the worst generation at it again
I see this as a good thing, if ai have a candidate that is better than another, why would I deny the 1st candidate admission just because of the 2nd’s color
There are many many reasons… and everyone replying to you is talking about them all
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a “better” candidate by most academic standards is more likely to be wealthy and, in the US, that means more likely to be White. Simply put, White people have more generational wealth, which makes them more able to participate in extracurriculars, more time to study, less general stress.
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If a college wants to create a more holistic education than just academic, it benefits them to have a diverse student body. The more diverse the student body, the more tolerant and open minded your graduates will be. They’ll be more open to listening to people that don’t look like them, and society will be better for it.
and then there’s 3) The elite in this country have always been and thus have been biased towards Straight White Men. Without guardrails in place, they will select more Straight White Men, and we will regress.
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It’s more like, you have two candidates who are equally qualified. One is black and one is white. You could choose either. If you have a very low number of black students, you’d obviously want to choose the black student to increase campus diversity and vice-versa.
Meritocracy should not be replaced with anything else. Full stop.
Meritocracy is not a thing that has ever existed in any human society ever in history. It’s pure fantasy. Nepotism has always been the rule. Racial discrimination is honestly just a subheading of nepotism that consists of “You might not be family, but at least you look, act, and think just like me where that other guy doesn’t.”
My parents were both in school during desegregation. We are less than a generation from people of color being denied the right to equality in education. Hell, Bob Jones University v. United States was decided in 1983. That sort of systemic inequality doesn’t just go away overnight. You have to take intentional steps to address those inequalities, and affirmative action is one of those steps. Color Blind policies fail to address systemic racism because they assume we live in a post-racial society, but the affects of centuries of inequality still exist everywhere in our society.
It ignores context. The state caused generational harm to a specific group of people. The fix has to target the same people. If you feel in a general sense there isn’t enough opportunity to go around, that’s a different bone to pick imo.
I work in graduate education, and about 30% of my work is in admissions. My life just became very complicated.
These social issues vasculate by design to keep the peasants of every color at each other’s throats.
The only real war is class war, too bad our owners propagandized us from birth to refuse to fight that particular war.
Now by all means, carry on fighting over the social wedges that are largely caused or exacerbated by our rigged capitalist dystopia.
Just don’t be late for work, my fellow capital batteries.
Is there some reason that we can’t work to have a more equitable society racially and economically? It’s not a zero sum game, we can care about and accomplish more than one thing at a time…
Reducing economical disparities will solve the so-called “racial” inequalities.
Affordable education, housing and care for all don’t necessitate discrimination, even positive.
When an university degree costs hundreds of thousands, the problem isn’t the ethnic makeup of the happy few who can afford it, it’s scarcity itself.
European state manage to fund a higher education for pretty much all of those that care to try it, it is not an impossible dream.edit: to clarify, I don’t think ending affirmative action before making any general progress is a good idea or will do any good.
just to keep eyes on the prize and be aware of diversion tactics.Exactly. Even if the real villain was capitalism all along (spoiler: it is), we can’t abandon all of these battles along the way in hopes of winning the war in the end. The fight will take generations and we need to win ground on multiple fronts to have any hope of real, honest to goodness, change.
Sorry, in my mind forgetting about race problems meant that everyone stopped being racist and shit. The economic inequalities associated with race wouldn’t disappear overnight, but they would eventually go away since social safety nets would obviously benefit the poorest people the most. But basically that flip comment was imagining a world where everyone really was colorblind.
No worries. And yeah, in a world where everyone magically had no conscious or unconscious bias, I suppose that by fixing economic inequality we would eventually address most other inequities associated with race. And that’s nice to think about.
But I don’t think I have to tell you that we don’t live in that world, so the bias (conscious and unconscious) remains, and the systemic inequities also remain.
And it’s fine to imagine a better world, but if there are folks arguing that actually, addressing the plight of minorities is a distraction from the more important “class war” and that winning that fight will magically fix everything else, your comment comes across as more of the same.
How would one sustainably protect/save the Jews (and all the other victimized groups) without first dismantling the Nazi regime?
