TIO

Once again, I find myself paralysed by being able to see both sides of the issue.
First, my gripe with affirmative action: I was the dux (Americans read: valedictorian) of my high school, and I was kind of hoping for a scholarship at uni (They're pretty rare here, and usually only offered academically; there's no such thing as a sporting scholarship). There were 19 scholarships available to undergrads in my course. 5 of them are gone because none of my family have ever fought in a war. Those I can deal with not getting; these guys fought to defend my country (in theory), so they deserve it. Another 3 go to 'rural' students, those who live outside the city (and believe me, outside Perth gets pretty damned rural in some places). Those I can also deal with not having. They need the help living alone in the big smoke.
But then, of those 11 scholarships, I lose 3 because I am not Aboriginal and 7 because, in Engineering, I am not female. Leaves me with one scholarship out of 19 that I'm even eligible for. Needless to say, I'm not happy that a less qualified chick took a scholarship I could really have used.
There is also a big shitstorm in Australia at the moment over students getting into uni on grounds other than academic merit, but I'll leave that for another time.

The other side of the story: The Aboriginal population over here is widely viewed as very uneducated, and unless we can get some real role models running around being smart, sophisticated, successful Aboriginals, we're going to have a lot of trouble getting rid of those stereotypes. It's a shame that talented kids have to lose their places at uni because of it, but we really, really need to improve the lot of Aboriginals around here, and for a few years, that'll mean giving them a leg-up to a better education. Once they get some kind of equality, then we can get rid of affirmative action. But as long as Aboriginal kids aren't getting into uni, often more because of their home lives and inadequate schooling than any lack of talent, we need to try and even things up.

But again, on the flip side of that, I'm not sure I want the reputation of my uni being dragged down by a few substandard students who are ushered through the system, and affirmative action doesn't exactly breed goodwill.

But then again...anyone heard of Pauline Hanson? That's what happens when you speak out against AA in Australia.

Oh, before I go, I'd like to check something in filtherton's quote:

Lies, Damn Lies, and...
The rest of the report seems to draw its conclusions through reasonable processes, and even acknowledges the fact that there are a thousand and one hidden factors in every such survey. But I can't accept this claim. If officers are conducting searches on a basis of racial profiling, then let's say they are searching 50% of the Black drivers they pull over, and only 15% of the white ones. We agree that they're mainly searching the black drivers because they are black. So they need some other motivation to search the white drivers; they're only searching the drivers they really think have contraband in the car (on basis, presumably, of glazed eyes, Hendrix music, and empty coke bottles on the floor), so of course they're more likely to find contraband in those cars.

Either the officers are racially profiling, or white drivers carry more contraband. You can't draw both conclusions from the same statistic.

__________________
Strewth

Willy

This was an interesting way to protest, and the fact that the university shut it down only helped to make their point and illustrate the hypocrisy of the university for calling them racists.

filtherton

Thanks for clarification. I didn't realize that the way i said it is misleading.
It basically means that cops are more likey to find contraband in the cars of white drivers because they are searching them based on probable cause, rather than skin color.
To summarize: White drivers probably don't carry more contraband, the cops are very likely using racial profiling.
On that note,
Waaaah, it is sooo hard to be white, hopefully, one day if we work hard enough, we can overcome this affirmative action thing. Then, we can go back to pretending like society is a completely equal level playing field.

WhoaitsZ

... let us all do something now.

being disabled has caused me to not get three jobs in particuliar that I had far more experience due to me not being 'normal'. i was tempted to do something but i felt like i would be stinking to their low parasitic existance and staid quiet. i know first hand that people can pretty much do wtf they want.

let us use our head. if we are smart, let's go for it. if you are unqualified but can get the part because of race or what have you, i hope you feel like you've wronged someone greatly .

tell AA to fuck itself. use your head and get some ethics. nothing would make me happier than seeing a guy to tell AA to stfu because he will NOT use a crutch. the government is hellbent on rules for dumbing shit down. break their rules and fucking WORK to get there, then when you're older you can say, hey...... look where i come from, where i've been. Pride from work won, not an egotrip or an AA puppet trick.

good luck.

little limey

Are there any people on here that are supporting affirmative action?

I know that it was created to help minorities that come from bad schools and such, but what about the minorities that are richer than I am? There is just no way possible to take into consideration econimical and educational levels of everybody. Race is an easy factor to use, although, in my opinion, it's not the right way to go.

In black colleges there is descrimination between light skinned and dark skinned students. It's the same in Brazil. People identify their race by their color and not their heritage. So many times there are different races among siblings. My point is that race is such an easy way out and creates a superficial look on the world.

I thikn the bake sale was a great idea and was shut down out of fear because the weak idea of afirmative action was being questioned.

redravin40

I remember a fund raiser for world hunger where when you came in the door you got a card.
The card said which table you got to use.
80% of the guests had to use the table where only brown rice and water was served.
15% got a table with a simple but decent meal.
5% had a huge table covered with roast pork, steaks, and baked goods.

