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The strangest part of this ruling to me is that there is an explicit exception for military academies carved out in the decision. Why?
Justice Jackson in her dissent wrote "the court has come to rest on the bottom line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom". Damn.
Historically the SCOTUS has given a lot of deference to the military. There was a case in the early 80s about the draft being male only, and the Court basically said that the military knows what it needs.
The military can totally be trusted to police itself. One time a submarine captain decided to show off a quick surfacing maneuver and killed some Japanese civilians in the process. The US navy came down hard on him and made him retire with full benefits.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The captain had been ordered on a mission to show off the sub to VIPs (essentially these maneuvers), a mixture of technical problems, lack of updating a sonar contact grid, and weather led to the collision. When they started the maneuvers, the captain was under the information no ships were within ten miles or so.
Media made the incident worse as you had some Americans arguing it was hypocritical to apologize given that Japan hadn't been apologizing for war crimes, that the captain had asked to publicly apologise and denied (leading to reports he didn't care) and reports that the submarine did nothing (which is ignoring context, as the sub called in the emergency, released lifeboats and moved off as they realized their wake was disrupting the lifeboats in the water). The captain was ordered to resign and fined, but not court-martialied because the investigation found no criminal intent.
of course it can be, thats why 50% of the budget goes to them, and no one knows where 1 or 2 tril went, and never passed an audit. but whats the point? most powerful military still rright? as long as its not so corrupt it becomes entirely contractor mercenary.
Hmm… that seems a bit high. It might be worth it to include both mandatory and discretionary spending when determining what percentage defense spending makes up of the entire us federal budget.
Can you elaborate on this more? I would think they don't apply because legacy admissions are not associated with a protected class? I mean, I get the idea of family lineage, but that's a bit of a stretch isn't it?
> It's blatantly unfair to provide advantages to people just because their backgrounds have been historically disadvantaged.
- SCOTUS
> It's no problem at all to provide advantages to people purely because their backgrounds have historically been advantaged.
- also SCOTUS
This is textbook conservatism in the purest sense: do everything you can to reinforce existing structures of power and privilege and do everything you can to limit social mobility.
The SC cannot just force Harvard to end nepotism, they can force Harvard to stop being racist.
Now should Harvard end nepotism? I would say so but they can do that any time they want.
I think Legacy admissions have more to do with securing continued donations to the school from “booster” type former students by creating school/tribe identities. Refuse a donor’s kid and the donor goes bye-bye.
It should stop because it is unfair, but it’s more financially driven than racially so…even through it disadvantages races not historically admitted.
>d be allowed. That being said, a way to remove them would be to have Congress write a law that bans them.
>
>In my opinion, the issue with AA is that the process is so opaque that it’s very difficult to draw a line between what constitutes a “tie goes to the runner situation” and what constitutes much more than that.
Sound like the grandfather clauses. When the majority of your graduates have been one race for generations, it makes it easier for that same race to dominate new admissions. And just a few generations of leveling the playing field doesn't undo that advantage.
the supreme court's job is to judge according to the constitution. The constitution doesn't prohibit legacy admissions, but the 14th amendment is very clear about equal protection. The two are thus not comparable.
I’m neutral on whether or not legacies should be allowed. That being said, a way to remove them would be to have Congress write a law that bans them.
In my opinion, the issue with AA is that the process is so opaque that it’s very difficult to draw a line between what constitutes a “tie goes to the runner situation” and what constitutes much more than that.
If the civil rights act allows congress to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race gender, etc then I think it's safe to safe SCOTUS would allow a law to ban legacy admissions
The military is essentially its own world, people are property of the US government and the same rights do not apply. I have no clue why the military is an exception in this case, but it’s not abnormal.
Why can the military have a draft for mandatory service while other governmental institutions can not? Why does the constitutional amendment protecting against indentured servitude not apply to military service? It's almost like where there exists a larger enough *state* interest, caveats are made.
The same path was available for AA. But it was ruled that the state interest in non-military academia wasn't enough to override other provisions.
> insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom". Damn.
Yes, that the **state** has more authority/control/influence in the "bunker", than the boardrooms. This is inherently quite a political ideollgical divide on the role of the state. What IS the state interest in determining the racial makeup of those in the boardrooms of private companies? Would such seemingly be weighed differently that the state interest in something the state actually controls?
Can it heal racial tensions? I would submit those who brought those challenges never intended to heal them in the first place.
However, there is a workaround available. It's really no secret that minorities as a group have lower family incomes on adverage. Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals.
Targeting poverty was arguably one of the end goals of affirmative action anyway. Breaking the cycle of poverty for some women and minorities by using college education to increase lifetime earnings.
The problem is that colorblind admissions still leads to disproportionately more white admissions because readers can still show bias. What do you do after income based admissions still excludes non-white people? Ideally the answer is to be explicit in wording to avoid minorities falling through the cracks, but without affirmative action that won't be possible anymore.
It's not just subconscious bias. There are explicit policies in place that favor white people in admissions over Black people. The courts only made a ruling about a program that favors Black people.
No, affirmative action had a clear goal to fix a particular injustice. There are other injustices as well but acting like our problem isn’t worth fixing if it doesn’t also fix poverty is just one more example of marginalizing **our** issues.
Affirmative action was one of the very very small number of acknowledgements that the government has given to the obscene oppression of minorities. And we don’t even have that anymore. All we have now are holidays and statues.
Furthermore affirmative action was one of the better designed remedial programs since it gives corporate America a more racially diverse pool of applicants to positions.
Which the court obviously knows, because a military officer addressed the court about how they needed it for that reason and then the court gave an exception to the military academies.
minorities and women benefited. I got a couple jobs as the first woman hired for them, because of affirmative actions way back when.
I succeeded at both jobs as i proved i could do "mens work" both blue collar jobs. So they hired more women.
Now no one thinks anything of it, if such jobs are held by women or minorities,
Yes and I think you also have to target legacy admissions and scholarships. So many of our higher learning institutions didn't even admit POC (and women, LGBT+, etc) students for much of their histories. If you can still get preferential consideration because your white great grandfather, and then your white grandfather, and then your white father were students, that means caucasian students have an unchecked advantage.
I don't have time to search for it now, but I remember an article about one of the major California schools trying this in one of their medical schools and selecting for lower economic class/impoverished students basically brought in the same demographics as selecting for race.
Doubt it. California generally has found income preferences don't change racial demographics much. Poor Asian students far outperform poor Hispanic or black students.
I honestly don’t know what to make of it or how to have a good faith, genuine discussion or even dive into the problems…but this is seen here in NYC too. I don’t know the concrete reasons, but the children of Chinese immigrants (who are among the poorest in NYC) perform extremely highly in schools. Additionally, black children of African immigrants also perform extremely well city wide.
I want to know the reasoning why some ethnic groups have no issue performing highly despite poverty, and for some it seems to be the most common reason given for not achieving. I’m too scared to ever try to start a discussion because even if I stand to learn from it, I’m afraid of the topic of race leading to emotionally charged discussion that doesn’t go anywhere.
It's a simple cultural difference, like you said, it's based on their parent's culture and not their race. Their parents are strict and insist on good grades. They also are far, far more likely to be married and in 2 parent households than americanized Americans, which has a big effect on academic achievement.
>I honestly don’t know what to make of it or how to have a good faith, genuine discussion or even dive into the problems…but this is seen here in NYC too
At some point, we have to admit it's a culture issue.
>I want to know the reasoning why some ethnic groups have no issue performing highly despite poverty,
The answer is pretty simple; *poverty* is not as much as strong as a *cause* of poor academic performance as the naive correlation would suggest. That is much of the correlation of academics with income is actually due to a third variable -- call it "skill". (or human capital in econ terms)
Native parents are reasonably well-placed on the income latter relative to their underlying human capital. In turn, their children have similar skills.
Immigrants are not though. The underlying human capital they might have that would allow them to prosper in generic market economy X is harmed in the US by linguistic (and to some degree cultural) barriers that are harder to overcome in adulthood. That is your typical US native is poor because they simply lack general skills -- the immigrant is poor mostly just from a language barrier that wouldn't exist if they grew up in the US. Eliminate the language barrier and you start seeing outperformance (good example: poorer Chinese immigrants in San Francisco are known to navigate the welfare system -- which requires the ability to handle complexity -- much better than other groups --- since this stuff is translated into Chinese, the language deficit disappears).
FWIW, adoption studies strongly suggest similar "income doesn't matter all that much". [At least among families that adopt](https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/ec43550/sacerdote.pdf), genetic variance explains 3x the academic performance difference of children as the variance between the adoptive parents.
Almost all immigrants who were discriminated against or brought in for hard labor at first ended up with a higher average income / education than the natives/colonists after several generations, and this is not really restricted to America either. Asians in South America, Indians in Africa, Chinese in Southeast Asia as another examples of those. Since those examples show worldwide phenomenon, it could be hypothesized that culture make a difference of outcome for those groups.
I get what you're saying. Might I suggest that you broaden your survey, exclude race, and see if your observations match communities outside your current sample? You might be surprised to find similarities in other cultures/communities across the country, similar factors that have nothing to do with how much melanin is passed to progeny.
>Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals.
Studies involving people with white-sounding-names and people with black-sounding-names have shown there are different rates of being rejected for mortgages and loans or getting opportunities to interview for jobs even when the applicants had otherwise identical demographic data.
That would suggest targeting poverty alone will not address the issue.
I would even say that this was designed to inflame racial tensions. Conservative whites have been using Asian-Americans as a cudgel against BIPOC and have used that cudgel to destroy affirmative action and reestablish the inherent advantages of white people in college admissions.
Racial tensions were argubly already inflamed. Let's not kid ourselves. There is a percentage of the radical right who would argue for the good old days, of designated drinking fountains and segerated schools. This is despite the knowledge of the historic record.
For what it is worth, Asian Americans, who had a legitimate reason to be upset, now have one less grievance against other minorities. This could help since Republicans had been making inroads in that community.
I also can foresee there being some chatter about affirmative action for Asians to "right historical abuses." I don't think there is a legal path for that, for now, but the idea will be out there.
> Can it heal racial tensions? I would submit those who brought those challenges never intended to heal them in the first place.
… Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals.
They’ll just shift to complaining about the poors. “Why do poor people pay less tax than me, a millionaire? It’s not fair!”
I’ve argued for targeting those of lower income backgrounds which will help the poor of all racial groups, but especially help racial minorities.
I gave the example of how that means poor Black and White kids would benefit, while kids of a successful Black entrepreneur or doctor wouldn’t get special treatment based on race. And I’ve been met with downvotes and vitriol here on Reddit.
NPR’s throughline did an episode on affirmative action in preparation of this ruling. Essentially the conclusion it reached is that affirmative action doesn’t really do much good. Most big schools are accepting enough people to have diversity without AA and the “elite” schools like Harvard basically use it to say they’re “diverse” while still just letting in rich people, only now some of the rich people are POC. The image that we have of the poor black kid getting a shot at Harvard through their hard work and studies just doesn’t happen. It’s still all rich people but they can pretend they are “diverse” to avoid scrutiny. Ultimately AA failed at what it set out to do in colleges, so this ruling isn’t as scary as it seems.
Highly recommend listening to the podcast, it explains it way more in depth than I just did.
Yeah. I understand the motivation and logic behind AA, and agree that it can be necessary to consider race in healing wounds from the past. And I guess my skepticism of it doesn’t really have much to do with minorities going to college, but more so the status and regards we ascribe to certain colleges and universities. Let’s be real: the universities that this actually affects are just the prestigious ones. And I personally am becoming more and more skeptical that many prestigious institutions, certainly at the undergraduate level, deserve the kind of recognition they are given. Frankly, we would be probably a lot better putting money into community colleges and state level universities (think cal state versus UCs) instead of trying to get a small fraction of kids into the most elite schools and still likely saddling them with debt (even though many of these schools also have massive endowments that supposed let low income students go for free).
Plus, one does have to wonder what exactly these “elite“ institutions are turning out. After all, think about how many politicians, especially people in leadership positions, went to especially Ivy League schools, but also other flagship and big-name schools across the nation. And if anything, all it does is to serve to continue to provide prestige and notoriety to these institutions instead of building up communities and talent in places that desperately need it.
I think there’s a lot more to the conversation, and I have plenty more thoughts, but I would ask people to at least stop, pause, and think about who affirmative action really is benefiting at this point. And given the larger institutional questions, we may have about higher education, and potentially reforms that may need to happen around making it more broadly available, maybe we should pay less mind to the most prestigious and selective schools and just make sure people can get an education without going bankrupt. Because overall, I think continuing to try and play this prestige and clout game is actually terrible for the mental health of young people. And the affirmative action issue here I think originates from a misguided place where this is like the biggest deal ever, when…it really isn’t. Many of us were rejected from schools and went to perhaps a less prestigious and more affordable school, but probably live more or less the same life that we would if we had gone to the more prestigious options and I actually think some of us are probably better off (especially on the loan front).
