Authors Nathan D. Martin and Kenneth I. Spenner show that Duke's legacies underperform as freshmen, are less likely to pursue challenging disciplines including pre-med or engineering and, generally, are less likely to pursue further study. Even the fact that their grades improve measurably during the sophomore year and remain improved is itself an argument for the inherent unfairness of legacy admissions. Why should the children of privilege get a leg up? But that question is hardly the end of the matter.The Times can't bring itself to really bang on the hypocrisy of it all, but still it's a fair-minded piece. I think it also highlights the fact that this idea that AA is some sort of flagrant violation of the great American meritocracy is bull. I have no sympathy for people who think AA is a sin against the American dream.
« An oddly compelling look into the life of Lanny Davis | Main | Well that does it for the Lieberman VP talk » Affirmative Action vs. Legacies28 Aug 2008 11:57 am
All around cool-ass dude Chris Bodenner sends us this Wash Times editorial comparing legacies and race based AA. It's pretty interesting:
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I'm ok with race-based affirmative action for college admissions, but I don't think it's fair to use the existence of legacies as a justification for the policy. It just means that white kids whose parents didn't go to college are doubly screwed.
I'm reading Gleick's biography of Richard Feynman. His acount of Jewish quotas in the 30's and 40's (Colleges thought Jews too troublesome to have many of them and they also justified the limitation by pointing out that few companies would hire Jews anyway) reminded me that we have always had affirmative action for college admission in the US. European whites have been given preference for most American history.
Every policy has winners and losers. The fact that a few whites don't get to go to their first college choice because some minority candidates got to jump ahead of them troubles me not at all.
That said, the future of affirmative action needs to evolve into an anti-poverty program rather than a racial preference system.
Ward Connelly, the guy who's championing the anti-racial preferences initiatives on various November ballots, actually wants to get rid of both race-based affirmative action and legacy admissions.
"Ward Connelly, the guy who's championing the anti-racial preferences initiatives on various November ballots, actually wants to get rid of both race-based affirmative action and legacy admissions."
Sure he does. And he's going to do that how, exactly?
Ward Connelly is a fool. T-NC's point here is one I've been making for decades against AA opponents, and they never have a good answer for it.
Funny how we hear more about one than the other...
Ta-Nehisi,
The charge of hypocrisy makes sense for individuals. It's a shakier play to extend the concept to groups because groups are comprised of factions which may disagree with one another.
Yes, for someone like George W. Bush to be against AA would be supremely hypocritical. But it entirely possible, even likely I would say, that large swaths of the middle class dislike AA *and* resent the legacy programs at elite universities. One can disagree with that worldview, but I don't see the hypocrisy.
- rob
in a true meritocracy most prized slots would go to asian-americans. asian admissions are limited. i bet white students would howl if is was TRULY about merit.
TNC,
Dude, I'm totally sorry for spamming you. I was having browser difficulty and hit 'refresh' a couple times. I didn't see that it was re-posting my comments.
Oops.
- rob
Rob Fightmaster posts and posts: "Yes, for someone like George W. Bush to be against AA would be supremely hypocritical. But it entirely possible, even likely I would say, that large swaths of the middle class dislike AA *and* resent the legacy programs at elite universities. One can disagree with that worldview, but I don't see the hypocrisy."
The hypocrisy would be there if these "large swaths of the middle class" bitch constantly about AA and mention their "resentment" about legacies only occasionally. I've heard the endless bitching about AA. I can honestly say I have almost never heard any of those bitchers say anything about legacies.
Rob,
It's fine. I think that's an error on our end. And point taken. I would only add that we never hear demands for Barack Obama to publicly oppose Legacies, or about a movement to abolish Legacies, or whether America has come far enough to abolish Legacies. I'd be much more confident about the intent of the opposition, if it were pitched in those terms.
The difference between AA and legacy preferences is this.
Legacies get a preference all other things being roughly equal. Faced with two students with roughly equal grades and SATs, one a legacy and one not, the legacy gets a preference. That's how it works at most (and perhaps all) colleges and universities. (Note, legacies admits have to be distinguished from development admits - e.g., $10 million or more in gifts in exchange for grandson being admitted - where the applicant's academic qualifications are not all that important. There are very few development admits, anywhere.)
