I'm not sure what other meaning of "affirmative action" there is.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
I generally agree with your points above, especially that it’s not a far left idea. It’s a mainstream left idea.
But one quibble. “Affirmative action,” as used by Kennedy and Nixon, originally meant the government taking “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination in government hiring: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/learn-origins-term-af... see also https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu.... So it wasn’t sufficient not to have officially discriminatory hiring policies, but you had to take affirmative steps to root out discrimination in the hiring process. Even today, affirmative action can refer to measures like broadening the recruiting pipelines. Recruiting at HBCUs might be considered a sort of affirmative action policy.
What the polls consistently show is that minorities support “affirmative action” in the abstract, but don’t support using race as an express consideration with respect to individual decisions. I don’t think its fair to say they’re not “thinking deeply” about the question. I think that instead the questions are referring to somewhat different substantive policies, and you’re seeing the result of people who agree with the general ends of “affirmative action” drawing lines between specific means they support and ones they don’t.
What I find really funny is that the current American far left, who are very vocal about any kind of racial inequality towards Blacks and Latinos, are the ones most vocal in their support for affirmative action.
They don't see it as racist at all, but actually they believe they're supporting the fair and moral choice and patting themselves on the back for being such virtuous people. They only care about the end goal, which is equity not equality, and it's clear that any method used to get there is fine by them.
It's absolutely sickening the delusion and hypocrisy these people have. Their principles are not set in stone, like holding a set of ideas that must be applied similarly across differing situations, but rather, their supposed principles, like tools, are selectively used or ignored for particular situations that they stand to benefit or lose from.
The four different polls we found in that thread found that, in the US, 24%, 27%, 45%, or 62% supports affirmative action. None of these is "a small minority", though some do fall short of being "broad popular support".
A majority of every minority group opposes expressly considering race in hiring and education. The prevalence of these policies is the result of its popularity among the white social liberals who increasingly run the country’s businesses and institutions.
Affirmative Action is systemic racial discrimination (by definition) and you think that has widespread support? Maybe in "progressive" circles, but I think most people see it for what it is.
I think most people rather support the idea of a needs based system, not one that requires a color chart to determine who gets what.
Affirmative action isn’t just for college admissions, and outside of college admissions, affirmative action programs generally do not involve decision preferences, but are limited largely to training programs, outreach efforts, and other funnel-shaping efforts.
So, the poll results are perfectly consistent with people understanding the question and either supporting AAP in general but not in college admissioms, or supporting it in general but not when it goes beyond funnel-shaping to include decision preferences. They are also consistent with them supporting it in college, and involving decision preferences, but only on ethnicity, gender, and other non-race factors, though that seems less likely.
Being for or against affirmative action and quotas is kind of orthogonal to being a racist, though? There are certainly racists who support affirmative action, and obviously ones who don't. (for instance, people who think that there is a difference in mean IQ between races, but thinks that affirmative action to compensate would increase societal stability) Similarly, there are people who believe all racial differences are skin deep / stop at the neck who support affirmative action and ones who do not. (For instance, people who think that affirmative action is counterproductive and will lead to racism)
There might be a correlation there, but let's not pretend that only two corners of that matrix are populated.
I think a lot of people who defend "affirmative action" [1] are misinformed about the extent of it. It's not about preferring the more "diverse" or less privileged candidate among roughly equally qualified candidates.
It's a direct attack on the concept of merit. Some of its ardent proponents aren't too shy about this fact either. [2]
This chart [3] by the Economist is illuminating: In Harvard undergraduate admissions, a person of the wrong race with top 10% academics has a chance equal to that of a person of the right race with bottom 40% academics.
> To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".
No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help."
> Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action?
I'm pretty sure you could find a ton of people who do if you searched for it. But even if the harm wasn't real I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.
Unfortunately the framing matters a lot, and people are not logically consistent in their preferences. The only way to know if people support affirmative action is to ask them "do you support affirmative action?"