I'm sure there are people who would say that is a vast over simplification of the worlds food problems.
I say the same about the bake sale.
It did nothing to account for all the people with their own ins (rich parents, alumni, sports skills) that give them a 'unfair' advantage over the rest of us. (maybe a dime for a half dozen for those folks)
The world is not based on who is the smartest and hardest working.
As long as that is the case, we need programs like affirmative action to balance things out.
Maybe one day it won't be needed but I don't think that day is today.

Wax_off

A point was made of this earlier, but I want to back it up.

Anyone advocating getting rid of AA should also be advocating the removal of all preferences for admission, including alumni. I don't hear anyone whining about how they lost their place to someone with lower grades who's daddy went to the school. But they should be. That's a preference system for white people.

I think we can all agree that AA is BAD. But consider why it was installed in the first place. To level the playing field for students who had suffered from underfunded/inadequate schools due to race based preferences (public funding racism.) Preferences which I think we can also agree was BAD.

So what's the answer? Nobody can tell me that racial funding bias in elementary/high school has been eliminated. Poor neigborhoods, primarily populated by minorities, have worse schools than rich white neigborhoods. Does that mean poor minority kids should have less opportunities than rich white kids just because they didn't have as good an environment for learning? How do you balance the scales? Perhaps a kid who got B's in a lousy school should be admitted over a kid who got B's in a good school. Yeah, and race shouldn't matter.

animosity

I'm writting an arguement essay on affirmative action right now, or at least i should be. I have 2 hours to complete it. I wanted to read this first though.

On the point about traffic stops. cops do tend to be "racist". My cousin is mexican and he was pulled over 14 times in one year. Two of those times he was in my driveway cleaning his car. I agree that police do tend to look at skin tone and the value of ones vehicle, but what does that have to do with affirmative action?

The only thing I really have to say about affirmative action is, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" -the end....

roachboy

on the bakesale:

the whole thing seems pretty ill-conceived, particularly if by it you are supposed to understand something about affirmative action---in other words, if there is really supposed to be something equivalent between the pricing structure of cookies and a coherent statement about affirmative action.

i would imagine that it was undertaken in order to be shut down---publicly--in order to generate yet another little story to be added to the book of far right martyrs in general, and to the volume within that bigger book of martyrs in which conservatives get to whine about the trouble they face on a college campus.

so this tedious little agit-prop event becomes grist for the press, and a way of framing discussion, with the result os pseudo-debate like what you have here, which unfolds as if there is something about the bake sale that is in fact a statement about affirmative action, as if you can seperate the mechanisms particular to it from the context in which they operate, both legislative and historical.

i support affirmative action.

but i have always understood it as a palliative, something made to address both historical and ongoing disparities in the states on the one hand, and to divert matters from the protection of class interests, which is not addressed directly by affirmative action---if you want to generate educational equality, then take control of funding away from localities and distribute it evenly across them, nationally. as a first step. given that the major form of discrimination in the states is spatial, and is a strict marker of class positions, it is a coherent place to begin.

the explicit agenda behind the conservative attacks on affirmative action is the naturalize once again differences in economic class position as they impact on education.

from this viewpoint, the way conservatives understand "fairness" is disengenuous--it is as if they pretend that in this manner they can frame one of the most polarized educational systems in the world, in class terms (a reflection of the overwhelmingly skewed concentration of wealth they have ushered in, beginning with reagan) as somehow equal in itself and requiring no adjustment/correction.

if you buy this absurd premise----that educational opportunities in america are equally distributed----then the arguments against affirmative action *could* hold water--but in the present environment, these premises presuppose a complete break with and denial of reality.

which is, all in all, and sadly for all of us, indicative of the conservative way of framing issues.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Lebell

Wow,

Blast from the past.

How many pages was this buried under??

__________________
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." – C. S. Lewis

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SilverScooter

see, this is the traditional "defense" of affirmative action yet i don't see it as an ideal or a potential solution. ever. end of story. it's ridiculous to think that any given minority group needs the proverbial "playing field" to be leveled and more so to think that slapping a weighty label on them will do it. this "defense" almost seems to be a blatant contradiction of itself, isn't the playing field level when it's merely a game of numbers and experience rather than factoring in varying "race constants" and PC bullshit?

to say that a quota having been met establishes an "unnatural balance" is equally laughable. why do we think that there shouldn't be an abundance of minority groups in the workplace. just because theres a better likelihood of having a qualified white person (simply due to population densities) doesn't necessarily mean that its commonplace. if there happens to be a glut of minority business majors somewhere in the middle of bohunk, MO, who's to say that quality can't match quantity.

we're in a capitalist nation here, affirmative action undermines the foundation of that very set of ideals. affirmaive action prevents us from utilizing our resources, unless of course, they're "integrated" resources.

strcrssd

The problem with affirmative action, as with racism, is that it is ideological.