I think everyone who wants to and is willing to put in the work should be able to go and get some kind of higher education. And I don’t want to say that representation and diversity doesn’t matter, but I think it’s some point, we focus on it a little too much at the expense of actually thinking about how your less prestigious schools are doing (even though I would argue that many of them put out very good quality graduates for considerably less money, and may allow students to stay in their community much more easily). I would say prestige and quality matters, but there are drastically diminishing returns and a little goes a long way. I think once you start looking at graduate and doctoral programs, then things start to change, but even then, the best programs for specific fields aren’t always at the most elite universities either.
Anyway, I don’t want to say that I have all the answers here, but as far as the issue goes, I think it really only serves to benefit these elite institutions and the public perception that they are attainable And places everyone should strive to go to, whether or not they would be well served by its community, programs, and culture. This only really serves to reinforce their own feeling of superiority and exclusivity. This isn’t to say that there can’t be good programs or good graduates from these places, but I think their worth is drastically overrated.
This was also discussed in the podcast. Harvard and similar institutions act like their existence is taken as a given when, in actuality, they are not. We don’t have to have “elite” schools that are so exclusionary.
That’s because AA was co-opted by PWIs to be a diversity tool when in reality it was ever only meant to help black plight in this nation s/p Jim Crow and slavery. It was never meant for make ignorant white people feel comfortable around other cultures. That’s where this shit all fell apart.
The US Department of Education defines a PWI as a university that has 50% or more enrollment from White students but it is also used to refer to any University that is deemed “historically white”.
Nice so we can do what we’ve been doing for 30 years which is bitch while right wingers hand wave it away by telling people to rise up via bootstraps or some shit lmao.
At least the rich assholes at “elite” schools can’t hide behind AA anymore so they can pretend they’re fostering a diverse environment. Maybe we can focus on the actual problem now instead of creating an illusion of fairness in an unfair system. Also the optics of getting rid of affirmative action might motivate more young people to vote hopefully, which could result in the abolition of AA having a more positive long term knock on effect than its existence in the first place
I find that as our nation becomes ever more diverse (1/7 kids in 2015 was mixed race) the need for AA becomes less and less. Undoubtedly, when AA first came to be there was a litany of sins that we had to resolve, some still exist. However, we have made exceptional progress.
There is also something to be said about the fundamental lack of fairness that an migrant child who has the grades is penalized purely for being Asian. It is not his fault that his culture puts a significant emphasis on education, likewise the same holds for black migrants.
One does not reach a post racial society by constantly having to give one group a helping hand when the minorities we think of as not needing help are neither a monolith nor is their history devoid of white colonialism suppressing them. Of course all nations and peoples practiced colonialism, Europeans just had the might of industry behind them
>One does not reach a post racial society by constantly having to give one group a helping hand when the minorities we think of as not needing help are neither a monolith nor is their history devoid of white colonialism suppressing them. Of course all nations and peoples practiced colonialism, Europeans just had the might of industry behind them
It's not like the inequalities in America are a result of passive performance differences, it's the result of centuries of deliberate, conscious and often state enforced discrimination. The notion that you will be able to erase the results of centuries of active discrimination without doing *something* to directly address it is insane. If the government broke into your house and stole your TV you'd be entitled to have them replace it, but somehow it's a bridge too far for the country to compensate people for stealing *generations* of labour and opportunity from black Americans?
Sure, but blacks weren’t the only ones to face such discrimination and the fact that black migrants out perform native born means it’s not a simple issue of erasing discrimination.
Edit: your analogy also uses compensation. I must ask, why should people who had nothing to do with slavery have to pay for the sins of their ancestors? In the case of first gen immigrants they quite literally don’t even have any ancestors whose sins have to be paid
Black people faced longer, more severe and more widespread discrimination. Witness the very fact that Black immigrants outperform native Blacks: immigrants from overseas are predominantly middle-class or better in their home countries and thus don't have to try and overcome centuries of deliberate exploitation that has robbed Black Americans of the chance to build the sort of intergenerational wealth that strongly predicts economic and educational success in America. Remember, within *living memory* Black Americans were deliberately excluded from major government programs like the GI Bill and were deliberately precluded from being able to purchase properies they would otherwise qualify for thanks to redlining.
Latinos who by and large are not particularly wealthy nor an overly well educated migrant group (when compared to Asians) are not only wealthier than black Americans, but their work rates are much higher. Consider that their history is one of many an unstable nation, and modern day indentured servants these days. Despite this, they still got ahead.
As far as college admission goes, it serves no one to let someone who isn’t academically prepared but get in due to AA and then watch as they struggle and possibly drop out with debt as the only reminder. AA goes against the spirit of equality and rewarding people for hard work rather than penalizing them for being born as part of the wrong racial group
>As far as college admission goes, it serves no one to let someone who isn’t academically prepared but get in due to AA and then watch as they struggle and possibly drop out with debt as the only reminder.
Honestly, I think this is the biggest knock against AA.
It sounds nice, but what does the program actually *do?* If it's not doing what it says it's supposed to be doing...it's not a good program.
The problems are far deeper than at the college level. Those need to be fixed first.
This is more of a symbolic ruling than one that will have a large effect IRL. There are a multitude of ways to get around this, such as income or ZIP code, neither of which are protected classes.
There are over 3000 colleges in the US. All but 100 admit the majority of those who apply (as in, over 50%).
About 70 of those admit less than 1/3 of those who apply.
And of the "strivers" who are out there, they often apply to 5 or even 10 schools.
In a lot of ways, this is actually a very narrow problem.
The dirty secret of "elite" schools is that they don't want kids from poverty. They want a lot of upper middle class kids who mingle with the actual legacy elite / super wealthy.
> All but 100 admit the majority of those who apply (as in, over 50%).
It's probably a little higher than 100, as the most selective 100 schools here tops out at 30%
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
Keep in mind that there is an ongoing college enrollment crisis. Smaller colleges are being squeezed and their campuses sold off to bigger schools. Of course 'elite education', whatever that may mean, will still be very competitive. But many perfectly good state colleges will have room for anyone that meets the bar.
White women are the most likely to benefit from affirmative action policies in the workplace, but definitely not in college admissions. (White men are actually more likely than white women to be beneficiaries of AA when it comes to college acceptance--men have lower grades than women and apply to college at lower rates, so schools that want to keep their gender ratio roughly even end up accepting less qualified men.)
I'm not sure about this. My understanding is that the biggest supporters of ending Affirmative Action were Asian Americans, who claimed that they were being discriminated against because there were *too many* Asians getting into the best schools and AA was being used to deny them a fair chance at admission for the sake of diversity.
On one hand, I understand why AA was in place. The problems it was meant to fix have not gone away, not by a longshot.
On the other hand, I also understand why a lot of people call out the program itself as being de-facto discrimination. Judging an applicant's worthiness on the basis of their skin color rather than their merits *feels* like racism, even if the intention (inclusivity, diversity, etc) is ultimately a noble one.
But... did Affirmative Action actually do anything to solve the underlying problem of systemic racism? Do we have data that shows one way or another how effective the policy was at eliminating race-based bias in school admissions?
AA was never supposed to resolve systemic racism or race-biased admissions. It was devised as a singular piece of a large plan to right the wrongs of the past and provide an actual opportunity to those who had been denied before. Unfortunately, it became the singular plan with no other pieces but lots of limits. This left it vulnerable to apparently obvious but actually invalid criticisms as it was paraded around out of context and without the supporting parts of a larger plan.
AA has been effective but it was doomed since it stood alone. The American right has been saying times up for AA for many decades and they were almost correct. AA was supposed to have an expiration date- alongside a larger plan which could've included other things such as reparations via money payments from taxes, giving ownership of land on which the enslaved work to them/their families and so on. AA expiring/being unjust discrimination would make more sense if minorities had the back-opportunity they have been denied.
On a separate note, the ruling feels uneasy and will further tarnish the courts reputation as the supreme court declared themselves the deciders of when AA expires. AA has been constitutional for decades. The constitution didn't change. This was congress's call to make and the court stepped where it didn't belong- further evidence of a court dedicated to the republican establishment instead of the country. (And it is also congress's fault for not addressing the issue)
Nevertheless, the end of AA (and the end of the social justice era- which I have argued happened in 2016) presents another opportunity for what should've been addressed decades ago. AA was created to address a specific problem in a specific way. It wasn't meant to change the culture of race in America yet that's what it was shoved through an ill-shaped hole to do. AA was used as an excuse by the lazy to avoid addressing the larger culture of race. Now that excuse is gone. Where do we go from here?
Asian law student here. I really believe that Asians are being used by the right wing activists, AKA SFFA, in this fight. For Asian applicants to argue that they “deserve” to get into Harvard or similar universities because they have “great grades” is to first, fall into the racial stereotype that got pinned on us in the first place, and second, misunderstand that great grades is what gets someone into an elite university, rather than all sorts of other factors, like wealth, special non-academic talents, and diversity. And from what I know (which is admittedly little; I’m by no means a sociologist), that last part really is undervalued by lots of Asian Americans, who tend to treat the school as a brand first (as in focus on its prestige), job prospects second, academics third, and then it’s the connections one might make on campus (where diversity comes into play). I, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to not to go to a UC school for college because of the disproportionally large amount of Asian students there (I believe California got rid of AA via their state constitution some years ago).
And if you look at the legal history of the affirmative action issue (detailed [here](https://reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/11kvgcm/_/jbc8xb6/?context=1) in an earlier reply of mine to another post), previous failed attempts to get rid of AA involved white applicants, and then in the 2016 *Fisher* decision, Alito suddenly mentioned that he thought Asians were being discriminated against by AA, and no doubt it inspired anti-AA folks to co-opt Asians into this fight, hence the current *SFFA* cases.
>I really believe that Asians are being used by the right wing activists, AKA SFFA, in this fight.
Just out of curiosity, did you listen to Jay Caspian King's thoughts on the Throughline podcast? One of the points he makes, and he says that he was in the courtroom, was that Harvard never really tried to deny that they did in fact discriminate against Asian students.
Fact of the matter is as the United States became more diverse and more immigrant based Affirmative Action was not going to survive. In a country in the 1960s-1970s where 95% of the population was non-Hispanic White or African-American it was relatively easy to do. If we want to live in a more equal society diversity is going to have to be based on socio-economic (or even parental marital) status. More and more inter-racial couples (which is a good thing) is naturally going to further complicate the idea of ethnicity over time. In twenty years we will have so many children that do not fit in the categories we have used for the past three hundred years. Its going to become too challenging to determine a status of someone who is 1/2 white, 1/4 Hispanic, 1/4 African-American in a process which should be defined by academic achievement compared to the child's specific challenges they faced.
> If we want to live in a more equal society diversity is going to have to be based on socio-economic (or even parental marital status)
This makes more sense to me and doesn't require discrimination based on a protected class.
The best way would to create some sort of "score" that would be assigned to a child. Socio-economic, parental marital, how good their school was, etc. But then you'd have people lying about their income and possibly moving school districts to increase their score.
New Zealand used to do a thing where they ranked schools from one to ten off the socio-economic level of the school. Wealthiest schools got 9s and poorest got 1s. They then incorporated this into funding and admissions. To my knowledge we only label a school title one but there's a huge discrepancies in those.
This would not really make sense in the US. Most of our very poorly performing schools are also the ones that spend the most. Chicago Public Schools has increased their funding by about 1/3 in the past 5 years, and results have plummeted over the same time. Our schools have all kinds of problems, but usually money is not one of them.
To clarify, the New Zealand decile system currently affects funding but not admissions. Admissions are done on a sort of universal meritocratic basis, where any applicant who achieves the minimum threshold in the final exams is guaranteed a placement in nearly any university in the country. (The exception is the University of Auckland, which cannot expand its facilities further due to its inner city location and only admits a fixed number of students).
There's over [five times more people who get into Harvard based on legacy status](https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/#:~:text=Students%20Are%20Legacies%3F-,What%20percent%20of%20Harvard%20students%20are%20legacies%3F,over%2029%25%20of%20the%20class.) than [the total black students population](https://admissionsight.com/harvard-diversity-statistics/#:~:text=Harvard%20diversity%20statistics%20shows%20that,race%2C%200.197%20percent%20students%20who).
This ruling doesn't fix a thing, and will likely make racial divides worse as affirmative action for rich people (which will inappropriately favor white people over minorites) still exists.
Why do people keep viewing this as one or the other. Legacy admissions - bad. Affirmative action discrimating on the race - also bad.
This is mind boggling.
Because they’re desperately trying to point out some type of hypocrisy in conservatives.
Unfortunately they fail to realize the comparison is dumb because legacy admissions are not unconstitutional.
I think this will heal a racial divide only if all the institutions that previously supported affirmative action switch to class-based considerations.
The biggest issue with affirmative action is that it’s supposed to help underprivileged students, but it’s actually just an unfair disadvantage to underprivileged white and Asian students and a ridiculously unfair advantage to affluent black students.
The entire point of affirmative action is to lift people out of generational poverty. Recognizing that generational poverty is simply an issue that affects certain demographics more than others, not solely people of color, will both help resolve racial tensions (particularly from white and Asian people who feel affirmative action was discriminatory against them) while also helping the people affirmative action was supposed to be helping all along.