AA admits are picked on a different scale altogether. If it were only the case that minorities got a preference if their academic qualifications were roughly equal, no one would be complaining about AA. But instead, AA candidates can get into an elite school with SATs hundreds of points lower than non-AA applicants. If you spend any time around high school kids, you know how cynical they are about this: they joke about how their minority friends only have to "check the box" to get into an elite school. That's the problem in a nutshell.
The key difference that I see, though, is the distinction between state action and private action. Maybe I'm a party of one here, but I see a huge difference between a private university like Harvard or Duke, and a state institution like the University of California. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but I see the phenomenon of "legacy" admissions to be largely confined to private institutions.
For me, private institutions like Harvard or Duke should feel free to admit whoever they like, under whatever conditions they desire, for whatever reason they see fit. Harvard could go all-black-lesbian-foot-fetishist-rugby-players for its Class of 2012, and I would say, "Go Crimson! That's change I can believe in!" Or it could decide that this year, only children of US Congressmen and convicted felons (but I repeat myself) can be admitted, and only if they write their application essay in Sanskrit. When it comes to private institutions, I shrug. AA or legacy, it's all up to them.
But I am deeply uncomfortable with the notion of government, at any level, classifying citizens by race. I just think it's pernicious.
During the University of Michigan AA fight, one of the Detroit papers listed a bunch of the criteria and the points system for admissions. Being a legacy did add to your overall score, but not nearly as much as race, or even being from the upper peninsula of Michigan. However, I thought using it at all for a public university was totally out of bounds.
The usual excuse for legacies is that the kid grew up with a great amount of pride in the institution and would be a better fit or would have more enthusiasm on campus. The reality is, Daddy will give more money to the school if they let his stupid kid in there to carry on the family tradition.
Then it should follow that this large swath would oppose both with equal fervor. Only attacking AA is inconsistent and implies bias.
One other thing I would add is this:
Middle class whites have a right to be resentful to some extent. The people who profited the most from slavery, jim crow, discrimination are the rich white famiilies. Yet, the people that pay the most are the middle and lower class whites. It seems to me that justice also entails that whites who were passively complicit in Jim Crow should be less culpable than those that deliberately preyed on black labor, eliminated black competition, and killed off any attempts at capital formation in the black community AND profited immensely from it.
The government as a whole is culpable for passing legislation that deliberately and specifically damaged blacks. So it needs to deliberately and specifically reconcile these damages with blacks. An additional estate tax that guarantees home loans, finances scholarships, provides small business loans for black businesses, etc. to redeem black capital formation seems more appropriate.
If you can't find the political will for that I've considered civil suits, either class action or individual, that go after those families directly. The DeWolfe family is not the only one that profited from slavery. There are plenty of families like this that are liable and should be paying damages.
There is at least a utilitarian benefit to legacy admissions: their wealthy parents donate money to the schools, money that goes to scientific research, scholarships for the (relatively rare) smart, poor kids, etc. What's the utilitarian benefit to admitting an unqualified minority such as Patrick Chavis into medical school?
I was just about to make a joke about how, when comparing AA to legacies, it's important to realize that some people think that the minorities who are slightly less qualified in terms of scores and such are "cheaters" or "line-jumpers," while legacies who are slightly less qualified are "connections."
But Fred beat me to it.
As I've written here before, I don't have problems with affirmative action in principle so much as in practice. That said, a private school like Duke is a business. A very big business. And typically, these schools don't let your kid in based solely on the fact that you went there. They let your kid in based on the fact that you went there and have made contributions to the school. Being the big businesses that they are, it pays off more for schools to educate the next generation of America's wealthy that will continue to donate to the school. The problem is that we look at college admissions as if these schools were somehow created in order to benefit the American people at large or with education as their primary purpose. These schools were built to perpetuate an elite, and will continue to do so. Affirmative action runs directly counter to their very reason for existence, as it poses a risk to the very oligarchy they were built to promote. Legacies at state schools are a bit more reprehensible, in my opinion, and less understandable. But all in all, I think the problem is a structural one in our education system, not having to do particularly with affirmative action or legacy admissions. A system based around private schools that cost as much as the average American makes in a year is going to be inherently inequitable.
So, besides Legacies, what other Return Buyer Rewards programs are also evil?
Sarcasm aside, AA based on anything other than financial need is corrosive to the system and its participants and terribly destructive to those with potential but no solid funding.
