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[hector13]

It is like a minimum wage for races, when you think about it.

So what happens when there is a minimum wage? Everyone uses it.

I wouldn't assign that particular equivalency, since the minimum wage doesn't discriminate - 'cept for full-time versus part-time, maybe - and you need to have a job before you can get it.

I think it's more you're trying to draw a picture, but someone says you need to use so much of a particular colour or technique before it's acceptable, else you'll get penalised.

It's not really a long-term solution, and it's probably the easiest and least expensive thing for a governing body to enact, is AA. It might be better to provide training or something of the like for minorities, at least for employment opportunities.

The issue then being that if that training isn't open to white folk it's still racist.

Is it possible for racism to be good..? Like, for everyone?

Edit for autocorrect.

[wierd]

No.

The axiom being asserted is that all people are more or less functionally equal, (within reason), and thus should be treated equally.

You cannot indulge racism while retaining that axiom. Racism implies that some group or other has a higher intrinsic value.

Much like how science's recent discoveries of European centric mutations of the ccr5 gene make purebred Europeans highly resistant to HIV caused many progressives to get queezy, citing how it could justify racial indifference toward black people in Africa suffering from HIV, acknowledging real physical differences that translate to better work performance (higher statistical upper body strength in males vs females, et al) causes similar ideological reactions, because they go against the axiom.

[Neonivek]

The idea of Affirmative Action isn't that it isn't discrimination or even that on some level it is racist.

It is life support... it is anti-venom... It is intended to shorten the period of time so that we might one day not require it.

At best it is a necessary evil.

What we should be asking is if it is doing its job. Lets be pragmatic about it. IS Affirmative action making a dent on discrimination? Has it made things worse in some areas?

"It's not really a long-term solution"

It isn't meant to be. It exists to no longer be relevant.

[origamiscienceguy]

It certainly has pissed off some people.

[TempAcc]

I hope all the democrat conspiracies about russia are true so I we can all sing the kalinka together one day :U

[Reelya]

AA is a pragmatic solution.

"We acknowledge that racism happens, and that we cannot correct wrong thinking, but we can limit the damage done through penalty" kind of thinking.

The deal is when one conflates "limit damage done" with "stopping all damage"

One of those things is not like the other.

That is to say, AA does not stop racism. It mitigates some of the effects.

We cannot eliminate racism without going full thought police+soma.

There are problems with the AA approach however (and quota approaches in general).

Think about a situation where black and white people are equally good, on average, at a skill that's relevant to a course. But black people are under-represented in the course, they make up 5% of your applicants rather than 15% which would be representative of the population. The black people in the course however score equally on average to a white person.

So what do you do? Let's assume there was some minimum-cut-off point for a test to get into the course. Now, to get 15% black people in the class, you boot out the 10% lowest-scoring white people, and replace them with as many black applicants as you can, who previously were below the cut-off point. Congratulations, you've now engineered a skill gap in the class that falls on racial lines, and didn't actually exist before. But it "looks good" for the college because it's more "diverse".

And the people you added to the class were below the original cut-off point for ability, meaning they have a much higher probability of falling behind, dropping out or holding the whole class back - they were below the original bottom 10%, so they have a higher chance of failure than your original lowest-scoring cohort in the class. And that's what's seen with AA - admissions from below the intended cut-off point have a real struggle to get through classes. You don't "help" a remedial maths student by throwing them into the advanced calculus class.

So, if you think about it, just cramming any extra black people you can into a classroom regardless of whether they have the direct prerequisites to succeed at your class doesn't necessarily help racism, but looks good for a colleges "diversity" score, like they're doing something. AA needs to be an incremental set of help over an entire lifetime. Strongly skewing admission criteria is a band-aid that can backfire, big time.

[Rolepgeek]

Toilet scrubbing seems fairly gender unbiased.

I see plenty of women scrubbing toilets.

There might be a reporting issue because of race there though. Anectdote is not data, but most of the women I have seen scrubbing toilets are latinas.

Higher percentage women =/= not gender biased.

@Covenant: Well, that is logical. But, not everyone is you, and you may not be as capable of being perfectly objective as to skill levels as you may think. It's entirely possible that you see one person's resume, file it away in your memory, and a few dozen applications later, you see more or less the same resume, but of a minority, and you just don't get the impression that they're as qualified, and file it away. It's not often explicit. But also; how often do you guys think affirmative action costs someone more qualified a job? As in actual numbers?

@

There aren't enough woman garbage truck operators and woman toilet scrubbers

We need affirmative action to solve this

Yep, why no affirmative action to get more women into dirty, dangerous jobs which are 90%+ male? Why just the glamorous ones?