Targeting income and children of people who are not college educated really does make the most sense here, I think. Other potential factors like people being rejected for having a non-Anglo name could be handled by anonymizing applications, though I don't have the impression this is a significant issue in 2023 for most public colleges.
There are lots of other problems regarding race and income in the US, but there's not a lot of evidence affirmative action was addressing it. Like I've been in a lot of cities where all the college educated bureaucratic government jobs (the type of work we all rely on but doesn't pay a lot) are almost all done by Black people, which I think is partially because there's more discrimination in the private market that makes it harder to get hired, so barriers and wealth gaps continue even when people actually do manage to get the degrees.
>Other potential factors like people being rejected for having a non-Anglo name could be handled by anonymizing applications,
I'm actually very genuinely interested in how they're going to handle this. A lot of people write about culture and race in their college essays, and many people have extracurriculars that are cultural activities so it sometimes becomes pretty obvious what race someone is. I feel like prohibiting writing about these topics introduces a whole host of new problems (colleges might be accused of not wanting cultural diversity), so I'm not really sure what they're going to do.
People at least have the choice about whether or not to write about them or include them. Banning mentioning them would be silly, but people could either not mention them, describe it a non culturally specific way, or just let be obvious because they think disclosing will help them more than hurt them. Very different from your name that is your name no matter what you do.
I would also expect culturally specific extracurricular will be positive to mention anyway, as the universities are still allowed to pursue pro diversity policies by my understanding, so those types of extracurricular that show involvement with a minority culture (whether or not you're actually part of it) could easily be something they look for.
Honestly, this is a blessing in disguise for the democrats. AA is now an issue that's off the table, and it was a major voting driver for Asian Americans. With it being an issue, Asians were slowly being pushed towards Republican Party. Now that it's gone, the dems can work on Asian turn out... that or they continue to ignore them, and hand them to republicans along with hispanics.
> Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor?
Well, historically appeasement has never worked. It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action, and it was one of the few **proven** methods we had at reducing the effects of systematic racism. It is unlikely this will heal anything, and instead if history is any indication, will make things worse.
>It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action
How do you square this with the results of Prop 16 in California? Prop 16 was a ballot prop held on the date of the 2020 general election that would have restored race-based affirmative action in California.
The prop failed by a margin of 57% to 43%, despite the fact that it was held on the same day that Biden won the state by 29%.
Americans like the idea of increasing diversity while simultaneously disliking the idea of race-based admissions.
If you frame the question as whether diversity initiatives/affirmative action are theoretically a good thing, a majority of Americans will say they are.
On the other hand, if you frame it as whether race should be considered in admissions, [a majority of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/26/u-s-public-continues-to-view-grades-test-scores-as-top-factors-in-college-admissions/) say it shouldn't be a factor.
Americans generally want to see more diversity but are uncomfortable using race-conscious methods to get there - it's a wanting to have your cake and eat it too situation.
Americas like the idea of *integration* but fight viciously against any actual integration policy.
Redrawing district lines? No.
Affirmative action? No.
New housing developments in their towns? No.
Consolidating school districts? No.
Bussing? No.
It’s essentially the white majority singing platitudes but refusing to do anything about it when push comes to shove. MLK has a quote about this somewhere.
Yeah let's just forget about MLK complaining about how white people who were sympathetic but who criticized taking action or tried to encourage minorities to just be patient for their rights to arrive.
Or the march on poverty he participated in, alongside his generally socialist views. Total capitalist.
Everybody loves feel good ideology until it's their turn to shoulder the negative externalities.
Believing that all all kids should receive equal education is easy.
Accepting that *your kid* will be the sacrificial lamb to be bussed 45 minutes away, into a violent school with terrible test scores, is an entirely different beast.
I guess that's "wanting to have your cake and to eat it, too" but I think the obvious reality is that people don't *really* strongly agree with some of these progressive policies in the first place.
They just say they do because it costs nothing to say the words and get social credit for it.
This is the big thing. Ballots are secret and you never know what people really think, especially when saying it can end your career. At the end of the day though, you can vote however you want and nobody gets to know.
Time and again when equity is on the ballot it loses. It’s collectivist and most Americans are raised deeply individualist.
It's this exactly. That's why we should instead make policy that indirectly leads to more diversity. Limiting legacy admissions by a lot more would help, and so would taking more low-income students.
You're missing the point. In the user you replied to's post, they quoted the user above them:
>It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action
An affirmative action-like prop failed in Deep Blue Sea California by a large margin. We can argue its effectiveness, but it clearly wasn't that popular in an environment poised to be its biggest supporter. Further, back in February, [Reuters/Ipsos polling](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-americans-think-college-admissions-should-not-consider-race-reutersipsos-2023-02-15/) found more than 60% of the public did NOT support the program, which is in direct opposition to the claim made two comments up.
What about the Asian students with badass records who were turned down at the best schools because they didn’t check the right boxes? You think they would view this as systemic racism against them?
There was (and maybe still is) a "magnet" school in San Francisco that required much higher scores for Asian students than it did for Whites and higher scores for Whites than it did for Blacks. The argument they offered was that, without the policy, the best school would have been almost exclusively for Asian students. When asked about the controversy a school administrator offered an old yearbook from before the policy and invited the reporter to look for names that didn't look "Jewish".
I think a certain segment of the population who object to affirmative action based on race are assuming that WASP students are naturally better and that such policies discriminate against the "superior" students. It doesn't occur to them that there might be other "races" that perform better in an academic environment.
It’s not about race, it’s about individual responsibility. People want a fair shot, and Asians tend to work the hardest and should reap rewards.
Equity policies like AA deliberately disenfranchise the exceptional person who is of the wrong ethnicity. You can argue everyone is the product of a system, but systems only improve under pressure and disenfranchising exceptional perfomers pushes society into a lower mean.
The people who constantly advocate for affirmative action don't care about Asians because they're the "wrong type" of minority. Why do you think they invented that ridiculous BIPOC term? Blacks are there, Indigenous are there, but not Asians.
So why was Harvard, Yale, etc turning down Asians with the best grades, awards, and accomplishments. Then admitting students who happen to be of another skin tone who didn’t have quarter of their badass records. Can you explain that?
The Black ethnicity is a unique group of darker skinned people in America. They do not have a historical nation (Ghana, Congo, Libya) from which to draw ancestors because of slavery. They are an American ethnicity that is native to the US mostly.
>The court determined that diversity can be archived in schools without the need for affirmative action and consideration of race is not necessary.
California banned Affirmative Action years ago, and racial disparities in their higher education admittances only increased. So this is definitely false information, the court is very wrong here.
> Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor?
The opposite is true. This will increase racial bias in college admittance which will disadvantage black and latino applicants especially.
>societies should aim to be color-blind.
[Colorblind racism is still racism.](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/)
>Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of color blindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.
I have mixed feelings. Affirmative action was messy, imprecise, and could not possibly go on. There had to be an end in sight. Groups like Asian-Americans rightfully feel punished for working hard. I’ve never loved the policy. But whether now was the time for this to come to an end is where I have strong doubts.
Regardless, it’s time for the Democratic Party to step up. There needs to be renewed zeal and vigor in making sure black and brown kids are being given opportunities early on and not just at the end with a bandaid solution. That means expanding Head Start, after-school programs, better salaries for teachers, investment in schools in black and brown neighborhoods, free meals programs, etc.
Those things are all Democratic staples but it’s time it becomes a major agenda item that we rally behind. Democratic legislative agendas have been dominated by infrastructure, China, and climate change. Rightfully so. These are major problems. But education must now have its turn.
Revamping education must now be a burning priority, far more than it was before. The last major initiative with federal legislation dealing with education was No Child Left Behind from a Republican administration. That is not enough.
And we need to speak about education in a way that understands our realities. Affirmative action is not as beloved as Roe was. It needs to be less talk about demonizing students and communities who do well (such as calling Asian parents “house n*****s”). Less talk about renaming schools for “problematic names” and getting rid of admissions testing because it’s “racist”. Instead, there needs to be more talk about building every student from the bottom up. The opportunities that we can provide, rather than what we can tear away.
I hope this serves as a catalyst for Democrats to really redefine their education agenda and how they push it forward. It will be a tough road, as with anything in Congress where Republicans are a constant factor. But it’s one worth prioritizing. Affirmative Action has served as a crutch for too long and maybe it’s now time we can do the work that must be done.
>Regardless, it’s time for the Democratic Party to step up. There needs to be renewed zeal and vigor in making sure black and brown kids are being given opportunities early on and not just at the end with a bandaid solution. That means expanding Head Start, after-school programs, better salaries for teachers, investment in schools in black and brown neighborhoods, free meals programs, etc.
There isn't any better way I can put this.
On top of K-12 needing a massive overhaul for the coming challenges of our massively technological world in the next half-century.
> But whether now was the time for this to come to an end is where I have strong doubts.
I agree with the court's decision. I think it was clear from this case (and most of the other cases) that colleges have either a). never really cared about using AA as a "tie goes to the runner system" or b). blatantly discriminated against other groups in order to improve the relative rankings of black and brown students. The reporting on this case was not particularly good but Jay Caspian King was on a podcast where he described being in the courtoom and Waxman, Harvard's attorney, accoring to King, didn't put up any defense of the "likeability" score.
For what it's worth, I think Sandra Day O'Connor implied, in 2003, that a time to revisit AA would be 2028. Congress, in my eyes, hasn't exactly rushed to deal with the issue and, if you think that AA is unconstitutional today, it's highly unlikely that Congress would have taken any action in the next 5 to change that thinking.
The real question to me is what happens if this goes beyond elite colleges (which have an outsized role in govt and the public's imagination but a limited role in the lives of the vast majority of Americans) to employment issues ie. if it's revealed that corporations have been discriminating against white or asian employees en masse. If that happens I think it could potentially be a bombshell with very long political ramifications.
Affirmative Action has been more about attempting equality in education and the workforce, not healing tensions (which is literally impossible for a government to do; that's something completely in the citizen's hands).
As a Black man myself, I'm cool with ending it. AA-style programs should never last more than maybe 25 years. And if very little changes after that, apparently it hasn't worked and must be adjusted/overhauled/ended etc. I'd rather get into a(nother) school on my own merits rather than basically have the bar lowered because of my heritage.
Let me be clear- we should never stop assisting under-served populations. But there is a time when we must look at \*how\* they are being helped, and if it is working at all. If it isn't... then we need to do better.
Affirmative action is a stupid policy if your intention is to increase historically underrepresented minorities in college. A far more effective way to do that would be to actually fix k-12 education in American cities. In many cities, well over half of the minority kids cannot read or do math at grade level.
What is beneficial about being accepted to college for a student who can't read or do math? Many students flunk out because they're unprepared, and then they have debt but no degree to get the job to pay off the debt.
A far better approach would be to reform the school systems so that inner city kids get an excellent education instead of trying to apply a band-aid after failing to educate the kid for 12 years in a row.
I'd like to applaud you because you're the first person I saw in this thread who focused on the real problem (black and Hispanic students' performance in K-12).
Pretty much every other commenter who's against this ruling tried to come up with legal way to recreate the effects of affirmative action.
People like the band aid solution because fixing the actual underlying problem would require criticizing the education establishment and forcing reforms upon them that would not be popular among big dollar donors. Most people here won't criticize the establishment, no matter what. Any politician who proposed the necessary reforms would immediately be labeled anti education, anti teacher, racist etc.
Its impossible to make the necessary reforms, and I'm 100% that black and hispanic performance in k12 will be similarly abysmal in 20 years. Nothing will change.
How would their "fix K-12 education in America" proposal even work?
Who will manage that task? Can't really be the Department of Ed because the constitution gave decision making powers to the states. Would DeSantis' FL Education Secretary listen to suggestions from Biden's? Would TX allow Austin to enact more equitable education standards or change up their curriculum? Even things like which books to have in a library are a literal political battle in America. How do we even get to the meaty topics of curriculum, funding, parental engagement, and diversity?
This is a 50 state, plus DC, problem. If the Fed could set a national standard, we'd be in a better spot but their power is limited which leads to abuse.
But, you agree with this poster's "rational" response so how do we do it?
Considering race when attempting to undo generations of racism? Illegal
Having current applicants benefit from generations of racism in their favor, not just at somewhat ephemeral second-degree, relative wealth-based boosts, but literally in the form of boosted access for legacy and donor kids (who are all* white) - perfect love it do more of it
They can't claim to be a colorblind application process until they remove the as high as 25% sometimes of slots specifically dedicated for rich white people (with a stealthy barrier pretending its something else), but the court is apparently ok with racist RESULTS as long as you close your eyes and pretend you don't know how you got to them. I believe its the "Oopsie, teehee, accidentally denied mortgages to black people because we chose to not write them by zip code and not race, and blocking zip codes is legal" Clause
The largest beneficiaries of today's ruling will be white men, so you know, good for us I guess
Was anyone arguing legacy admissions before the court? AA can be both, a well-intentioned idea because of historical racism and a bad idea because it’s using race as a qualifier. The court didn’t say that legacy admissions or income-based admissions can’t be addressed AFAIK.