This reminds me of when Andrew Yang's campaign found that Americans are much more supportive of universal basic income proposals if you call it a "Freedom Dividend" instead of UBI. I imagine whether the proposal comes from a Republican or a Democrat also would have a big impact.
What you can't do is try to determine if someone supports a policy in the abstract and then assume that they must have the same attitude towards a real implementation of that policy.
Americans do more or less support affirmative action programs, but the details matter:
> "Poll results vary widely, for example, according to specific question wordings. In general, historical polling data show that Americans have an overall positive view toward "affirmative action" and programs that increase opportunities for minorities, so long as these do not confer an unfair advantage for minorities in the form of "preferential treatment" or "lower standards."
More concretely, compare the following proposition:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted, but requiring them to meet the same standards as others (66% favor, 32% oppose)"
To this one:
> "Setting quotas for the number of racial minorities hired or accepted even if it means lowering the standards in order to make up for past discrimination (18% favor, 79% oppose)"
There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.
Edit: About Europe, we almost never practice affirmative action the same way as US does. It mostly is "If two applicants has equal merit you are free to choose the disadvantaged one". See this court case for example:
I decided to look up proposition 209 exit polls [1]. (Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in California university admissions.)
Support for Prop. 209 was: white 63%, black 26%, latino 24%, asian 39%.
Another article [2] says that exit polling showed 27% of people that voted for 209 "also voiced support for 'affirmative-action programs designed to help women and minorities.'" (The question was in fact, "Are you in favor of both private and public affirmative action programs designed to help women and minorities get better jobs and education, or are you opposed to them?" It's from the L.A. Times exit poll [1])
Note that the overall proportion on that question was 54% in favor, 46% opposed.
I now invite you to divine what proportion of each minority group was in fact confused voters.
Now, this is affirmative action, not the definition of racism, personally I'd expect exit polls asking "Is it racist for a black store owner to ban whites from his store?" to get "Yes" with quite a higher proportion across all the population than what you see here. (And "Is it racist for a white store owner to ban whites from his store?" would get a ton of yesses too.)
Ok, yeah. But as a barometer of attitude, that's a lot of people who agree that affirmative action is a bad idea. It's not an unassailable tenet of American politics.
I guess people who are vehemently in support of affirmative action feel the need to downvote my comment, not to point out that it's unproductive or doesn't add to the discussion, but simply to reflect that they disagree.
I'm a moderate liberal, and even I can see that this smacks of what conservatives accuse the left of doing.
In addition to people in favor of affirmative action and people opposed to affirmative action, there's the large class of people who are in favor of affirmative action, but against the political correctness pressure of having to act like they believe this in for the benefit of all instead of the explicit benefit of the affected minority.
The left is perfectly happy to enforce their views using the same mechanism. Absent a claim that there is a scientific basis for the institutionalized racism of affirmative action, for instance, it seems no less religious. Being the "correct" opinion isn't a saving grace here.
This isn't my attempt to scuttle affirmative action, by the way. If you believe it is, you've missed my point
I'm really left-wing (compared to the average American I'm far-left :p), and while I understand why college were the first to understand and act on affirmative action in the US (during the civil rights movement), those policies were 'good' at the time but it's not the case anymore.
let's be honest, they didn't 'trickle down' that much, or rather, they trickled 'up' in sports and entertainment, and that trickled down. Affirmative action by educated people did its job, but until you build equality from the ground up, you will never have it, and I think people on the left have to let go old policies that formed (or even formatted) them and don't work anymore.
Affirmative action in college is at worst reactionnary, and at best stationary (and, paraphrasing D'avray: being stationary is going back).
I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge what's the effect are, and how it work in the US, but it looks to me like liberal feminism, where the response to 'your economic system create systemic inequality and poverty to everyone, and my group in particular' is 'but look, if you conform to it, you can get almost as rich as we are'. Except it's education instead of wealth.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
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