response 141 of 232:

Jan 23 18:06 UTC 2003

    ANd what always on the table is the inability to move to a place 
where better jobs and schools are available. It takes a job to earn 
the money for a new place, and employment, as aready noted isn't there.

response 143 of 232:

Jan 23 19:12 UTC 2003

re 133:
        I certainly won't argue that a black kid from a wealthy neighborhood
(I think I met three or four such people in the 21 years I lived in Michigan)
doesn't have advantages that black kids in poor neighborhoods don't.  Their
experiences are likely to be worlds apart.  Are you arguing that the black
kid from a wealthy neighborhood has all the advantages of a white kid from
a wealthy neighborhood?  That sounds like a much harder case to make, given
that the white kid will be treated like they belong in the neighborhood, and
the black kid will tend to be treated with some degree of suspicion.

re 135:
        There certainly has been a lot of discrimination in the US against
various European ethnic groups.  My step mother's Italian grandfather, for
example, had to change his name before he was able to get a job as a lawyer
in New York.  It certainly wasn't good, but a generation later his kids,
having been born in the US with American sounding names and American accents,
were mainstream white Americans.  

But I think the history of discrimination in this context is mainly useful
in helping us understand why things are the way they are today, rather than
in determining who is being discriminated against today.  That a group was
discriminated against heavily several decades ago but has since assimilated
is evidence that they don't need Affirmative Action today, not that it
wouldn't have been fair to give Affirmative Action to members of that group
at one point.  The reason to give extra admissions points to black people
today is that for various historical and societal reasons, much of the US
black population is trapped in an environment in which it's very difficult
to succeed, and it's not getting better on its own.

John argues that Affirmative Action treats people differently because policy
makers think, becuase of their ethnicity, that they're unable to compete with
other people, and likens this treatment to segregation -- keeping the races
separate.  What we have in fact is a group of people who, because of their
ethnicity, have been separated from the rest of society and placed at a
considerable disadvantage.  This is segregation.  Affirmative Action is a
recognition of that societally imposed disadvantage, and an attempt to
compensate for it.  Affirmative Action is a recognition that the starting
points for the two groups weren't equal, and an attempt to bring the groups
back together by compensating for that.

response 145 of 232:

Jan 23 20:09 UTC 2003

And to answer your question regarding advantages.  Yes, I think a black
kid, raised in a wealthy environment, put through good schools and tucked
in at night by loving parents has all the same advantages and chance for
success as his or her white best friend coming from the same type of home. 

I believe we've come that far.  Which is not to say that's far 
enough.

response 147 of 232:

Jan 23 23:10 UTC 2003

Re 144:  Your idea about looking at individuals is certainly the best way to
figure out who is best suited for admission, but it would require a great deal
of resources and some compromises in order to scale up to UM admissions
numbers.  How many people apply each year, anyway?

response 149 of 232:

Jan 24 00:14 UTC 2003

re resp:143: I know what affirmative action is for.  I can see you have 
good intentions in supporting it's use.

I'm suggesting it doesn't work and will not work.  Groups which have 
been treated separately have not become assimilated very well into 
American society.  Those who have not received special treatment have 
overcome discrimination and the disadvantages of whatever group they're 
in and become recognized as general Americans.

Do you know who deserves special help?  I don't think it's every black 
person, every Hispanic, every gay, every Italian, etc.  I think it's 
every person with a disadvantage who needs help.  That's what Mary is 
saying, too, I think.  (It's weird being on the same side of an 
argument with Mary, but interesting.)

Ethnic groups don't need advantages, because the members don't all have 
the same problems.  Also because we try to regard different treatment 
due to ethnicity to be wrong.

The reason why every one of us isn't the president or a Nobel Prize 
winner or a millionaire is because we're disadvantaged, compared to the 
people in those positions.  We're not charming, smart or connected 
enough, and we're certainly not driven enough.

response 151 of 232:

Jan 24 01:40 UTC 2003

Yes, those black folk do pine for the Jim Crow days when they risked lynching
if they dared to vote.

response 153 of 232:

Jan 24 03:47 UTC 2003

re resp:151: There is much difference between doing away with Jim Crow 
laws, and affirmative action.  I thought the Jim Crow laws went out in 
the 50's, anyway.  Those that were left from the earlier part of the 
century.

response 157 of 232:

Jan 26 02:36 UTC 2003

I prefer the term 'honky'. ;)

response 159 of 232:

Jan 26 07:24 UTC 2003

re #158:

> Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, etc, have been discriminated at various
> times in our history.  HOWEVER, _none_ of them have been enslaved more
> recently than the late 1700s. ...  Without slavery, the dynamic was different
> for those groups.  Eventually, others supplanted them at the bottom.

  The overwhelming majority of Irish, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese
  immigration to this country occurred *after* the Civil War.  Even were
  that not the case, based on what you have written above I don't see how
  your point concerning slavery amounts to much more than a logical
  non sequitur.  The statement is true but has no demonstrated relevance
  to your argument.

response 161 of 232:

Jan 26 17:01 UTC 2003

I'll grant the point on Chinese and Japanese.  Maybe Italian.  Not so
sure about Irish: my own Scots-Irish anscestors were in Virginia in the
late 1700s.  There was a spurt in Irish immigration during the Potato
Famine, which, if I recall correctly was in 1848.

Still.  I hadn't realised that others hadn't made the same connection I
had some time ago.  So:

Many slaveholders knew that owning people was wrong.  And yet, they couldn't
afford to not own slaves.  So they had to rationalise their behaviour,
convincing themselves that their slaves were not "people" but were, in fact,
an inferior sub-species.  That rationalisation continues, even though it is
no longer needed.  Except, of course, to justify current behaviour.

I argue that had other groups been enslaved, a similar rationalisation would
continue about them.  They weren't, so it hasn't.  The anger against them
has always been relatively short-lived, twenty to fifty years in most cases.
(It's probably significant that, in some cases, members of these groups
were landowners when more of them were seeking passage to the New World.)

(I just did a quick search; I'd thought the quota system was installed
in the 1800s, but Sacks & Kolken, Immigration Lawyers, say it was in
the 1920s.)

response 163 of 232:

Jan 27 00:24 UTC 2003

  re #161:  As recently as sixty years ago citizens of this country were
  subjected to government-produced propaganda designed to convince us that
  the Japanese were a race of sallow-skinned, buck-toothed, conniving
  subhuman monkey-men.  Public sentiment against them was whipped up into
  such a frenzy that most of the people of Japanese ancestry on the west
  coast (who were virtually all of the Japanese-Americans in this country)
  were rounded up and put into camps.

  Only a little more than sixty years later there's almost no sign of the
  anti-Japanese fervor of those times.  Why were those attitudes eradicable
  when the ones you cite that affect African-Americans have proved so
  intractable?

  I'm willing to agree that the long-term effects of racism can be pernicious
  and unpredictable.  I'm just not convinced that you're demonstrating
  causation, not correlation, when you cite slavery as the unique factor here.

response 165 of 232:

Jan 27 01:55 UTC 2003

        One of the reasons that American anti-Japanese sentiment was so short
lived is that most Americans had no day-to-day contact with Japanese.  The
dynamics of racism as it applies to groups that are in day-to-day contact and
clash regularly, and groups that don't, is quite different.