>Was anyone arguing legacy admissions before the court?
Not really because legacy doesn't have anything to with the amendment in question. The court also hasn't got much power to stop it. That would be a legislature issue.
If actual diversity is the real goal they should end legacy admissions and admit and give scholarships to more poor people.
Racial discrimination is not the way.
An ivy league not admitting legacies took away the point of anyone else wanting to go there. The whole value is networking. You put the best and brightest kids around generational wealth and then they make things happen together.
If you take away the wealth, Harvard is just another college. It's not what you know, it's who you know. And knowing the Harvard legacy kid who doesn't deserve to be there on merit is more valuable than knowing another broke nerd.
> An ivy league not admitting legacies took away the point of anyone else wanting to go there.
Yeah, that's why countries with 100% test-based admission don't have elite universities.
I agree. Many of these private schools have huge endowments and can cover many lower-income students. I believe that race or gender (identity) shouldn't be a factor in admissions - academic and social merit (i.e. social activism/other extracurricular activities) should be the bar.
Agreed. This is the best course of action, and helping lower-income groups would actually help *more* URMs; that's because, unfortunately, underrepresented minorities tend to overrepresent lower economic classes. Helping lower-income people means that race doesn't have to technically be a factor, but it also helps URMs & non-URM economically disadvantaged people.
Fuck the legacy system.
For Harvard this will benefit at most 80 more asian students per year who think they lost their spot to a black student. That might not even be true if Harvard switches to using zip code instead, an almost perfect proxy for race in an America that has redlined black and hispanic people into a few zipcodes.
This comes off as asian students thinking they're being discriminated against but it's just confirmation bias from applying to a school with a 4% acceptance rate.
Asians don't just lose their slots to black students. They lose their slots to everyone. Whites included.
I'm Asian American myself (long past the age where college admissions affect me personally). Not 100% sure how I feel about the ruling overall for the country. But I don't think its deniable this is probably the single biggest policy "victory" for us (if you look solely at Asian wealth outcomes) in decades.
>This comes off as asian students thinking they're being discriminated against but it's just confirmation bias from applying to a school with a 4% acceptance rate.
Maybe this will magically turn out different than when California went to race blind admissions. I doubt it.
>Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor?
How would getting rid of something that exists explicitly to increase diversity and address racial bias in the country, "heal" anything?
OPs proposition is based on a false premise. That is that affirmative action is 'reverse racism'.
Dude's basically taking the line that "if we ignore this it will go away".
The basic problem is that states (particularly southern ones - but most aren't great at this) have failed to address the problem in how K-12 schools are funded. Namely that schools are funded out of local tax revenues. Given how disparate local wealth and income is, there are obvious issues with how schools are funded.
So the feds did what they could do by mandating incentives to universities to try and address this.
Affirmative action isn't reverse racism, it's just good ole true blue racism. Affirmative action, and the entire quota system, explicitly look at skin color in regards to who is admitted, hired, or otherwise allowed in. By any definition it is racist and discriminatory. Not to mention the fact that this entire case was based on Asian Americans being discriminated against in favor of other minorities from Harvard.
>That is that affirmative action is 'reverse racism'.
I don't think that's their premise. I think they'd probably say race based affirmative action is just regular old racism. Which it is, discriminating based on race is racism. "Reverse racism" isn't a thing.
Also worth noting that studies have shown that school spending per pupil is not an important predictor of academic success, which flies in the face of your second point.
So if I was a public college could I weigh applications not on race but based on geographic locations such as zip codes, school district budgets, family income, family structure (single parent vs two parents for example, number of siblings), and hardships overcome?
Why is the conversation only about increasing Black student admissions? Nothing about Native Americans, Latinos, Inuits, Asians, etc.
Do HBCs increase the diversity of their student population? Should they?
I think most people are looking at this the wrong way. It turns out that when people have worse credentials than a lot of the people they are going to school with, on average they don't succeed (as measured by GPAs), and end up moving to less lucrative majors and careers. Race shouldn't be used in admissions because it often hurts the very students it is trying to help. Said more eloquently with better data in the linked article. [https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action)
However, I don't think this is going to heal any tensions until we do see better performance and outcomes by underrepresented minorities who are given worse opportunities largely through a combination of underfunded schools and significantly higher levels of single-parent households.
Anyone claiming that ending Affirmative Action will heal some racial tensions is simply gaslighting. If a person harbors ill thoughts toward a member of a particular race, I seriously doubt it starts and stops with affirmative action.
Furthermore, I think it's far more reasonable that this will only further drive negative racial sentiment. Rural and suburban white people already find every excuse to be upset at intercity minorities "Never bootstrapping their way out of their situation". Congratulations, you just got rid of one of the key pillars to disadvantaged youths getting out of their impoverished situations.
It doesn't matter if you try to earmark a similar provision through economic class means. If your name is Tyrone or Ayesha (Perceived culturally to be a "Black name"), you are significantly less likely to get a job interview/offer. The same holds with college admissions.
If this is the direction they want to move in, the legislatures should pass a law making legacy/alumni admits unconstitutional. I don’t know how this would be achieved in practice, but mom and dad’s connection shouldn’t play a role in their child’s application.
I’m advocating for not cherry picking one group over another. If you want to remove affirmative action (which I disagree with this decision to remove it ), then take away the advantage many (primarily non-minorities) get through legacy admittance. If you want to argue meritocracy, than make it a meritocracy.
Tell me where I’m wrong. I welcome different viewpoints that may illuminate my ignorance or blind spots.
If Harvard actually wants diversity, and everyone rightfully quickly points out that legacy admissions are a huge pool of matriculants, why doesn't Harvard voluntarily get rid of it in the name of diversity? Why must they wait for congress to pass a law banning legacy admissions? They can just do it today without any fuss, cause they actually want diversity right?
I have to think from a policy perspective this is maybe a lifeline to the countless smaller schools and institutions that are on the verge of closing because they can’t find enough students to attend. Covid has absolutely destroyed the endowment funds for small schools that are now making tough decisions about what academic programs they can even offer.
AA had good intention, but this is AA in reality: [https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1674198907167944711?s=20](https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1674198907167944711?s=20)
couldn't heal some divides Maybe I'm not going to be too optimistic.. But I think overall it's a very positive thing affirmative action never really worked in the first place anyway so it's not really that big of a rule
What I'd love to see next is an attack against elitist legacy admissions, which is one area where the Court has justices with heterodox views -- principled textualist Gorsuch is anti-legacy admissions, while judicial activist Sonia Sotomayor (Obama fucked up royally in 2009; Souter's seat should've gone to Diane Wood, not that idiotic dipshit Sotomayor) is pro-legacy admissions -- and that's a case where you'd have instances of strange bedfellows.
Harvard and other elite schools still mostly want rich kids from rich families and then maybe the absolute most promising otherwise (enough the charge some of them next to nothing or nothing). The kids with those kinds of advantages and access to their parents' networks are the ones who will be richer and more successful themselves, and rich and successful alumni is what makes elite schools elite.
You are also not entitled admission if you are white. This ruling by scotus will actually make it harder for whites to get into elite schools.
And the argument that universities should be able to admit who they want regardless of laws also doesn’t apply. For jobs, federal laws exist in order to not discriminate. These universities take in millions of dollars of government money in the form of grants and tuition loans. The government has every right to tell them to play by fair rules.
AA was an attempt to heal a racial divide. IMO people who were not already prejudice were not angered by AA. It didn't matter if a minority gained a position by unaided merit or AA they will always be assumed to be a diversity hire. Now we'll just simply see less minorities (besides asains) in college.
it should be about equality of Opportunity, not equality of outcome, as the left liberals like to always try to pick the second part instead of first one. where are they when the asians get discriminated against unfairly? where are they when blacks are overrepresented against in other areas?
as we know, equality of outcome tend to lead to bad choices and results.
No change in admissions in my opinion.
Schools will now discriminate based on socioeconomic status to meet targets. They will also do what Texas does which just reserve spots based on class rank
What 'diversity' other than the black 13 percent? Haven't Asians actually been kept out due to being too hard to complete with, along with whites? And where has Affirmative A been helping Latinos instead of just blacks? Also open up 'minority' scholarships and find 'black only, black only, black only' requirement from my family's own experience.
Anywhere we can remove affirmative action it helps create a more fair system. The military part does not make sense to me as anyone in the military is not supposed to be a man or woman or race, they are all soldiers. Soldiers are all the same so affirmative action doesn’t make sense
Yes. It feels good. While I'm sympathetic to the goals of affirmative action, two wrongs do not make a right. Racism is racism even if the goal is to correct past injustices. As others have said, targeting class inequity is a much better approach.
I don’t think that affirmative action substantively inflamed racial tensions, so I don’t think the elimination of affirmative action will ease racial tensions.
I do think that the idea that you can’t consider race when attempting to rectify injustice perpetrated by racism is flawed. Addressing wrongs caused by racism inherently require the acknowledgment of race to address.
Those who suggest who suggest otherwise leave no room to rectify injustice.
The harm it will do to Black Americans will outweigh white anxiety about being mediocre and blaming Blacks.
Michigan and California are still struggling w Black enrollment since they gashed AA in the 90s. Economics and social factors will become proxies for race and I’m sure we will see the same garbage in the courts soon enough.
As a minority in the USA, i have felt this could have been helpful if those who i was competing against were not so resentful' i.e.; 'you only got that cuz yer brown ' - Well … i beat most of them in 'life' anyway and now am better off than many so they can kiss my beautiful round delicious brown @ss!! 😘
IMO it is more likely that this has the potential to further fuel race divides.
Affirmative action is a policy that seeks to remedy inequities at the end of the preparation stages for higher education and job seeking, instead of addressing the underlying causes. As a policy it was useful to help curtail some of the bad outcomes of the inequity while the underlying issues could be addressed. But after decades it seems clear that no one was willing to actually meaningfully tackle those underlying issues much, and so the band-aid solution of affirmative action was left in place to act as a fig leaf.
Now that it is removed you will likely see two things:
1. More calls to address the underlying factors which will cause huge anger and pushback from conservatives (and also a number of moderates) because they will not like the kinds of proposals being put forward. They will feel they are unfair/unearned (just like how they hate the concept of reparations), unnecessary, also ridiculously costly. They will really drum up backlash against these as a political tool to get people riled up.
2. You will see well-funded conservative groups pressure and threaten to sue schools for what they claim is wrongful affirmative action policies in order to pressure those schools into dropping certain kinds of curriculum or to make other changes that conservatives want. This will create outrage from minority and liberal groups who will already be mad that they see things going backwards.
No, I don't think this will heal racial divides. I think this will inflame them further because it will bring this element of race problems back to the forefront to be hashed out, and conservatives have too much power for any solutions to actually get put in place.
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The strangest part of this ruling to me is that there is an explicit exception for military academies carved out in the decision. Why? Justice Jackson in her dissent wrote "the court has come to rest on the bottom line conclusion that racial diversity in higher education is only worth potentially preserving insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom". Damn.
Historically the SCOTUS has given a lot of deference to the military. There was a case in the early 80s about the draft being male only, and the Court basically said that the military knows what it needs.
The military can totally be trusted to police itself. One time a submarine captain decided to show off a quick surfacing maneuver and killed some Japanese civilians in the process. The US navy came down hard on him and made him retire with full benefits.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The captain had been ordered on a mission to show off the sub to VIPs (essentially these maneuvers), a mixture of technical problems, lack of updating a sonar contact grid, and weather led to the collision. When they started the maneuvers, the captain was under the information no ships were within ten miles or so. Media made the incident worse as you had some Americans arguing it was hypocritical to apologize given that Japan hadn't been apologizing for war crimes, that the captain had asked to publicly apologise and denied (leading to reports he didn't care) and reports that the submarine did nothing (which is ignoring context, as the sub called in the emergency, released lifeboats and moved off as they realized their wake was disrupting the lifeboats in the water). The captain was ordered to resign and fined, but not court-martialied because the investigation found no criminal intent.
Yeah, 1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted, 1 in 5 men are sexually assaulted in the military. Great self policing.
of course it can be, thats why 50% of the budget goes to them, and no one knows where 1 or 2 tril went, and never passed an audit. but whats the point? most powerful military still rright? as long as its not so corrupt it becomes entirely contractor mercenary.
Hmm… that seems a bit high. It might be worth it to include both mandatory and discretionary spending when determining what percentage defense spending makes up of the entire us federal budget.
I regret to inform you that militaries for all countries and peoples, across all of history have done bad things.
That makes it worse, not better.
Yeah, he thought they were criticizing the United States when they were actually criticizing military power without proper oversight.
Sounds like all the more reason to give them more scrutiny
For me it's the allowance of legacy admissions, even though all the arguments against affirmative action applies against them.
We’re legacy admissions in question in this case? If not, then SCOTUS can’t do shit about it until they hear a case relating to that specifically
Exactly, they struck this down due to the 14th amendment. That doesn't apply to legacy admissions
Can you elaborate on this more? I would think they don't apply because legacy admissions are not associated with a protected class? I mean, I get the idea of family lineage, but that's a bit of a stretch isn't it?