Sure you can free this camp and that camp without marching on Berlin, but if the machine, the source that propagates it and maintains it remains intact, you’re addressing a symptom of the primary cause and they’ll just build more camps.
If you resolve one social wedge, they’ll stoke another in it’s place through the government they fully captured decades ago. Why do you think they’re actively unresolving decades settled resolutions through their Federalist Society judges?
Practiced insatiable Greed that rises to a level that becomes dangerous to society, that makes you more powerful than your single vote, that lets you buy your own regulatory bodies and inform the laws that are supposed to regulate you for the public good needs to be disallowed/criminalized. Without that, it’s a never ending game of division wedge whackamole, and you only need to understand who that benefits, the modern masters/profiteers/“job creators.”
An economy is supposed to be a tool to better distribute good and services for the benefit of society. Our society lives in service to, and is often told we need to make sacrifices for, our beloved 🌈economy. We’re doing it backwards, we are being played, it’s so obvious that it burns.
I’m just going to quote the comment that you are replying to, since you don’t seem to have read it.
Is there some reason that we can’t work to have a more equitable society racially and economically? It’s not a zero sum game, we can care about and accomplish more than one thing at a time…
I don’t agree that the sole cause of racial inequity is economic. If you only address the economic factors, then you will still be left with an unjust society. Again, what I am saying is that we can do more than one thing at a time.
To address your analogy, what you’re proposing would be like marching on Berlin and leaving the camps in place, and just assuming that the folks in the will be fine once you overthrow the Nazis without actually doing the work to make sure that is the case. In reality, allied forces liberated the camps in the process of marching toward Berlin. That is what I am trying to say. We need to dismantle all of the machinery of oppression, not just the economic parts.
Edit: This probably came across as unnecessarily combative. I’m going to take a step back from this thread for a while. Ya’ll stay nice.
For all the camps we’ve freed that get unfreed, abortion, civil rights, on and on, We NEVER seem to get around on marching on Berlin. In fact, Berlin has has been reinforcing its walls and turrets unopposed for over 50 years. They do make so many jobs after all. We hate the camps, but ignore the ones that commission them.
Not to mention K-12 that isnt in literal ruin, so underfunded that becoming a teacher, what should be one of society’s most revered professions, is a life on the edge of poverty. How about our tent cities in every major city filled with our beaten, hopeless brothers and sisters our society throws away like garbage for the crime of not being effective enough capital batteries.
I could get into other stuff but there’s just too fucking much. Almost all of which stems from allowing insatiable greed to fester and metastasize until it became an aspirational trait and core value in the US. Now half the peasants dream in vain of being in the Oligarch class doesn’t instead of condemning and dismantling such a class.
The Gorden Geckos/Mr Potters/Ebenezer Scrooges were elevated and deified and allowed to run a muck here and warp our nation and increasingly the world to their cancerous, antisocial vision, and everyone outside of the owner class lost, even most who are their most zealous defenders.
You can’t reduce all of society’s problems to one source. We need to improve the lives of everyone, and we don’t do that by ignoring the plight of minority groups. We can accomplish more than one good at a time.
Not all, but nearly all.
Abortion should be legal and available to all women, that said, around 40% of them are done for economic reasons: https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29
Hence the issue is greatly exacerbated by our capitalist dystopia.
I don’t think I need to l source the economic growth incentive for exploiting undocumented immigrant labor they invite, while at the same time propagandizing half the country to hate them so they don’t gain social footing to get fair pay.
Climate change, hmmm…
Collapse of the nuclear family and birth rate, hmmm…
K-12 educational collapse due to tax breaks for a certain economic class in almost every state, hmmm…
Higher ed being bastardized from a societal necessity to a for profit indentured servant factory, hmmm…
Food deserts and urban decay from big box stores killing main street to eliminate threats and then pulling out of those neighborhoods once succeeding leaving nothing but abandoned disaster areas, hmmm…
I’m sure there are some national problems that aren’t caused by, substantially exacerbated by, or intentionally stoked for division by our owner class through their captured governments and bully pulpit, but without addressing our rigged economy and the wealth class gaining more hard power year after year, I’m sorry but it’s deck chairs by comparison.
