> 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.
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.
Is your claim that the "American Left" has decided to sacrifice the poor whites to help other races? If it is, it's not really an accurate claim. It's poor Asians who've taken the largest brunt of affirmative action, while Whites have remained relatively neutral in their standing.
> affirmative action has been pretty much dead for the past decade.
According to the article, being black is like getting 450 extra points on your SAT compared to an Asian student. I don't think AA is as dead as you think it is.
Affirmative action had a place just after desegregation. Now, it is just one of the examples of identity politics, pushed in a doomed attempt to placate the deconstruction crew. Given that deconstruction of societal institutes is a stated goal for these people they do not care whether it actually achieves anything productive for either those who are given positions based on identity categories, for the affected institutes of for society as a whole - as long as it creates strife the purpose has been fulfilled.
> Affirmative action isn't racial discrimination, it's an attempt to correct for racial discrimination.
It's very obviously both these things.
It's an attempt to try to compensate for implicit/less visible racial discrimination, with very explicit racial discrimination enshrined into policy.
Not saying it's always a terrible idea, but pretending that it's not racial discrimination is exactly the kind of gaslighting discussed in the article.
Affirmative action has always been a racist hypocrisy. The fact that there have always been leftists campaigning for it is irrelevant, as it's by far more common. America is indeed structurally racist: against whites and (sometimes) Asians. The fact that this has a long history doesn't make recent trends any more acceptable.
>Affirmative action is targeting specific groups of people to achieve some desired makeup. That's literally what affirmative action means.
When the 10% of a high school class consists of a statistically outsized proportion of a desired group of people favoring them would be called affirmative action, yes. Just because a policy doesn't pick people out by the color of their skin doesn't make it not affirmative action. (And likewise, just because a policy doesn't call out skin color doesn't make it not racist.)
This can also apply to antiracism, which as I understand it [1] is policy that attempts to undo structural racism, not policy that is absent of race-conscious treatment. I think this question would also be more interesting to answer because everyone already agrees that affirmative action literally does factor in race. The more controversial part is whether it serves to reinforce or counteract some forms of systemic racism.
[1] From a modern viewpoint (e.g. Kendi), although I'm not sure if this word previously had different uses.
Again, affirmative action towards historically marginalized group is legal and is not a violation of protected status laws. It strains credibility to imagine the author is talking about discrimination against historically marginalized groups given the rest of their manifesto.
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.
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 said nothing like "damn lefties" or anything similar, don't know why you are replying this to me. Nor do I understand why you had to explain how repulsive the other side of the debate is to you.
As for "simple and misguided" - that is exactly how I see affirmative action where the recipients are selected by skin color and not by socioeconomic status and where the help comes in the form of outcomes and not opportunities.
The GP was arguing a point that is agreed-upon by many who argue against affirmative action — that the minorities ostensibly helped are harmed in the bigger picture. Yet you rip on the GP for not thinking enough about the whites and Asians who are also the victims of affirmative action? You could be a bit reflexively polarized about this issue.
You're assuming that those pushing for affirmative action do truly care about helping disadvantaged people. Attempts have been made to do affirmative action by income, but were halted because they were helping poor southeast Asians and eastern Europeans, not Blacks and Hispanics. Affirmative action is pretty nakedly a system of racial spoils.
> And then I think: you can't just stop doing a bad thing and pretend it didn't happen. You've got to try to make things right.
Who did the bad thing, and who is going to make it right, and how?
> Have things been made right by now? I have no idea.
How would anyone know? People assume we can establish a causal relationship between past discrimination and present disparity, which thing is impossible. Anti-racists claim that all disparity is evidence of discrimination, but this is as religious a belief as ancient Greeks claiming that all lightning comes from Zeus, God of thunder. And likely to be about as wrong in hindsight.
In books like "Discrimination and Disparities", "Black Rednecks and White Liberals", and "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", the author Thomas Sowell gives many examples of minority groups that prospered far above and beyond their relative majorities despite real and systemic oppression against them. And, in "Affirmative Action Around the World", he details just how disastrous, ineffective, and harmful affirmative action programs consistently end up being.
If you as a doctor consistently diagnose symptoms incorrectly, conclude the wrong illness, and, worst of all, prescribe treatment that ends up harming your patient more than helping, you are a terrible doctor that should be barred from practicing. The political left have been such terrible doctors decades nigh on century. They misdiagnose all disparity as due to racism or oppression, and their prescriptions, whether it's the great society programs of the 60s, affirmative action of the 70s, or today's DEI bureaucracies, are highly counterproductive and devastating to society.
This is why so many white-centric right wing groups very much want affirmative action abolished, because it is a massive advantage to the politically powerful and connected, who are mostly white in America.
Lets just say its hardly like they are out for justice for all races...
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
> Affirmative Action is not "reverse racism". Measuring someone's achievements relatively to the external difficulties they faced along the way is not "reverse racism". I don't believe we still have to spell this out.
Affirmative action is not "measuring someone's achievements relatively to the external difficulties they faced along the way". It is racial discrimination against whites and asians.
Affirmative action does not measure people by external difficulties they faced. It measures people by their races and seek to benefit some races over others - being fueled by racial resentment.
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.
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