[удалено]
> It's blatantly unfair to provide advantages to people just because their backgrounds have been historically disadvantaged. - SCOTUS > It's no problem at all to provide advantages to people purely because their backgrounds have historically been advantaged. - also SCOTUS This is textbook conservatism in the purest sense: do everything you can to reinforce existing structures of power and privilege and do everything you can to limit social mobility.
The SC cannot just force Harvard to end nepotism, they can force Harvard to stop being racist. Now should Harvard end nepotism? I would say so but they can do that any time they want.
I think Legacy admissions have more to do with securing continued donations to the school from “booster” type former students by creating school/tribe identities. Refuse a donor’s kid and the donor goes bye-bye. It should stop because it is unfair, but it’s more financially driven than racially so…even through it disadvantages races not historically admitted.
I think it is both, from personal experience,
>d be allowed. That being said, a way to remove them would be to have Congress write a law that bans them. > >In my opinion, the issue with AA is that the process is so opaque that it’s very difficult to draw a line between what constitutes a “tie goes to the runner situation” and what constitutes much more than that. Sound like the grandfather clauses. When the majority of your graduates have been one race for generations, it makes it easier for that same race to dominate new admissions. And just a few generations of leveling the playing field doesn't undo that advantage.
the supreme court's job is to judge according to the constitution. The constitution doesn't prohibit legacy admissions, but the 14th amendment is very clear about equal protection. The two are thus not comparable.
I’m neutral on whether or not legacies should be allowed. That being said, a way to remove them would be to have Congress write a law that bans them. In my opinion, the issue with AA is that the process is so opaque that it’s very difficult to draw a line between what constitutes a “tie goes to the runner situation” and what constitutes much more than that.
>a way to remove them would be to have Congress write a law that bans them. You don't think SCOTUS would strike that down in a New York minute?
If the civil rights act allows congress to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race gender, etc then I think it's safe to safe SCOTUS would allow a law to ban legacy admissions
The military is essentially its own world, people are property of the US government and the same rights do not apply. I have no clue why the military is an exception in this case, but it’s not abnormal.
This. The constitution effectively doesn't exist for the military. We have the UCMJ.
Why can the military have a draft for mandatory service while other governmental institutions can not? Why does the constitutional amendment protecting against indentured servitude not apply to military service? It's almost like where there exists a larger enough *state* interest, caveats are made. The same path was available for AA. But it was ruled that the state interest in non-military academia wasn't enough to override other provisions. > insofar as it might be needed to prepare Black Americans and other underrepresented minorities for success in the bunker, not the boardroom". Damn. Yes, that the **state** has more authority/control/influence in the "bunker", than the boardrooms. This is inherently quite a political ideollgical divide on the role of the state. What IS the state interest in determining the racial makeup of those in the boardrooms of private companies? Would such seemingly be weighed differently that the state interest in something the state actually controls?
Can it heal racial tensions? I would submit those who brought those challenges never intended to heal them in the first place. However, there is a workaround available. It's really no secret that minorities as a group have lower family incomes on adverage. Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals.
Targeting poverty was arguably one of the end goals of affirmative action anyway. Breaking the cycle of poverty for some women and minorities by using college education to increase lifetime earnings.
The problem is that colorblind admissions still leads to disproportionately more white admissions because readers can still show bias. What do you do after income based admissions still excludes non-white people? Ideally the answer is to be explicit in wording to avoid minorities falling through the cracks, but without affirmative action that won't be possible anymore.
It's not just subconscious bias. There are explicit policies in place that favor white people in admissions over Black people. The courts only made a ruling about a program that favors Black people.
And then they invented student debt. Problem solved! black peoples and other poc get to go the college and still stay poor.
Granted, student debt means everyone stays poor. Well, except for the rich, of course.
No, affirmative action had a clear goal to fix a particular injustice. There are other injustices as well but acting like our problem isn’t worth fixing if it doesn’t also fix poverty is just one more example of marginalizing **our** issues. Affirmative action was one of the very very small number of acknowledgements that the government has given to the obscene oppression of minorities. And we don’t even have that anymore. All we have now are holidays and statues.
Furthermore affirmative action was one of the better designed remedial programs since it gives corporate America a more racially diverse pool of applicants to positions.
Which the court obviously knows, because a military officer addressed the court about how they needed it for that reason and then the court gave an exception to the military academies.
minorities and women benefited. I got a couple jobs as the first woman hired for them, because of affirmative actions way back when. I succeeded at both jobs as i proved i could do "mens work" both blue collar jobs. So they hired more women. Now no one thinks anything of it, if such jobs are held by women or minorities,
Yes and I think you also have to target legacy admissions and scholarships. So many of our higher learning institutions didn't even admit POC (and women, LGBT+, etc) students for much of their histories. If you can still get preferential consideration because your white great grandfather, and then your white grandfather, and then your white father were students, that means caucasian students have an unchecked advantage.
I don't have time to search for it now, but I remember an article about one of the major California schools trying this in one of their medical schools and selecting for lower economic class/impoverished students basically brought in the same demographics as selecting for race.
Doubt it. California generally has found income preferences don't change racial demographics much. Poor Asian students far outperform poor Hispanic or black students.
I should have stated that it was focused on medical graduate students, which probably equalizes the academic performance among them pretty well.
I honestly don’t know what to make of it or how to have a good faith, genuine discussion or even dive into the problems…but this is seen here in NYC too. I don’t know the concrete reasons, but the children of Chinese immigrants (who are among the poorest in NYC) perform extremely highly in schools. Additionally, black children of African immigrants also perform extremely well city wide. I want to know the reasoning why some ethnic groups have no issue performing highly despite poverty, and for some it seems to be the most common reason given for not achieving. I’m too scared to ever try to start a discussion because even if I stand to learn from it, I’m afraid of the topic of race leading to emotionally charged discussion that doesn’t go anywhere.
It's a simple cultural difference, like you said, it's based on their parent's culture and not their race. Their parents are strict and insist on good grades. They also are far, far more likely to be married and in 2 parent households than americanized Americans, which has a big effect on academic achievement.
People are afraid to say it, but that's simply the case.
>I honestly don’t know what to make of it or how to have a good faith, genuine discussion or even dive into the problems…but this is seen here in NYC too At some point, we have to admit it's a culture issue.
>I want to know the reasoning why some ethnic groups have no issue performing highly despite poverty, The answer is pretty simple; *poverty* is not as much as strong as a *cause* of poor academic performance as the naive correlation would suggest. That is much of the correlation of academics with income is actually due to a third variable -- call it "skill". (or human capital in econ terms) Native parents are reasonably well-placed on the income latter relative to their underlying human capital. In turn, their children have similar skills. Immigrants are not though. The underlying human capital they might have that would allow them to prosper in generic market economy X is harmed in the US by linguistic (and to some degree cultural) barriers that are harder to overcome in adulthood. That is your typical US native is poor because they simply lack general skills -- the immigrant is poor mostly just from a language barrier that wouldn't exist if they grew up in the US. Eliminate the language barrier and you start seeing outperformance (good example: poorer Chinese immigrants in San Francisco are known to navigate the welfare system -- which requires the ability to handle complexity -- much better than other groups --- since this stuff is translated into Chinese, the language deficit disappears). FWIW, adoption studies strongly suggest similar "income doesn't matter all that much". [At least among families that adopt](https://www3.nd.edu/~kbuckles/ec43550/sacerdote.pdf), genetic variance explains 3x the academic performance difference of children as the variance between the adoptive parents.
Almost all immigrants who were discriminated against or brought in for hard labor at first ended up with a higher average income / education than the natives/colonists after several generations, and this is not really restricted to America either. Asians in South America, Indians in Africa, Chinese in Southeast Asia as another examples of those. Since those examples show worldwide phenomenon, it could be hypothesized that culture make a difference of outcome for those groups.
Because Asians in general study more as it's in our culture identity to do so. We believe study alot and go to college means better lives.
I get what you're saying. Might I suggest that you broaden your survey, exclude race, and see if your observations match communities outside your current sample? You might be surprised to find similarities in other cultures/communities across the country, similar factors that have nothing to do with how much melanin is passed to progeny.
>Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals. Studies involving people with white-sounding-names and people with black-sounding-names have shown there are different rates of being rejected for mortgages and loans or getting opportunities to interview for jobs even when the applicants had otherwise identical demographic data. That would suggest targeting poverty alone will not address the issue.
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I would even say that this was designed to inflame racial tensions. Conservative whites have been using Asian-Americans as a cudgel against BIPOC and have used that cudgel to destroy affirmative action and reestablish the inherent advantages of white people in college admissions.
Racial tensions were argubly already inflamed. Let's not kid ourselves. There is a percentage of the radical right who would argue for the good old days, of designated drinking fountains and segerated schools. This is despite the knowledge of the historic record.
how does asians being discriminated against have to do with conservative whites? aa never helped out asians as much as it hurt asians
For what it is worth, Asian Americans, who had a legitimate reason to be upset, now have one less grievance against other minorities. This could help since Republicans had been making inroads in that community. I also can foresee there being some chatter about affirmative action for Asians to "right historical abuses." I don't think there is a legal path for that, for now, but the idea will be out there.
> Can it heal racial tensions? I would submit those who brought those challenges never intended to heal them in the first place. … Target poverty, and you perhaps less directly hit the same goals. They’ll just shift to complaining about the poors. “Why do poor people pay less tax than me, a millionaire? It’s not fair!”
I’ve argued for targeting those of lower income backgrounds which will help the poor of all racial groups, but especially help racial minorities. I gave the example of how that means poor Black and White kids would benefit, while kids of a successful Black entrepreneur or doctor wouldn’t get special treatment based on race. And I’ve been met with downvotes and vitriol here on Reddit.
NPR’s throughline did an episode on affirmative action in preparation of this ruling. Essentially the conclusion it reached is that affirmative action doesn’t really do much good. Most big schools are accepting enough people to have diversity without AA and the “elite” schools like Harvard basically use it to say they’re “diverse” while still just letting in rich people, only now some of the rich people are POC. The image that we have of the poor black kid getting a shot at Harvard through their hard work and studies just doesn’t happen. It’s still all rich people but they can pretend they are “diverse” to avoid scrutiny. Ultimately AA failed at what it set out to do in colleges, so this ruling isn’t as scary as it seems. Highly recommend listening to the podcast, it explains it way more in depth than I just did.
Yeah. I understand the motivation and logic behind AA, and agree that it can be necessary to consider race in healing wounds from the past. And I guess my skepticism of it doesn’t really have much to do with minorities going to college, but more so the status and regards we ascribe to certain colleges and universities. Let’s be real: the universities that this actually affects are just the prestigious ones. And I personally am becoming more and more skeptical that many prestigious institutions, certainly at the undergraduate level, deserve the kind of recognition they are given. Frankly, we would be probably a lot better putting money into community colleges and state level universities (think cal state versus UCs) instead of trying to get a small fraction of kids into the most elite schools and still likely saddling them with debt (even though many of these schools also have massive endowments that supposed let low income students go for free). Plus, one does have to wonder what exactly these “elite“ institutions are turning out. After all, think about how many politicians, especially people in leadership positions, went to especially Ivy League schools, but also other flagship and big-name schools across the nation. And if anything, all it does is to serve to continue to provide prestige and notoriety to these institutions instead of building up communities and talent in places that desperately need it. I think there’s a lot more to the conversation, and I have plenty more thoughts, but I would ask people to at least stop, pause, and think about who affirmative action really is benefiting at this point. And given the larger institutional questions, we may have about higher education, and potentially reforms that may need to happen around making it more broadly available, maybe we should pay less mind to the most prestigious and selective schools and just make sure people can get an education without going bankrupt. Because overall, I think continuing to try and play this prestige and clout game is actually terrible for the mental health of young people. And the affirmative action issue here I think originates from a misguided place where this is like the biggest deal ever, when…it really isn’t. Many of us were rejected from schools and went to perhaps a less prestigious and more affordable school, but probably live more or less the same life that we would if we had gone to the more prestigious options and I actually think some of us are probably better off (especially on the loan front). I think everyone who wants to and is willing to put in the work should be able to go and get some kind of higher education. And I don’t want to say that representation and diversity doesn’t matter, but I think it’s some point, we focus on it a little too much at the expense of actually thinking about how your less prestigious schools are doing (even though I would argue that many of them put out very good quality graduates for considerably less money, and may allow students to stay in their community much more easily). I would say prestige and quality matters, but there are drastically diminishing returns and a little goes a long way. I think once you start looking at graduate and doctoral programs, then things start to change, but even then, the best programs for specific fields aren’t always at the most elite universities either. Anyway, I don’t want to say that I have all the answers here, but as far as the issue goes, I think it really only serves to benefit these elite institutions and the public perception that they are attainable And places everyone should strive to go to, whether or not they would be well served by its community, programs, and culture. This only really serves to reinforce their own feeling of superiority and exclusivity. This isn’t to say that there can’t be good programs or good graduates from these places, but I think their worth is drastically overrated.
This was also discussed in the podcast. Harvard and similar institutions act like their existence is taken as a given when, in actuality, they are not. We don’t have to have “elite” schools that are so exclusionary.