Legacy status is available to the descendants of those "first time buyers" regardless of race, color, creed, and gender. It is a smart business model, encourages alumni participation as well as donation, and makes a more solid foundation for the school involved.
I manage an alumni community for my alma mater. Members come from all parts of society and are inclusive of any race/color/creed/sexual preference/gender anyone can name. We're the ones who keep the non-academic dimensions of the university interesting and fun. There's hardly anything wrong with a business encouraging this behavior. After all the World Wide Web has evolved to exactly this sort of model.
AA was a tool to balance out past institutional racism - this is not an issue anymore. There's no shortage of individual bigotry and institutions root those people out and neutralize their ability to hurt other people.
But AA currently is a blunt weapon of reverse discrimination that diverts attention away from young people with high potential but insufficient funds. Especially after the gutting of financial aid programs these past seven years.
AA is simply unconstitutional.
It may be a good idea. It may be a bad idea. Doesn't matter.
The government cannot constitutionally give preferential treatment to someone on the basis of race.
You can see the Supreme Court squirm every time they take up the issue, because they are stuck between a rock (they think AA is a good idea) and a hard place (the fact that its unconstitutional), so they squeeze out transparent masks for AA, all but lay out a plan for school admins to make the AA process so soft and squishy that a court can plausibly overlook the fact that its a racial preference, and move on. Which is why an admissions policy that says "we will admit 500 minorities regardless of merit" will be struck down, but "We will admit people, giving consideration to the difficulties they have faced and in the educational value of diversity, but not in a way that leaves a paper trail" will survive a constitutional challenge.
So it doesn't matter if its a good idea or a bad one. Its an unconstitutional one.
I don't think anyone would mind AA, legacy admissions, donor admissions, sports scholarships, and so on if they were a small fraction of the total spaces in the school. Say about 20% for all of those categories put together. The other 80% would be up for open competition for lower middle class whites, Asians, African Americans and Latinos who could be admitted under race-blind rules, rich kids whose parents aren't tacky enough to pull strings, and people who are various combinations of the above.
But at some top schools, the ratio starts to tip the other way. You add up all the students who are in one special category or another, and they are the majority. The generic smart kids with no particular "hook" to get in are strongly disfavored in this environment. A lot of them happen to be Asians or lower middle class whites.
A private university can run things that way if it wants to. But when they call the result "meritocracy," people start to holler.
people act as if ANY AA student can be admitted to ANY school based on their color.
AND IT IS A COMPLETELY FALSE AND SPECIOUS ASSUMPTION.
if an AA kid has a gpa of 3.7 and an SAT score of 2270 versus a white student with 3.6 and an SAT score of 2300, then the AA may have the leg up.
BUT
an AA kid with a gpa pf 3.0 and a SAT score of 1300, wont have a shot getting into the same school as the other two.
Affirmative Action helps students of color who HAVE the required scores. it does not help those who fall below the marks.
i'm so tired of white people grousing about this as if going to Brown instead of Yale will make them wind up saying "paper or plastic?".
edit: for the AA student with a 3.0, i meant to say an "Sat score of 2000".
also, i didn't intend to double post.
ANOTHER EDIT: by "AA", i meant "African-American".
DougEFresh - You should note that at UM, private funds constitute a majority of the funding. For the Law School, it's more like 90% of the funding. Even for the undergraduate school, state funding is far less than half of what the university needs to operate. So, it's just as important for U-M to have active, engaged alumni who financially support the school as it is for Harvard or Stanford.
That's why I think that legacy preferences are OK. I think AA preferences would also be OK if they were, like legacy preference, a marginal tool to pick between academically equal candidates and not a way to admit minority candidates whose academics are otherwise not even in the ballpark.
Those who have said that AA is not a big thumb on the scale simply do not know whereof they speak. Amherst admits black students with 1100s and 1200s on their SATs; asians and whites better have 1650 or higher just to be considered. Michigan's AA program was similar before the Supreme Court struck it down. That's the problem and denying that it's the problem isn't going to make it go away.
I meant "1450" and not "1650".
AA gets more attention because it is usually set out as a formal policy. Legacy and Development admissions are usually done as "exceptions to polcy" and thus fly under the radar more. As someone noted above, a good solution is to give a leg up to students from low income families, particularly those who are first-generation college students. That net is race-neutral, but will still pick up a lot of minority students.