I’m a bit puzzled by this response, to be honest. Yes, there are economic factors in many issues facing our society. However, the causes of abortion are not the same as access to it. And I notice you left out issues that are extremely pressing or even existential to many people, like inequities in policing, medicine (I don’t mean access to medicine, I mean inequities in treatment and research), higher ed, as well as denial of rights to self determination for Transgender people and erosion of civil rights for LGBTQ people across the country. Some of these have economic components, but none can be completely solved by economic means.
Of course we need to fix our broken economic system. The inequalities in wealth and the stranglehold that the capital class has on our economy and government are a dire problem. But to tell minorities who are also struggling in many ways that those struggles are a distraction is unconscionable. We can help each other, we don’t have to reduce the struggle to make a better world down to a single factor, and to do so will just create more inequalities when we fail to consider the needs to groups besides our own.
Once again, social wedges. Indentured servitude never went away, it just rebranded. The almost entirely caucasion owner class did cling to using race as the ultimate tool for coerced labor, but after generations of resistance, and the unquenchable quest for unsustainable growth, more than half a century ago decided that having a racial underclass in a largely white population simply wasn’t enough exploited labor to increase their wealth and power fast enough, as it’s never fast enough.
The poor, true believer Fox News consuming racists are the cultural remnant of that long abandoned unspoken compact between the wealth class and their once favorite colored, highest ranking capital batteries when it was convenient. Racism is real. Racism is wrong, but to the oligarchs, it’s become just another tool to manipulate their labor pool.
Some might see it as poetic justice on the once complacent white peasants who took solace in being the richer, more socially powerful peasants, and that’s fine, but unproductive, as we have a common enemy who manipulates and stokes such anymous with the means of major media propaganda they own to maintain productivity. It’s easier than chains, it’s more insidious than Jim Crow. Just turn half fhe peasants against the other half and they’ll never look up. You can’t argue with the effectiveness.
Tie college admissions to a random, unique identifier, and make it as blind to subjective opinion as possible. It could go through an intermediary that does have the personal information, but that gives the universities access to that identifier and only non-identifying information. Ask for motivational letters without as little personal information as possible (or no motivational letter at all), no picture, no name, no sex, financial status, nothing that’s identifiable to the people who have to evaluate the candidates.
The issue with this approach is that it further entrenches gaps that are already there. The best predictor of economic outcome is zip code. That’s because schools are funded by local property tax. Live in a wealthier area, get better schools. Better schools lead to a better outcome. Schools in poorer districts stay poorer. It’s a system that is self perpetuating.
Replacing affirmative action with something that is strictly income based could help but that ignores other systemic biases that are based on race rather that income.
I feel like if we’re ending affirmative action we should also put in place more restrictions on legacy admissions which is just affirmative action for dumb, rich kids and represents a much bigger chunk of students than affirmative action ever did.
This includes primaries. If the left isn’t radical enough for you, you can change that within the primaries. It’s wild how many complaints about the Dems come from people who only vote in presidential election years.
some states don’t have primaries; they have caucuses. which means you get to spend an entire day in a room with a bunch of other people arguing.
if you’re conflict avoidant, that’s the equivalent of a root canal without anesthesia.
I think it’s a mix of things. I agree a lot of people don’t participate in the primaries and they really should, but I’d also stress the importance of elevating the quality of the candidates we have. I don’t believe any of the primary candidates right now have any idea what it’s like to live in the USA as an “average” person. For starters, the average age of US citizens is 39, but the average age of the 3 current candidates is 74, with each of them being a minimum of 30 years older than the average American. I am not trying to promote ageism in any way, but I would really prefer if we had leadership that was less removed time-wise. I just don’t personally believe that someone at 70 or 80 has any reasonable idea what it’s like to be an American in the 30-40 age range right now – their experiences with that age come from a time prior to the advent of cellular telephones, social media, personal computing technology, etc.
On top of that, even if you look past the age gap, the choices we have so far really don’t instill great confidence.