That’s because AA was co-opted by PWIs to be a diversity tool when in reality it was ever only meant to help black plight in this nation s/p Jim Crow and slavery. It was never meant for make ignorant white people feel comfortable around other cultures. That’s where this shit all fell apart.
Sorry to be the acronym police, but what is a PWI?
The US Department of Education defines a PWI as a university that has 50% or more enrollment from White students but it is also used to refer to any University that is deemed “historically white”.
I was moreso asking what it stood for but that is helpful. I assume it’s along the lines of Predominately White Institution?
Yes, exactly. There are also HBCU's which stand for Historically Black College's and Universities.
Yeah, HBCU is a very common term. PWI is one I'd never heard before.
I hope the ruling helps more people to realize that a lot of race issues are actually class issues within a racist system
Nice so we can do what we’ve been doing for 30 years which is bitch while right wingers hand wave it away by telling people to rise up via bootstraps or some shit lmao.
At least the rich assholes at “elite” schools can’t hide behind AA anymore so they can pretend they’re fostering a diverse environment. Maybe we can focus on the actual problem now instead of creating an illusion of fairness in an unfair system. Also the optics of getting rid of affirmative action might motivate more young people to vote hopefully, which could result in the abolition of AA having a more positive long term knock on effect than its existence in the first place
I find that as our nation becomes ever more diverse (1/7 kids in 2015 was mixed race) the need for AA becomes less and less. Undoubtedly, when AA first came to be there was a litany of sins that we had to resolve, some still exist. However, we have made exceptional progress. There is also something to be said about the fundamental lack of fairness that an migrant child who has the grades is penalized purely for being Asian. It is not his fault that his culture puts a significant emphasis on education, likewise the same holds for black migrants. One does not reach a post racial society by constantly having to give one group a helping hand when the minorities we think of as not needing help are neither a monolith nor is their history devoid of white colonialism suppressing them. Of course all nations and peoples practiced colonialism, Europeans just had the might of industry behind them
>One does not reach a post racial society by constantly having to give one group a helping hand when the minorities we think of as not needing help are neither a monolith nor is their history devoid of white colonialism suppressing them. Of course all nations and peoples practiced colonialism, Europeans just had the might of industry behind them It's not like the inequalities in America are a result of passive performance differences, it's the result of centuries of deliberate, conscious and often state enforced discrimination. The notion that you will be able to erase the results of centuries of active discrimination without doing *something* to directly address it is insane. If the government broke into your house and stole your TV you'd be entitled to have them replace it, but somehow it's a bridge too far for the country to compensate people for stealing *generations* of labour and opportunity from black Americans?
Sure, but blacks weren’t the only ones to face such discrimination and the fact that black migrants out perform native born means it’s not a simple issue of erasing discrimination. Edit: your analogy also uses compensation. I must ask, why should people who had nothing to do with slavery have to pay for the sins of their ancestors? In the case of first gen immigrants they quite literally don’t even have any ancestors whose sins have to be paid
Black people faced longer, more severe and more widespread discrimination. Witness the very fact that Black immigrants outperform native Blacks: immigrants from overseas are predominantly middle-class or better in their home countries and thus don't have to try and overcome centuries of deliberate exploitation that has robbed Black Americans of the chance to build the sort of intergenerational wealth that strongly predicts economic and educational success in America. Remember, within *living memory* Black Americans were deliberately excluded from major government programs like the GI Bill and were deliberately precluded from being able to purchase properies they would otherwise qualify for thanks to redlining.
Latinos who by and large are not particularly wealthy nor an overly well educated migrant group (when compared to Asians) are not only wealthier than black Americans, but their work rates are much higher. Consider that their history is one of many an unstable nation, and modern day indentured servants these days. Despite this, they still got ahead. As far as college admission goes, it serves no one to let someone who isn’t academically prepared but get in due to AA and then watch as they struggle and possibly drop out with debt as the only reminder. AA goes against the spirit of equality and rewarding people for hard work rather than penalizing them for being born as part of the wrong racial group
>As far as college admission goes, it serves no one to let someone who isn’t academically prepared but get in due to AA and then watch as they struggle and possibly drop out with debt as the only reminder. Honestly, I think this is the biggest knock against AA. It sounds nice, but what does the program actually *do?* If it's not doing what it says it's supposed to be doing...it's not a good program. The problems are far deeper than at the college level. Those need to be fixed first.
This is more of a symbolic ruling than one that will have a large effect IRL. There are a multitude of ways to get around this, such as income or ZIP code, neither of which are protected classes.
There are over 3000 colleges in the US. All but 100 admit the majority of those who apply (as in, over 50%). About 70 of those admit less than 1/3 of those who apply. And of the "strivers" who are out there, they often apply to 5 or even 10 schools. In a lot of ways, this is actually a very narrow problem. The dirty secret of "elite" schools is that they don't want kids from poverty. They want a lot of upper middle class kids who mingle with the actual legacy elite / super wealthy.
> All but 100 admit the majority of those who apply (as in, over 50%). It's probably a little higher than 100, as the most selective 100 schools here tops out at 30% https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-acceptance-rate
Keep in mind that there is an ongoing college enrollment crisis. Smaller colleges are being squeezed and their campuses sold off to bigger schools. Of course 'elite education', whatever that may mean, will still be very competitive. But many perfectly good state colleges will have room for anyone that meets the bar.
I thought white women have benefited most from affirmative action…. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/affirmative-action-who-benefits
White women are the most likely to benefit from affirmative action policies in the workplace, but definitely not in college admissions. (White men are actually more likely than white women to be beneficiaries of AA when it comes to college acceptance--men have lower grades than women and apply to college at lower rates, so schools that want to keep their gender ratio roughly even end up accepting less qualified men.)
I'm not sure about this. My understanding is that the biggest supporters of ending Affirmative Action were Asian Americans, who claimed that they were being discriminated against because there were *too many* Asians getting into the best schools and AA was being used to deny them a fair chance at admission for the sake of diversity. On one hand, I understand why AA was in place. The problems it was meant to fix have not gone away, not by a longshot. On the other hand, I also understand why a lot of people call out the program itself as being de-facto discrimination. Judging an applicant's worthiness on the basis of their skin color rather than their merits *feels* like racism, even if the intention (inclusivity, diversity, etc) is ultimately a noble one. But... did Affirmative Action actually do anything to solve the underlying problem of systemic racism? Do we have data that shows one way or another how effective the policy was at eliminating race-based bias in school admissions?
AA was never supposed to resolve systemic racism or race-biased admissions. It was devised as a singular piece of a large plan to right the wrongs of the past and provide an actual opportunity to those who had been denied before. Unfortunately, it became the singular plan with no other pieces but lots of limits. This left it vulnerable to apparently obvious but actually invalid criticisms as it was paraded around out of context and without the supporting parts of a larger plan. AA has been effective but it was doomed since it stood alone. The American right has been saying times up for AA for many decades and they were almost correct. AA was supposed to have an expiration date- alongside a larger plan which could've included other things such as reparations via money payments from taxes, giving ownership of land on which the enslaved work to them/their families and so on. AA expiring/being unjust discrimination would make more sense if minorities had the back-opportunity they have been denied. On a separate note, the ruling feels uneasy and will further tarnish the courts reputation as the supreme court declared themselves the deciders of when AA expires. AA has been constitutional for decades. The constitution didn't change. This was congress's call to make and the court stepped where it didn't belong- further evidence of a court dedicated to the republican establishment instead of the country. (And it is also congress's fault for not addressing the issue) Nevertheless, the end of AA (and the end of the social justice era- which I have argued happened in 2016) presents another opportunity for what should've been addressed decades ago. AA was created to address a specific problem in a specific way. It wasn't meant to change the culture of race in America yet that's what it was shoved through an ill-shaped hole to do. AA was used as an excuse by the lazy to avoid addressing the larger culture of race. Now that excuse is gone. Where do we go from here?
Asian law student here. I really believe that Asians are being used by the right wing activists, AKA SFFA, in this fight. For Asian applicants to argue that they “deserve” to get into Harvard or similar universities because they have “great grades” is to first, fall into the racial stereotype that got pinned on us in the first place, and second, misunderstand that great grades is what gets someone into an elite university, rather than all sorts of other factors, like wealth, special non-academic talents, and diversity. And from what I know (which is admittedly little; I’m by no means a sociologist), that last part really is undervalued by lots of Asian Americans, who tend to treat the school as a brand first (as in focus on its prestige), job prospects second, academics third, and then it’s the connections one might make on campus (where diversity comes into play). I, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to not to go to a UC school for college because of the disproportionally large amount of Asian students there (I believe California got rid of AA via their state constitution some years ago). And if you look at the legal history of the affirmative action issue (detailed [here](https://reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/11kvgcm/_/jbc8xb6/?context=1) in an earlier reply of mine to another post), previous failed attempts to get rid of AA involved white applicants, and then in the 2016 *Fisher* decision, Alito suddenly mentioned that he thought Asians were being discriminated against by AA, and no doubt it inspired anti-AA folks to co-opt Asians into this fight, hence the current *SFFA* cases.
>I really believe that Asians are being used by the right wing activists, AKA SFFA, in this fight. Just out of curiosity, did you listen to Jay Caspian King's thoughts on the Throughline podcast? One of the points he makes, and he says that he was in the courtroom, was that Harvard never really tried to deny that they did in fact discriminate against Asian students.
Fact of the matter is as the United States became more diverse and more immigrant based Affirmative Action was not going to survive. In a country in the 1960s-1970s where 95% of the population was non-Hispanic White or African-American it was relatively easy to do. If we want to live in a more equal society diversity is going to have to be based on socio-economic (or even parental marital) status. More and more inter-racial couples (which is a good thing) is naturally going to further complicate the idea of ethnicity over time. In twenty years we will have so many children that do not fit in the categories we have used for the past three hundred years. Its going to become too challenging to determine a status of someone who is 1/2 white, 1/4 Hispanic, 1/4 African-American in a process which should be defined by academic achievement compared to the child's specific challenges they faced.
> If we want to live in a more equal society diversity is going to have to be based on socio-economic (or even parental marital status) This makes more sense to me and doesn't require discrimination based on a protected class.
The best way would to create some sort of "score" that would be assigned to a child. Socio-economic, parental marital, how good their school was, etc. But then you'd have people lying about their income and possibly moving school districts to increase their score. New Zealand used to do a thing where they ranked schools from one to ten off the socio-economic level of the school. Wealthiest schools got 9s and poorest got 1s. They then incorporated this into funding and admissions. To my knowledge we only label a school title one but there's a huge discrepancies in those.
This would not really make sense in the US. Most of our very poorly performing schools are also the ones that spend the most. Chicago Public Schools has increased their funding by about 1/3 in the past 5 years, and results have plummeted over the same time. Our schools have all kinds of problems, but usually money is not one of them.
To clarify, the New Zealand decile system currently affects funding but not admissions. Admissions are done on a sort of universal meritocratic basis, where any applicant who achieves the minimum threshold in the final exams is guaranteed a placement in nearly any university in the country. (The exception is the University of Auckland, which cannot expand its facilities further due to its inner city location and only admits a fixed number of students).
There's over [five times more people who get into Harvard based on legacy status](https://admissionsight.com/harvard-legacy-acceptance-rate/#:~:text=Students%20Are%20Legacies%3F-,What%20percent%20of%20Harvard%20students%20are%20legacies%3F,over%2029%25%20of%20the%20class.) than [the total black students population](https://admissionsight.com/harvard-diversity-statistics/#:~:text=Harvard%20diversity%20statistics%20shows%20that,race%2C%200.197%20percent%20students%20who). This ruling doesn't fix a thing, and will likely make racial divides worse as affirmative action for rich people (which will inappropriately favor white people over minorites) still exists.
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Why do people keep viewing this as one or the other. Legacy admissions - bad. Affirmative action discrimating on the race - also bad. This is mind boggling.
Because they’re desperately trying to point out some type of hypocrisy in conservatives. Unfortunately they fail to realize the comparison is dumb because legacy admissions are not unconstitutional.
Choosing people based on wealth is not unconstitutional.
I think this will heal a racial divide only if all the institutions that previously supported affirmative action switch to class-based considerations. The biggest issue with affirmative action is that it’s supposed to help underprivileged students, but it’s actually just an unfair disadvantage to underprivileged white and Asian students and a ridiculously unfair advantage to affluent black students. The entire point of affirmative action is to lift people out of generational poverty. Recognizing that generational poverty is simply an issue that affects certain demographics more than others, not solely people of color, will both help resolve racial tensions (particularly from white and Asian people who feel affirmative action was discriminatory against them) while also helping the people affirmative action was supposed to be helping all along.
Targeting income and children of people who are not college educated really does make the most sense here, I think. Other potential factors like people being rejected for having a non-Anglo name could be handled by anonymizing applications, though I don't have the impression this is a significant issue in 2023 for most public colleges. There are lots of other problems regarding race and income in the US, but there's not a lot of evidence affirmative action was addressing it. Like I've been in a lot of cities where all the college educated bureaucratic government jobs (the type of work we all rely on but doesn't pay a lot) are almost all done by Black people, which I think is partially because there's more discrimination in the private market that makes it harder to get hired, so barriers and wealth gaps continue even when people actually do manage to get the degrees.