I remember years ago working with a class of aspiring teachers at UCLA, where I got a good perspective on AA. One young woman said, "Sure, I was an Affirmative Action admit. I'm proud to say it, because I'm doing fine. I'm taking the same classes as everyone else. Nobody's writing my papers for me. Nobody's taking my tests for me. And I'm graduating next quarter. It works."
Race-based affirmative action is certainly problematic, and it’s pretty much a dead letter in the age of Judges Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Roberts. (For a short while, our jurisprudence assumed that a race-conscious injury demanded a race-conscious remedy.)
But whites complaining about affirmative action and reparations are like courthouse kibitzers complaining about a jury awarding damages to the victim of an auto accident.
They weren’t hit by the car.
DBL,
"Amherst admits black students with 1100s and 1200s on their SATs; asians and whites better have 1650 or higher just to be considered."
Oh woe the white students!
you are seriously mistaken if you dont believe just as many, if not more, white students are admitted
with below average SAT scores.
-To everyone else proposing it should be economic based, you do realize it would help mostly poor white students, right?
cause the argument will be, "well, statistically there are more white people in poverty than blacks." to justify why a new decline in non-white admittance.
when people use the charade of economic equality, it just signals another subtle way to keep children of color out of higher education.
From the Post
More black voters than white voters could see their child as president. Is that some of that there affirmative action in action?
Anybody who thinks black students get into top schools by "checking the box" is being foolish. White kids may joke about that, but a lot of the time they're masking their own insecurity and scholastic inferiority by belittling black students. The kids I remember doing that in high school were usually the ones with lower GPAs, SAT scores and fewer extracurriculars than the minorities they claimed only got into better schools because their race. Even when that Hispanic or black student was valedictorian or salutatorian and the white whiners sputtered somewhere in the middle top twenty. That was two and three years ago for me. I was 2nd in my class and a merit scholar and white students still thought that I got into Ivies because I was black. These were people with 3.3 GPAs and OK SAT scores. Nobody ever gave me anything but a dirty look because was black.
The grumbling Caucasians that complain about losing "their" university spots to blacks (who make up 2-less than 9% at most elite schools) are probably missing out to other whites or Asians.
Affirmative Action policies at the college level hurt those who they're explicitly designed to help.
You're throwing young people who are academically less prepared into sink or swim situations and willfully ignoring the basics of "long-term" gradual adaptation and habit forming that's needed to achieve success. If you're competing in a math class filled with nerdy (but brilliant) math camp veterans and you didn't even take calculus in high school, then you're going to get destroyed by the curve. If you're a chubby 8 minute miler competing against a bunch of 6 minute milers, you're going to look pretty silly when you roll in two minutes after everyone else has finished and are sprawled out on the grass snickering at your slow ass (it hurts to this day...). "I am not in the same league yet with these guys," you'll conclude. And you'd be right. You'll improve by the end of your senior year in college, but guess what, those 6 minute milers will be running 5 minute miles by then. Take a year or two in community college and come back when you're stronger, ready to compete and WIN!
You have to start younger. I'd much rather see top universities take the money from alumni trying to buy their (likely hard working) kids into school and use it to fund afterschool supplemental study programs or summer study programs for disadvantaged elementary and middle school kids in their region. Good study habits formed young die hard and payoff over a lifetime of learning and intellectual enjoyment.
Make college admissions color-blind.
I'm not sure many universities present their admissions process as any type numbers based "meritocray". Top tier univerisities want a diverse student body made up of exceptional students. Every year dozens of students with 4.0 G.P.A's and 1500+ SAT scores get rejected from every top tier school. The idea is that if that's the only criteria or even the only significant criteria we use to evaluate our incoming class we'll be, well, Cal Tech. Not very interesting.
Athletes bring something to the academic experience for all students that mr. 1500/4.0 can't. Same for the opportunity to study alongside students from backgrounds/cultures/ethinicties etc. different from your own. A class with only Mr. and Mrs. 1500/4.0 wouldnt have that. Like it or not, same thing for the legacy admits. There is a whole different worldview to be gleaned from studying, partying, whatever it is you do, next to someone whose daddy owns Anheuser Busch than there is to be gleaned from the son of a farmer or a first generation kid from the inner city.
