quotes because white is a pretty new categorization. It used to be Germans, English, Italians, Irish, etc.

A premed, biology grad just lost out on a 500k/yr job by not getting into medical school.

OPs dad got into medical school with this discrimination, so its not a leap to imagine OP would have grown up in a lower middle class area if not for discrimination.

If you want to argue non-systemic, then maybe. There will always be some racist people out there, whether it’s white people favoring white people or black people favoring black people.

It's not the role of students to delay or defer their own education out of some sense of guilt.