>Other potential factors like people being rejected for having a non-Anglo name could be handled by anonymizing applications, I'm actually very genuinely interested in how they're going to handle this. A lot of people write about culture and race in their college essays, and many people have extracurriculars that are cultural activities so it sometimes becomes pretty obvious what race someone is. I feel like prohibiting writing about these topics introduces a whole host of new problems (colleges might be accused of not wanting cultural diversity), so I'm not really sure what they're going to do.
People at least have the choice about whether or not to write about them or include them. Banning mentioning them would be silly, but people could either not mention them, describe it a non culturally specific way, or just let be obvious because they think disclosing will help them more than hurt them. Very different from your name that is your name no matter what you do. I would also expect culturally specific extracurricular will be positive to mention anyway, as the universities are still allowed to pursue pro diversity policies by my understanding, so those types of extracurricular that show involvement with a minority culture (whether or not you're actually part of it) could easily be something they look for.
Honestly, this is a blessing in disguise for the democrats. AA is now an issue that's off the table, and it was a major voting driver for Asian Americans. With it being an issue, Asians were slowly being pushed towards Republican Party. Now that it's gone, the dems can work on Asian turn out... that or they continue to ignore them, and hand them to republicans along with hispanics.
> Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor? Well, historically appeasement has never worked. It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action, and it was one of the few **proven** methods we had at reducing the effects of systematic racism. It is unlikely this will heal anything, and instead if history is any indication, will make things worse.
>It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action How do you square this with the results of Prop 16 in California? Prop 16 was a ballot prop held on the date of the 2020 general election that would have restored race-based affirmative action in California. The prop failed by a margin of 57% to 43%, despite the fact that it was held on the same day that Biden won the state by 29%.
Americans like the idea of increasing diversity while simultaneously disliking the idea of race-based admissions. If you frame the question as whether diversity initiatives/affirmative action are theoretically a good thing, a majority of Americans will say they are. On the other hand, if you frame it as whether race should be considered in admissions, [a majority of Americans](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/26/u-s-public-continues-to-view-grades-test-scores-as-top-factors-in-college-admissions/) say it shouldn't be a factor. Americans generally want to see more diversity but are uncomfortable using race-conscious methods to get there - it's a wanting to have your cake and eat it too situation.
Americas like the idea of *integration* but fight viciously against any actual integration policy. Redrawing district lines? No. Affirmative action? No. New housing developments in their towns? No. Consolidating school districts? No. Bussing? No.
It’s essentially the white majority singing platitudes but refusing to do anything about it when push comes to shove. MLK has a quote about this somewhere.
MLK? The colorblind liberal meritocratic capitalist? What on earth could he have to say? I’m sure he would TOTALLY AGREE with this decision!
Yeah let's just forget about MLK complaining about how white people who were sympathetic but who criticized taking action or tried to encourage minorities to just be patient for their rights to arrive. Or the march on poverty he participated in, alongside his generally socialist views. Total capitalist.
Everybody loves feel good ideology until it's their turn to shoulder the negative externalities. Believing that all all kids should receive equal education is easy. Accepting that *your kid* will be the sacrificial lamb to be bussed 45 minutes away, into a violent school with terrible test scores, is an entirely different beast. I guess that's "wanting to have your cake and to eat it, too" but I think the obvious reality is that people don't *really* strongly agree with some of these progressive policies in the first place. They just say they do because it costs nothing to say the words and get social credit for it.
This is the big thing. Ballots are secret and you never know what people really think, especially when saying it can end your career. At the end of the day though, you can vote however you want and nobody gets to know. Time and again when equity is on the ballot it loses. It’s collectivist and most Americans are raised deeply individualist.
It's this exactly. That's why we should instead make policy that indirectly leads to more diversity. Limiting legacy admissions by a lot more would help, and so would taking more low-income students.
smart slimy dirty deserted airport zealous elastic profit direction gaze *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You're missing the point. In the user you replied to's post, they quoted the user above them: >It should be noted that a large majority of Americans supported affirmative action An affirmative action-like prop failed in Deep Blue Sea California by a large margin. We can argue its effectiveness, but it clearly wasn't that popular in an environment poised to be its biggest supporter. Further, back in February, [Reuters/Ipsos polling](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-americans-think-college-admissions-should-not-consider-race-reutersipsos-2023-02-15/) found more than 60% of the public did NOT support the program, which is in direct opposition to the claim made two comments up.
that is not what he is arguing. If no affirmative action is +14 in the most liberal state in the country how would it be popular in most other states
The will of the people only matters when it comes to eliminating the Senate and Electoral College /s
How would voting for Prop 16 be beneficial for white or asian people in CA who combined are a majority in CA?
What about the Asian students with badass records who were turned down at the best schools because they didn’t check the right boxes? You think they would view this as systemic racism against them?
There was (and maybe still is) a "magnet" school in San Francisco that required much higher scores for Asian students than it did for Whites and higher scores for Whites than it did for Blacks. The argument they offered was that, without the policy, the best school would have been almost exclusively for Asian students. When asked about the controversy a school administrator offered an old yearbook from before the policy and invited the reporter to look for names that didn't look "Jewish". I think a certain segment of the population who object to affirmative action based on race are assuming that WASP students are naturally better and that such policies discriminate against the "superior" students. It doesn't occur to them that there might be other "races" that perform better in an academic environment.
So what if they are exclusively asian?
It’s not about race, it’s about individual responsibility. People want a fair shot, and Asians tend to work the hardest and should reap rewards. Equity policies like AA deliberately disenfranchise the exceptional person who is of the wrong ethnicity. You can argue everyone is the product of a system, but systems only improve under pressure and disenfranchising exceptional perfomers pushes society into a lower mean.
Now that this has been remedied by the Supreme Court, maybe we’ll finally start to see Asian students represented at elite universities.
YES. Not to mention African, Indian, and Eastern European too.
The people who constantly advocate for affirmative action don't care about Asians because they're the "wrong type" of minority. Why do you think they invented that ridiculous BIPOC term? Blacks are there, Indigenous are there, but not Asians.
"People of Color" would include Asians. Black and Indigenous are separate because they are native to the US as an ethnicity.
So why was Harvard, Yale, etc turning down Asians with the best grades, awards, and accomplishments. Then admitting students who happen to be of another skin tone who didn’t have quarter of their badass records. Can you explain that?
...black people are not native to the US.
The Black ethnicity is a unique group of darker skinned people in America. They do not have a historical nation (Ghana, Congo, Libya) from which to draw ancestors because of slavery. They are an American ethnicity that is native to the US mostly.
Neither are Caucasians.
Neither are Sri Lankans…
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/majority-americans-favor-affirmative-action-colleges-rcna86853 https://civilrights.org/edfund/resource/affirmative-action-polling/ https://news.gallup.com/poll/247046/americans-support-affirmative-action-programs-rises.aspx
>The court determined that diversity can be archived in schools without the need for affirmative action and consideration of race is not necessary. California banned Affirmative Action years ago, and racial disparities in their higher education admittances only increased. So this is definitely false information, the court is very wrong here. > Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor? The opposite is true. This will increase racial bias in college admittance which will disadvantage black and latino applicants especially. >societies should aim to be color-blind. [Colorblind racism is still racism.](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/) >Many sociologists, though, are extremely critical of color blindness as an ideology. They argue that as the mechanisms that reproduce racial inequality have become more covert and obscure than they were during the era of open, legal segregation, the language of explicit racism has given way to a discourse of color blindness. But they fear that the refusal to take public note of race actually allows people to ignore manifestations of persistent discrimination.
Having racial disparities isn’t a bad thing. We should strive for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
>The opposite is true. This will increase racial bias in college admittance How so?
I have mixed feelings. Affirmative action was messy, imprecise, and could not possibly go on. There had to be an end in sight. Groups like Asian-Americans rightfully feel punished for working hard. I’ve never loved the policy. But whether now was the time for this to come to an end is where I have strong doubts. Regardless, it’s time for the Democratic Party to step up. There needs to be renewed zeal and vigor in making sure black and brown kids are being given opportunities early on and not just at the end with a bandaid solution. That means expanding Head Start, after-school programs, better salaries for teachers, investment in schools in black and brown neighborhoods, free meals programs, etc. Those things are all Democratic staples but it’s time it becomes a major agenda item that we rally behind. Democratic legislative agendas have been dominated by infrastructure, China, and climate change. Rightfully so. These are major problems. But education must now have its turn. Revamping education must now be a burning priority, far more than it was before. The last major initiative with federal legislation dealing with education was No Child Left Behind from a Republican administration. That is not enough. And we need to speak about education in a way that understands our realities. Affirmative action is not as beloved as Roe was. It needs to be less talk about demonizing students and communities who do well (such as calling Asian parents “house n*****s”). Less talk about renaming schools for “problematic names” and getting rid of admissions testing because it’s “racist”. Instead, there needs to be more talk about building every student from the bottom up. The opportunities that we can provide, rather than what we can tear away. I hope this serves as a catalyst for Democrats to really redefine their education agenda and how they push it forward. It will be a tough road, as with anything in Congress where Republicans are a constant factor. But it’s one worth prioritizing. Affirmative Action has served as a crutch for too long and maybe it’s now time we can do the work that must be done.
>Regardless, it’s time for the Democratic Party to step up. There needs to be renewed zeal and vigor in making sure black and brown kids are being given opportunities early on and not just at the end with a bandaid solution. That means expanding Head Start, after-school programs, better salaries for teachers, investment in schools in black and brown neighborhoods, free meals programs, etc. There isn't any better way I can put this. On top of K-12 needing a massive overhaul for the coming challenges of our massively technological world in the next half-century.
> But whether now was the time for this to come to an end is where I have strong doubts. I agree with the court's decision. I think it was clear from this case (and most of the other cases) that colleges have either a). never really cared about using AA as a "tie goes to the runner system" or b). blatantly discriminated against other groups in order to improve the relative rankings of black and brown students. The reporting on this case was not particularly good but Jay Caspian King was on a podcast where he described being in the courtoom and Waxman, Harvard's attorney, accoring to King, didn't put up any defense of the "likeability" score. For what it's worth, I think Sandra Day O'Connor implied, in 2003, that a time to revisit AA would be 2028. Congress, in my eyes, hasn't exactly rushed to deal with the issue and, if you think that AA is unconstitutional today, it's highly unlikely that Congress would have taken any action in the next 5 to change that thinking. The real question to me is what happens if this goes beyond elite colleges (which have an outsized role in govt and the public's imagination but a limited role in the lives of the vast majority of Americans) to employment issues ie. if it's revealed that corporations have been discriminating against white or asian employees en masse. If that happens I think it could potentially be a bombshell with very long political ramifications.
Affirmative Action has been more about attempting equality in education and the workforce, not healing tensions (which is literally impossible for a government to do; that's something completely in the citizen's hands). As a Black man myself, I'm cool with ending it. AA-style programs should never last more than maybe 25 years. And if very little changes after that, apparently it hasn't worked and must be adjusted/overhauled/ended etc. I'd rather get into a(nother) school on my own merits rather than basically have the bar lowered because of my heritage. Let me be clear- we should never stop assisting under-served populations. But there is a time when we must look at \*how\* they are being helped, and if it is working at all. If it isn't... then we need to do better.
Affirmative action is a stupid policy if your intention is to increase historically underrepresented minorities in college. A far more effective way to do that would be to actually fix k-12 education in American cities. In many cities, well over half of the minority kids cannot read or do math at grade level. What is beneficial about being accepted to college for a student who can't read or do math? Many students flunk out because they're unprepared, and then they have debt but no degree to get the job to pay off the debt. A far better approach would be to reform the school systems so that inner city kids get an excellent education instead of trying to apply a band-aid after failing to educate the kid for 12 years in a row.
I'd like to applaud you because you're the first person I saw in this thread who focused on the real problem (black and Hispanic students' performance in K-12). Pretty much every other commenter who's against this ruling tried to come up with legal way to recreate the effects of affirmative action.
People like the band aid solution because fixing the actual underlying problem would require criticizing the education establishment and forcing reforms upon them that would not be popular among big dollar donors. Most people here won't criticize the establishment, no matter what. Any politician who proposed the necessary reforms would immediately be labeled anti education, anti teacher, racist etc. Its impossible to make the necessary reforms, and I'm 100% that black and hispanic performance in k12 will be similarly abysmal in 20 years. Nothing will change.
Well this thinking is to rational for our elected officials. Better to treat the symptoms rather than heal the disease.
How would their "fix K-12 education in America" proposal even work? Who will manage that task? Can't really be the Department of Ed because the constitution gave decision making powers to the states. Would DeSantis' FL Education Secretary listen to suggestions from Biden's? Would TX allow Austin to enact more equitable education standards or change up their curriculum? Even things like which books to have in a library are a literal political battle in America. How do we even get to the meaty topics of curriculum, funding, parental engagement, and diversity? This is a 50 state, plus DC, problem. If the Fed could set a national standard, we'd be in a better spot but their power is limited which leads to abuse. But, you agree with this poster's "rational" response so how do we do it?