That opportunity to broaden one's worldview and overall understanding of what makes this nation run is just as much what the college experience is about as what comes out of the texts, especially for certain non-professional majors that may never actually be used after graduation.
And to teach kids/young adults that the only thing you need to get to the top is to have the highest scores or whatever your numerical metric is, is to totally mislead them. Look anywhere, from the P.O.T.U.S. to the head of whatever corporation it is you work for. Those folks aren't the prodigies- they're somewhere buried in obscurity in the R&D department wondering why they dont get more credit for their brilliance.
Highyeller and Geo,
Here is a comparison of Patrick Chavis's grades and MCAT scores versus Allan Bakke, the white fellow who sued because he was denied admission to U.C. Davis to make room for Chavis: "The Life and Death of Patrick Chavis" (one example: Chavis scored in the 24th percentile on the quantitative section of the test; Bakke scored in the 94th percentile). The Bakke case went to the Supreme Court and became a legal cornerstone of affirmative action; Chavis became a poster child for advocates of affirmative action -- until he became a hack doctor and started grievously injuring African American women in South Central Los Angeles.
Here's the question: who benefited from Chavis's affirmative action? Chavis himself was put in a position above his abilities as an OB-GYN (who branched out into liposuctions), and the patients who suffered weren't rich liberal white women, but poor black women. Those women would have been better off if Chavis got a job at the DMV and someone more capable took his spot in the medical school.
Geo: *a white student with 3.6 and an SAT score of 2300...an AA kid with a gpa pf 3.0 and a SAT score of 1300 wont have a shot getting into the same school as the other two....*
Lets see if this is true at University of Michigan (the only school to actually release their point system to the public):
http://www.umich.edu/~mrev/archives/1999/summer/chart.htm
I'll change the SAT scores to 1000 and 1400, since the Michigan point system uses old style SATs.
Non-AA student: 3.6 GPA, 72 points. 1400 SAT, 12 points.
AA student: 3.0 GPA, 60 points. 1000 SAT, 6 points. Race bonus, 20 points (equivalent to a 1.0 boost in GPA).
Underqualified AA student wins.
Incidentally, being a legacy gets you 4 points, equivalent to a 0.2 boost in GPA).
I forgot to mention in my previous post the very simple reason why AA gets more of a backlash than legacies: most people consider racism worse than greed and nepotism.
Which of the following two statements seems more offensive?
"I pulled some strings, and got my nephew a job. I guess we passed over some people I'm not related to, but who cares, right?"
"I pulled some strings, and got my fellow white guy a job. I guess we passed over some black guy, but who cares, right?"
The idea of people being "underqualifed" for admission to a particular college is also misplaced. The only real qualification to for admission to any undergraduate institution is that you be able to do the work. The calculus at HYP is the same calculus their teaching at the mid tier schools. Sure the curve might be a little steeper if your in a curriculum that grades on a curve but by and large the work is the work.
The difference between the top tier school and the mid tier ones is thing like the edowment, trhe repuatiton of the faculty (derived largely from thier published research, not thier ability to teach,) how many students they reject, etc. It's not based on how hard the work is. A kid who's gonna fail out of Harvard, would probably fail out of Maryland or wherever.
"Qualification" to do any particualr job is determined by someone else, after college, whether its the bar, the medical board/presiding doctors in residency, accounting certifiation exams, etc.
The fact that Chavis was a bad doctor isnt because he got into med school- he cold have gone to a lower tier school, gone to school in Domican Republic (lots of ppl do this) anything. The thing standing between him and those women in South Central who got bad treatment should have been the boards and whoever trained him in residency. Thats where his qualification shouldve been measured not med school admission board, who frankly know little about him beyond how he did on the MCAT's.
The fundamental problem here is the refusal to acknowledge that what we call intelligence isn't equally distributed among different groups. For whatever reasons, a smaller percentage of African Americans and what Americans typically call Latinos (that is, mestizos or mulattoes) have the intellectual ability to handle college-level academic work. That means that if you insist on trying to give 12% of your admissions spots to blacks because blacks are 12% of the population, the only way you will be able to do that is by radically lowering your standards. If you judge everyone objectively, you'll get the occasional black student who is truly qualified, but realistically, they'll make up about 2% of your class and not 12%.