RFK Jr is an admitted openly vocal anti-vax believer and also a vocal science denier (he still promotes belief in the link between vaccines and autism which has been systemically dis-proven), neither of which are popular positions to the left and will likely cost him votes. Biden has a low approval rating and a lot of Democrat voters don’t see him as a strong or effectual president, but he’s likely to get the nomination because he previously beat Trump and seems to be the defacto “if you’re voting against Trump instead of voting for someone, vote for him” nominee. Marianne Williamson is at least a fresh, non-dynastic face in the political race with a reasonable track record as an independent, but because she’d been an independent until 2019 and because she’s female there’s a subsection of voters who will adamantly refuse to vote for her regardless of her political stance, making her unlikely to win the nomination over Biden.
I really hope that we start to see greater candidate diversity in the future and I agree that it starts with showing up to vote, I just wish we had candidates that felt more representative of the party ideals and also of our overall population than what we’re getting now.
This goes back to not voting in every election. Groups that invest (money, time, votes) on local races (city council, school board) have a greater variety to pick when one of these people goes on to higher office (state-level, county-level) and then goes on to federal office.
The primaries are already too late - it’s all about the local races.
20 more years of this SCOTUS in all likelihood. That’s what 4 years of Trump got us, and DeSantis’s nominees for Florida’s SCOTUS make Trump’s nominees look like level headed centrists. Unless we get big Democratic majorities, then maybe there’s a chance at SCOTUS expansion.
Remember it’s not enough to just vote in the general, participate in your primaries too and encourage your friends and family to do the same for both federal and state/local office. The people who are most eager to right these wrongs quickly and through drastic action are usually the underdogs for their nominations. Removing Republicans in favor of Democrats will help most of the time regardless, but how much it helps depends on which Democrats we are electing. It’s the difference between slowing the bleeding for 2 years and actual meaningful change.
Biden will sign a new Judicial Act if Congress puts one in front of him so don’t worry about that or how wishy washy he might sound in the meantime. He may be lukewarm on SCOTUS expansion in hypothetical discussion, but when the paper is on his desk, he’ll sign it. But it’s up to us to give him a Congress that would do it and state governments that will sue to put cases back in front of a relegitimized SCOTUS after the fact.
The latest in a series of measures ensuring that future generations will be mired in problems which we’ve been inching away from for centuries only to dive right back into them on a regular basis.
My favorite part is that military academies are exempt
“We can be racist, but not that racist”
Lefties think almost anything and nearly everything is racist or sexist…
They refuse to see the truth that, promoting social equity programs is discriminating against certain races and genders, to provide unfair advantages in favor of certain races and genders.
Lets discriminate against white males to help put an end to discrimination!
It doesn’t work that way, you buffoons.
Instead of social equity, go create Social Goods… That are freely available to ALL people.
As a first generation white student wanting to go to college, this makes me happy! Hopefully other first generation white students will get equal treatment too.
Edit: I guess racism against white people is socially acceptable now…
Race shouldn’t be a consideration in whether to admit a particular student. But it should be used on an ongoing basis to ensure that the admission process is applied fairly.
Then, if it’s determined that there’s a racial bias in admissions, the root cause should be analyzed and corrected. Are students of one race better prepared academically? That’s a problem that needs to be fixed at the high school level (or earlier). If you admit students who aren’t prepared for college-level courses, you either have to spend resources on remedial classes, or have a lot of students from that race drop out.
Are students of one race more able to pay? If we want everyone to have the same chance at education regardless of background, maybe college should be fully government-funded.
That’s a problem that needs to be fixed at the high school level (or earlier).
What ability does a private university like Harvard have to affect the equity of primary or secondary education across the entire country? This sounds good, but who is doing the fixing? The same people who are stripping away the ability for colleges and universities to address inequity by considering it in their admissions policies are also strip mining public education. Maybe AA was a bandaid but ripping off the bandaid because it would be better to fix the injury, but having no ability or will to fix the injury, just means that now you’re bleeding all over the place.
Me, still waiting for those “checks and balances” to kick in:
I’m sorry, did you meant the “checks and balances” that will be cashed for lobbying against the common interest of citizens? /j