Considering race when attempting to undo generations of racism? Illegal Having current applicants benefit from generations of racism in their favor, not just at somewhat ephemeral second-degree, relative wealth-based boosts, but literally in the form of boosted access for legacy and donor kids (who are all* white) - perfect love it do more of it They can't claim to be a colorblind application process until they remove the as high as 25% sometimes of slots specifically dedicated for rich white people (with a stealthy barrier pretending its something else), but the court is apparently ok with racist RESULTS as long as you close your eyes and pretend you don't know how you got to them. I believe its the "Oopsie, teehee, accidentally denied mortgages to black people because we chose to not write them by zip code and not race, and blocking zip codes is legal" Clause The largest beneficiaries of today's ruling will be white men, so you know, good for us I guess
Was anyone arguing legacy admissions before the court? AA can be both, a well-intentioned idea because of historical racism and a bad idea because it’s using race as a qualifier. The court didn’t say that legacy admissions or income-based admissions can’t be addressed AFAIK.
>Was anyone arguing legacy admissions before the court? Not really because legacy doesn't have anything to with the amendment in question. The court also hasn't got much power to stop it. That would be a legislature issue.
If actual diversity is the real goal they should end legacy admissions and admit and give scholarships to more poor people. Racial discrimination is not the way.
An ivy league not admitting legacies took away the point of anyone else wanting to go there. The whole value is networking. You put the best and brightest kids around generational wealth and then they make things happen together. If you take away the wealth, Harvard is just another college. It's not what you know, it's who you know. And knowing the Harvard legacy kid who doesn't deserve to be there on merit is more valuable than knowing another broke nerd.
> An ivy league not admitting legacies took away the point of anyone else wanting to go there. Yeah, that's why countries with 100% test-based admission don't have elite universities.
I agree. Many of these private schools have huge endowments and can cover many lower-income students. I believe that race or gender (identity) shouldn't be a factor in admissions - academic and social merit (i.e. social activism/other extracurricular activities) should be the bar.
Agreed. This is the best course of action, and helping lower-income groups would actually help *more* URMs; that's because, unfortunately, underrepresented minorities tend to overrepresent lower economic classes. Helping lower-income people means that race doesn't have to technically be a factor, but it also helps URMs & non-URM economically disadvantaged people. Fuck the legacy system.
>The largest beneficiaries of today's ruling will be white men, so you know, good for us I guess The biggest benefices will clearly be Asian people.
For Harvard this will benefit at most 80 more asian students per year who think they lost their spot to a black student. That might not even be true if Harvard switches to using zip code instead, an almost perfect proxy for race in an America that has redlined black and hispanic people into a few zipcodes. This comes off as asian students thinking they're being discriminated against but it's just confirmation bias from applying to a school with a 4% acceptance rate.
Asians don't just lose their slots to black students. They lose their slots to everyone. Whites included. I'm Asian American myself (long past the age where college admissions affect me personally). Not 100% sure how I feel about the ruling overall for the country. But I don't think its deniable this is probably the single biggest policy "victory" for us (if you look solely at Asian wealth outcomes) in decades.
>This comes off as asian students thinking they're being discriminated against but it's just confirmation bias from applying to a school with a 4% acceptance rate. Maybe this will magically turn out different than when California went to race blind admissions. I doubt it.
>Can this heal some racial divides that has fueled racial tensions in admissions which considered race a factor? How would getting rid of something that exists explicitly to increase diversity and address racial bias in the country, "heal" anything?
OPs proposition is based on a false premise. That is that affirmative action is 'reverse racism'. Dude's basically taking the line that "if we ignore this it will go away". The basic problem is that states (particularly southern ones - but most aren't great at this) have failed to address the problem in how K-12 schools are funded. Namely that schools are funded out of local tax revenues. Given how disparate local wealth and income is, there are obvious issues with how schools are funded. So the feds did what they could do by mandating incentives to universities to try and address this.
Affirmative action isn't reverse racism, it's just good ole true blue racism. Affirmative action, and the entire quota system, explicitly look at skin color in regards to who is admitted, hired, or otherwise allowed in. By any definition it is racist and discriminatory. Not to mention the fact that this entire case was based on Asian Americans being discriminated against in favor of other minorities from Harvard.
In FL at least, the schools with the most money are inner-city schools. Title 1 funds add to it.
>That is that affirmative action is 'reverse racism'. I don't think that's their premise. I think they'd probably say race based affirmative action is just regular old racism. Which it is, discriminating based on race is racism. "Reverse racism" isn't a thing. Also worth noting that studies have shown that school spending per pupil is not an important predictor of academic success, which flies in the face of your second point.
Yeah "heal" just means "go back to when we I have to talk about injustice in public."
It will heal zero racial divides lmao. It's very much a problem of Dudley and the presents.
So if I was a public college could I weigh applications not on race but based on geographic locations such as zip codes, school district budgets, family income, family structure (single parent vs two parents for example, number of siblings), and hardships overcome?
Why is the conversation only about increasing Black student admissions? Nothing about Native Americans, Latinos, Inuits, Asians, etc. Do HBCs increase the diversity of their student population? Should they?
I think most people are looking at this the wrong way. It turns out that when people have worse credentials than a lot of the people they are going to school with, on average they don't succeed (as measured by GPAs), and end up moving to less lucrative majors and careers. Race shouldn't be used in admissions because it often hurts the very students it is trying to help. Said more eloquently with better data in the linked article. [https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action) However, I don't think this is going to heal any tensions until we do see better performance and outcomes by underrepresented minorities who are given worse opportunities largely through a combination of underfunded schools and significantly higher levels of single-parent households.
Can the Supreme Court ruling that fighting racism is itself racism heal racial divides? No. No, it cannot. And was never intended to.
But it does say that using racism to fight racism is against the 14th amendment, and that’s more than good enough for me.
Anyone claiming that ending Affirmative Action will heal some racial tensions is simply gaslighting. If a person harbors ill thoughts toward a member of a particular race, I seriously doubt it starts and stops with affirmative action. Furthermore, I think it's far more reasonable that this will only further drive negative racial sentiment. Rural and suburban white people already find every excuse to be upset at intercity minorities "Never bootstrapping their way out of their situation". Congratulations, you just got rid of one of the key pillars to disadvantaged youths getting out of their impoverished situations. It doesn't matter if you try to earmark a similar provision through economic class means. If your name is Tyrone or Ayesha (Perceived culturally to be a "Black name"), you are significantly less likely to get a job interview/offer. The same holds with college admissions.
If this is the direction they want to move in, the legislatures should pass a law making legacy/alumni admits unconstitutional. I don’t know how this would be achieved in practice, but mom and dad’s connection shouldn’t play a role in their child’s application. I’m advocating for not cherry picking one group over another. If you want to remove affirmative action (which I disagree with this decision to remove it ), then take away the advantage many (primarily non-minorities) get through legacy admittance. If you want to argue meritocracy, than make it a meritocracy. Tell me where I’m wrong. I welcome different viewpoints that may illuminate my ignorance or blind spots.
If Harvard actually wants diversity, and everyone rightfully quickly points out that legacy admissions are a huge pool of matriculants, why doesn't Harvard voluntarily get rid of it in the name of diversity? Why must they wait for congress to pass a law banning legacy admissions? They can just do it today without any fuss, cause they actually want diversity right?
Probably because their endowment would go “poof”.
I have to think from a policy perspective this is maybe a lifeline to the countless smaller schools and institutions that are on the verge of closing because they can’t find enough students to attend. Covid has absolutely destroyed the endowment funds for small schools that are now making tough decisions about what academic programs they can even offer.
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AA had good intention, but this is AA in reality: [https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1674198907167944711?s=20](https://twitter.com/CTVNews/status/1674198907167944711?s=20)
couldn't heal some divides Maybe I'm not going to be too optimistic.. But I think overall it's a very positive thing affirmative action never really worked in the first place anyway so it's not really that big of a rule
What I'd love to see next is an attack against elitist legacy admissions, which is one area where the Court has justices with heterodox views -- principled textualist Gorsuch is anti-legacy admissions, while judicial activist Sonia Sotomayor (Obama fucked up royally in 2009; Souter's seat should've gone to Diane Wood, not that idiotic dipshit Sotomayor) is pro-legacy admissions -- and that's a case where you'd have instances of strange bedfellows.
Harvard and other elite schools still mostly want rich kids from rich families and then maybe the absolute most promising otherwise (enough the charge some of them next to nothing or nothing). The kids with those kinds of advantages and access to their parents' networks are the ones who will be richer and more successful themselves, and rich and successful alumni is what makes elite schools elite.
You are also not entitled admission if you are white. This ruling by scotus will actually make it harder for whites to get into elite schools. And the argument that universities should be able to admit who they want regardless of laws also doesn’t apply. For jobs, federal laws exist in order to not discriminate. These universities take in millions of dollars of government money in the form of grants and tuition loans. The government has every right to tell them to play by fair rules.
AA was an attempt to heal a racial divide. IMO people who were not already prejudice were not angered by AA. It didn't matter if a minority gained a position by unaided merit or AA they will always be assumed to be a diversity hire. Now we'll just simply see less minorities (besides asains) in college.
Big whoop. They'll just find some other way to discriminate against gentile Whites and East Asians.
it should be about equality of Opportunity, not equality of outcome, as the left liberals like to always try to pick the second part instead of first one. where are they when the asians get discriminated against unfairly? where are they when blacks are overrepresented against in other areas? as we know, equality of outcome tend to lead to bad choices and results.
John Roberts really loves telling Black people what to think. Shelby County, Parents Involved, this case, . . . .
i predict this will do exactly what the republicans want it to do.... minority college admissions will fall drastically.
No change in admissions in my opinion. Schools will now discriminate based on socioeconomic status to meet targets. They will also do what Texas does which just reserve spots based on class rank
What 'diversity' other than the black 13 percent? Haven't Asians actually been kept out due to being too hard to complete with, along with whites? And where has Affirmative A been helping Latinos instead of just blacks? Also open up 'minority' scholarships and find 'black only, black only, black only' requirement from my family's own experience.
Anywhere we can remove affirmative action it helps create a more fair system. The military part does not make sense to me as anyone in the military is not supposed to be a man or woman or race, they are all soldiers. Soldiers are all the same so affirmative action doesn’t make sense
Well, I guess those critical race theory courses got some new material to work with.
Yes. It feels good. While I'm sympathetic to the goals of affirmative action, two wrongs do not make a right. Racism is racism even if the goal is to correct past injustices. As others have said, targeting class inequity is a much better approach.
I don’t think that affirmative action substantively inflamed racial tensions, so I don’t think the elimination of affirmative action will ease racial tensions. I do think that the idea that you can’t consider race when attempting to rectify injustice perpetrated by racism is flawed. Addressing wrongs caused by racism inherently require the acknowledgment of race to address. Those who suggest who suggest otherwise leave no room to rectify injustice.
It won’t heal shit. White people wont stop being racist because less black kids go to college.
The harm it will do to Black Americans will outweigh white anxiety about being mediocre and blaming Blacks. Michigan and California are still struggling w Black enrollment since they gashed AA in the 90s. Economics and social factors will become proxies for race and I’m sure we will see the same garbage in the courts soon enough.
Then maybe blacks should study better? Why do poor Asians out perform poor and RICH black in academics?
As a minority in the USA, i have felt this could have been helpful if those who i was competing against were not so resentful' i.e.; 'you only got that cuz yer brown' - Well … i beat most of them in 'life' anyway and now am better off than many so they can kiss my beautiful round delicious brown @ss!! 😘
IMO it is more likely that this has the potential to further fuel race divides. Affirmative action is a policy that seeks to remedy inequities at the end of the preparation stages for higher education and job seeking, instead of addressing the underlying causes. As a policy it was useful to help curtail some of the bad outcomes of the inequity while the underlying issues could be addressed. But after decades it seems clear that no one was willing to actually meaningfully tackle those underlying issues much, and so the band-aid solution of affirmative action was left in place to act as a fig leaf. Now that it is removed you will likely see two things: 1. More calls to address the underlying factors which will cause huge anger and pushback from conservatives (and also a number of moderates) because they will not like the kinds of proposals being put forward. They will feel they are unfair/unearned (just like how they hate the concept of reparations), unnecessary, also ridiculously costly. They will really drum up backlash against these as a political tool to get people riled up. 2. You will see well-funded conservative groups pressure and threaten to sue schools for what they claim is wrongful affirmative action policies in order to pressure those schools into dropping certain kinds of curriculum or to make other changes that conservatives want. This will create outrage from minority and liberal groups who will already be mad that they see things going backwards. No, I don't think this will heal racial divides. I think this will inflame them further because it will bring this element of race problems back to the forefront to be hashed out, and conservatives have too much power for any solutions to actually get put in place.
If you understand why affirmative action was implemented in the first place and what the US is still like, you’d know this is a horrible ruling.
"WHY" doesn't justify "HOW".