Yeah, why no movements to get men to be nurses, or secretaries, or teachers? Like, middle-school or elementary school teachers? That's just sexist, that is. [/sarcasm]

Well, it could be that there's still a society wide taboo about putting women in danger, whereas there's less of one about them being able to do the same "glamorous" jobs that only men used to do. Could also be that men are typically physically stronger, which is actually a factor in a number of the professions I'm seeing men really dominate in (as in 99+%). Could also be something about men being raised with the idea that being tough and doing hard physical jobs is the proper thing for a man to do, while women are raised with the idea that being caring and doing jobs that involve assisting other people is the proper thing for a woman to do. Purely extrapolation, mind you. But of course, physical labor is always more demanding than emotional labor, so really, men have it worse. Right? >_>

I mean, men in women-dominated fields can have it rough, don't get me wrong. Sexism, racism, and so one does in fact cut both ways. But weirdly, it's almost like there aren't that many men in fields and positions they dislike enough compared to typically female-dominated fields to form a movement around.

[Sergarr]

I hope all the democrat conspiracies about russia are true so I we can all sing the kalinka together one day :U

Kalinka is for festival happy-fun activities, as the would-probably-be-brutally-enslaved-a-la-Red-Dawn population, you'd probably be singing that one.

[Reelya]

@weird: Toilet scrubbing is non gender biased because women do it? I think you need to step back and think about that. If women are often relegated to the role of "scrub the toilets or you don't eat" that might suggest otherwise.

You need to think about opportunity cost. Nobody wants to be the toilet scrubber. But if you have no other opportunities you end up doing that with your life. Men clearly have more opportunities to not end up scrubbing toilets.

[TempAcc]

I hope all the democrat conspiracies about russia are true so I we can all sing the kalinka together one day :U

Kalinka is for festival happy-fun activities, as the would-probably-be-brutally-enslaved-a-la-Red-Dawn population, you'd probably be singing that one.

Pshh, that'd be the perfect opportunity to get my bella ciao going. Its still a pretty song despite having been appropriated by dirty commies.

[hector13]

So, if you think about it, just cramming any extra black people you can into a classroom regardless of whether they have the direct prerequisites to succeed at your class doesn't necessarily help racism, but looks good for a colleges "diversity" score, like they're doing something. AA needs to be an incremental set of help over an entire lifetime. Strongly skewing admission criteria is a band-aid that can backfire, big time.

Depends how you go about it.

While eliminating AA will net you fewer minorities, controlling for things like socioeconomic circumstances and other things like that minorities score low for relative to white folk will at least allow you to maintain the standard of ability overall.

It obviously won't be as good for diversity scores as straight up installing minorities, but at least it means you are less likely to encounter the problems you posit in your example.

Improving the opportunities of minorities isn't going to be a quick fix, but the better outcomes they can work toward now means they're going to (hopefully) pass on the benefits of those outcomes to the next generation.

[Reelya]

I disagree. If you let someone into a complex course with terrible SATs just because they're really, really from a poor background, then the same problems that held them back on the SATs are going to hold them back in your course.

What you should be doing is funding more bridging courses for people from a poor background. Do the bridging course then try for the top-level course again. This gives students at adult age a chance to shape up, and makes sure that they're ready for the material they're going to be presented with, not just scraping along with stuff that school hasn't properly prepared for, because you "pretended" they did better on a test than they actually did.

[PTTG??]

But also; how often do you guys think affirmative action costs someone more qualified a job? As in actual numbers?

Certainly more often than I think 'covert racism' costs someone more qualified a job.

Neither of us has numbers on that, of course, but then again I can point at laws and hiring policies that explicitly demonstrate affirmative action - they're proud of it, after all. For obvious reasons, you can't point at covert racism. We don't have a special lens to view into hearts and minds.

I'd rather eliminate the racism I can see before worrying about racism that might not (in at least some of the places you're looking for it) exist.

Wave your magic wand, then. Eliminate that overt racism.

[hector13]

I disagree. If you let someone into a complex course with terrible SATs just because they're really, really from a poor background, then the same problems that held them back on the SATs are going to hold them back in your course.

What you should be doing is funding more bridging courses for people from a poor background. Pretending they did better on tests than they actually did helps nobody.

Fund new courses that are aimed at the level of educational achievement that they actually got, don't put poor-performers into a high-performer course for "fairness", because you're actually fucking them over in the long run.

I didn't mean to imply ignoring test scores and such as it would be silly to accept someone into a course they can't necessarily do.

Anyhow, SATs are totes racist, regardless

Jay Rosner, executive director of the Princeton Review Foundation, once analyzed rarely disclosed “item-level” data from old SATs and found a troubling pattern. The College Board drops questions if they tend to be answered incorrectly by students who otherwise do well on the test—or if they tend to be answered correctly by students who otherwise do poorly. That seems like an admirable attempt to control quality, but it reinforces the status quo: Questions that white and Asian males don’t do particularly well on are systematically shorn from the tests.

[wierd]

@weird: Toilet scrubbing is non gender biased because women do it? I think you need to step back and think about that. If women are often relegated to the role of "scrub the toilets or you don't eat" that might suggest otherwise.

You need to think about opportunity cost. Nobody wants to be the toilet scrubber. But if you have no other opportunities you end up doing that with your life. Men clearly have more opportunities to not end up scrubbing toilets.

You read WAY too much into what I did NOT say, reelya.
Please don't do that again.

I see male janitorial workers in equal proportion to female, but the female ones are mostly Latina in my observation.