This difference in average intelligence distribution is the crux of the problem. University employees tend to be liberal and pro-diversity; there is no institutional bias against minorities, and in fact there is one in favor of them. The problem isn't that anyone is barring the school house door; the problem is that there aren't enough qualified blacks and Latinos to get in on the merits.
Green,
The way the medical profession is structured, the biggest quality control hurdle is admission to med school. With Chavis's scores and grades, he might not have even gotten into a Caribbean school, but you are right that there are some hacks that come out of foreign schools as well. I knew a woman once who worked at a law firm that defended these doctors. A whole mess of them when to the med school at the Universidad de Guadalajara; she said they called them "the Guad Squad", because of their frequent screw-ups.
Elite schools get so many excellent applications that they turn down some number of 4.0 GPAs and perfect SAT scores every year. There are surely white kids with less than perfect scores who get in because of legacies, or because of sports, or because of charity work, or because of excellent essays, or whatever. But, for real, every year kids with perfect scores but who are otherwise unremarkable (and white or asian) get rejected from elite schools. That does not happen to people who are neither white nor asian.
And the fact that people whine more about racial preferences than legacy preferences (or she-acted-in-a-movie preferences, or whatever) does reflect prejudice, but apart from the observation that there is prejudice there, so what? That doesn't make one or the other less unfair. Giving preference because of legacies is unfair. Giving preference because of minority-status is unfair.
The person who said that affirmative action doesn't help all blacks is right: it only helps the middle and upper-class blacks, who need it least. A black student with strong scores and rich parents will be accepted to an elite school over a white student with stronger scores and poor parents. That sucks.
I guess my point is that those who argue that AA is inherently "unfair" grossly undersimply the concept of fair. Same imo for legacies or any variety of other programs.
AA exists because it was recognized that their was a need to proactively do something to counteract the hundreds of years of completely utterly "unfair" treatment of black people that has effected a community that lives disproportionately at the bottom rung of this society. As a result of that reality, that unfairness, this program exists. I agree with most other folks that it is highly ineffective in actually doing anything about the problem, but that's largely why the program exists. But if it were something else that was more effective- maybe additional tutoring for black kids, mentorship programs, apprenticeship programs set up black kids, do any of you think that would be looked at significantly less negatively by white folks?? It wouldn't. Those same folks would be saying why can't my kid have a mentor or an apprenticeship or whatever it is. The only "fair" way to help those who are for one reason or another at some sort of a disadvantage, is to completely ignore them and let them work it out on their own. I suppose that's fine if you think that's the way the world should work, typically, that's what we call a "republican". Not inherently a bad thing i suppose.
RE: Juan
"The fundamental problem here is the refusal to acknowledge that what we call intelligence isn't equally distributed among different groups. For whatever reasons, a smaller percentage of African Americans and what Americans typically call Latinos (that is, mestizos or mulattoes) have the intellectual ability to handle college-level academic work. That means that if you insist on trying to give 12% of your admissions spots to blacks because blacks are 12% of the population, the only way you will be able to do that is by radically lowering your standards. If you judge everyone objectively, you'll get the occasional black student who is truly qualified, but realistically, they'll make up about 2% of your class and not 12%."
Or they just come from subpar schools that have been forgotten by America at large, and their parents, coming from similar schools, lack the educational background to make up for the shortfalls in public education.
I attended a New England prep school that had long been lauded for its diversity. As such, there was a very large contingent of inner city scholarship kids. And yes, they often didn't perform quite as well as their middle class/upper middle class white and international (usually Asian) counterparts. But much of that always seemed that they hadn't been taught how to go through the motions of school as much as their counterparts had. You're talking about kids who happened upon college through scoring well on a standardized test when they were 12, finding themselves in Upward Bound or a similar program, versus kids who were told for their entire lives that school was of the utmost importance so they could get into private school for high school (like everyone else in the family had) and go on to the Ivy League.
John Henry:
I not sure you meant estate tax but isn't this statement a form of Affirmative Action: The government as a whole is culpable for passing legislation that deliberately and specifically damaged blacks. So it needs to deliberately and specifically reconcile these damages with blacks. An additional estate tax that guarantees home loans, finances scholarships, provides small business loans for black businesses, etc. to redeem black capital formation seems more appropriate.