We can't ban racism, because it would be impossible to enforce...and if we did try to enforce it, I don't like to think of the results.

What we need to do is educate. The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to ignore racial factors and see people for people. (can someone find a reference for this....I'm fairly certain I saw it somewhere).

This all goes back to a federally funded education assistance program that does NOT socially promote children through the grades. Further, being a teacher should require more than just (in Texas) a bachelors degree and a certification. I think the minimums should be a psychology degree for the very young, Masters degree for primary, and a doctorate for anything higher. The teachers also need to be educated using this system (no social promotion), and the Universities need to increase the difficulty of their programs.

__________________
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage (1912 - 1992)

skier

This would be a great topic for a social psych or sociology essay topic...

__________________
"Asking a bomb squad if an old bomb is still "real" is not the best thing to do if you want to save it." - denim

bigoldalphamale

wow, i thought the discrimination at the dry cleaners was when the korean ahead of me in line paid $5 for two armfuls of drycleaning and my white ass paid $23 for two shirts a pair of pants and a tie. fuck them.

and F affirmative action and its proponents.

Cynthetiq

i'm not a supporter of affirmative action... ACTIONS and CONTRIBUTIONS to the community not skin color...

while we have a diversity initiative here it's not like some other companies where if you are white and a black competing for same job the black guy gets it... even if GROSSLY underqualified...

Sargeman

Let me start out by saying that I'm not a supporter of AA. As a Mexican male the last thing I want is to be hired on to fill some quota or to be some token minority or to be hired on because in hispanic.

But now look at it from the other side. For all the examples of "this person is a token AA person that obviously isn't right for the job" stories there are out there, there are AT LEAST that many that can be said for how many minorities were/are still being passed up because they are minorities even though they are more than qualified for positions/jobs.

So please guys don't try to make it out like there is no discrimination going on other than AA.

__________________
...because there are no facts, there is no truth, just data to be manipulated. I can get you any results you like, what's it worth to you.....

roachboy

geez...caught again by the passage of a year....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

filtherton

Happy 1 year anniversary bump.

hokieian

I don't think anybody gets pulled over 14 times in one year without a reason. Are you saying your cousin was innocent all 14 of those times and was pulled over simply because he was mexican? I'm not buying it.

filtherton

That's averaging a little over once a month, which is quite doable if you live in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong skin color.

Redgirl

There are some drawbacks to AA, but there wouldn't even be AA if the "good old boy" network wasn't still the major player in most hiring situations. I think those who are against it are the ones who don't understand just what it feels like to be constantly discriminated against. Not just at the job interview, or not getting into your first choice of colleges, but at the store, walking down the street, driving your car...

You complain over one instance where you might get discriminated against, what about all the rest of the time? You don't feel it then, do you? If you're white, then the answer is most likely no.

__________________
Thought for the day: Men are like fine wine. They start out as grapes, and it's up to the women to stomp the crap out of them until they turn into something acceptable to have dinner with.

roachboy

to act as though educatioal opportunities are evenly distributed across class and often racial lines is simply wrong.
opposition to programs on the order of affirmative action presuppose a "level playing field"
there isnt one.

if all that was at stake in this matter was skin color, then maybe the objections would have weight.
but since you have to blind yourself to see things in that truncated a manner, they dont have any weight.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

bigoldalphamale

it has nothing to do with race. and everything to do with being attractive. attractive people, of any race, sex, gender are more likely to be hired than less than attractive people of similar background. need proof: go walk around the offices at any of the following fortune 500 companies (just as an example):

Booze Allen Hamilton
Price Waterhouse Coopers
Accenture
Bearing Point
Ernst & Young
Merrill Lynch

to name a few.

soccerchamp76

When you are a cop, you do not look for minorities. You look for people breaking the law. If that person happens to be African-American, so be it. Maybe it is just that they commit more crimes?
From the FBI Database in 2002: Murder crimes
Whites: 5,356
Blacks: 5,579

Now, the whites are the majority but are committing less crimes.

__________________
Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
Chris Griffin: That would explain all the gravity.

Sargeman

That's pretty interesting, is there a link I can click on. There are other things the site would probably have that I would sure like to explore.

__________________
...because there are no facts, there is no truth, just data to be manipulated. I can get you any results you like, what's it worth to you.....

soccerchamp76

__________________
Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
Chris Griffin: That would explain all the gravity.

filtherton

So is it that the cops aren't looking at race, or are they just playing the odds, and in doing so using race as a factor in determining who to pull over?

I think that for some, not all, when you are a cop you look for minorities because you know statistically that they are more likely to be breaking the law. That is called racial profiling.

Flyguy

Becasue for the most part, their sins (or the mentality of them) are still being repeated today.

Think about it.

If you think discrimination doesn't exist anymore, then YOURE living in the dream world.