Ta-Nehisi:
I find this article not fair minded because the implicit assumption is that those whites being discriminated against by affirmative action aren't being recognized as legacy children of say the carpenters union in Philadelphia which is more lily white than the paint in the Invisible Man(try in get in if you don't have a union sponsor). The arguement about Affirmative Action is always pigeon holed so as to not recognize advantages just being white is.
Yes! I mean the estate tax - taxing inherited wealth to finance AA programs. This is where most of the capital gained from cheating blacks resides. I'm not sure what the exact numbers are but the top 1% of families own somewhere around 90% of private wealth. I said rich above, but actually I mean the wealthy. Additionally, an estate tax will limit the disincentives on investment that an income tax would, i.e. the Forbeses and the Waltons will continue to invest.
Additionally, this would remove the potenital unfairness in the current structure of AA.
Whitey,
"Or they just come from subpar schools that have been forgotten by America at large"
What makes those schools "sub par"? Think about that, and think about also why public schools that are predominantly white and Asian post higher scores.
Keeping this open. Please keep it clean guys.
"What makes those schools "sub par"? Think about that, and think about also why public schools that are predominantly white and Asian post higher scores."
What makes them subpar? Are you kidding?
America's public education system is based around funding on the local level. As a result, schools in poor communities are perennially underfunded, while schools in wealthy communities have more money than they know what to do with. Schools that are predominantly white and Asian post higher scores because there is an extreme disparity between the money invested in a student at one of those schools versus at a school in a poor community. Schools in poor white communities don't generally produce test scores any better than schools in comparably poor black and Latino communities.
Moreover, there is something to be said for the type of education one receives in public school being geared towards white students over minority students. The history taught in schools is a history of white America; the literature is generally that of white men. It is understandable that white kids are going to inherently be more interested in the subject matter than black and Latino kids are, considering that it's a history glorifying the white men that enslaved and/or conquered their forebears.
Whitey,
I realize you went to a prep school but you can't seriously be this uninformed about public school funding. Some of the worst-performing school systems in the country also happen to be among the highest-spending per student. Look up what the per-pupil spending is in the D.C. system, for example. Money isn't the differentiating factor here.
Regarding your second paragraph, again you seem uninformed about urban schools. Most students in predominantly black public schools are taught more about George Washington Carver than they are about Thomas Edison, and there is no shortage of literature by African American writers that gets assigned in the English classes in those schools.
Everyone’s credentials have been tainted. The culprits are the white racists who insisted on a quota of zero for all those years. Affirmative action isn’t perfect, but it’s a necessary part of the solution.
RE: Juan
Per pupil spending doesn't mean that the money is actually getting to students. Those figures are arrived at by taking all the money being poured into the system and then dividing it by the number of students in the system. That doesn't mean that inefficiency doesn't play a role. One way or another, that money isn't getting to the students. Outdated text books and disintegrating facilities are undeniable. I don't think you can point to inequalities in racial intelligence for that. Maybe they blew all the money on consultants.
In regards to your second point, I'm coming from the perspective that this is a complaint I've heard from many friends of mine through the years. And if your perspective is accurate, then it makes perfect sense that students from such communities would do poorly on standardized tests, as a history section of such a test, for example, focuses not on George Washington Carver but instead on George Washington.
Green:
How about a nationwide full scholarship program for qualified blacks going to college, along with identical admissions requirements for everyone? That would ensure that no qualified black kid would have to give up on college because he couldn't afford it, or graduate with a bunch of debt. It would directly address the wealth gap, too, because it's a lot easier to help your kids through college when you've got a bit saved back, and because starting out post-graduation with $50K in debt really slows down your future accumulation of wealth.
IMO, that would be enormously more fair and less offensive than different admissions requirements for different racial groups, and would also give more help where it's most needed, at the bottom. It would also eliminate a bunch of the unintended consequences of affirmative action admissions.
Juan,
That's it. You're not even trying. Locking this thread. You may think that people disregard you because you're speaking "uncomfortable truths," or because "you're un-pc," but dude, often, you're just ignorant. There's nothing courageous about working out your deeply personal issues on a blog, and there's nothing "un-pc" about claiming that black kids spend most of their time learning about George Washington Carver. It's just ignorant, dude--and the worst part is that you seem proud of your ignorance. Take it to Stormfront. Seriously kid, you should be ashamed of yourself.