response 127 of 232:

Jan 23 04:09 UTC 2003

jep asked yesterday why I support Affirmative Action...

For me, it's a basic issue of fairness.  I'm still pretty young compared to
many of the people in this discussion, but I've done pretty well so far.  I've
got a pretty big apartment in a nice safe neighborhood, a few miles away from
the neighborhoods where people who don't look like me have to worry about
being shot, or get told not to go outside because the local refinery just blew
up, again.  I don't have a job that pays at the moment, but that's ok because
I can afford to go several months before it becomes an issue.  I worked hard
to get this far, and I'll do a lot more hard work if I want to keep up this
lifestyle.  But I had a lot of help getting here.

I grew up in nice neighborhoods where it was always safe to go out and
explore.  I went to good schools, some just by virtue of the neighborhoods,
some by virtue of my parents' ability to pay, and one by virtue of my parents'
ability to wait in line.  I always had prestigous universities nearby,
available to help with whatever I was interested in that wasn't being fully
covered in school.  I had a house full of computers.  I had well educated
parents who could help me with stuff I was studying and having trouble with,
and could teach me about lots of other stuff.  I had lots of very well
connected friends and aquaintences.  That didn't mean I did well in school.
I pursued the stuff I was interested in, ignored the rest, and ended up with
an impressive mix of As and Ds ("don't you ever do anything average?" I was
asked at one point) that wouldn't have gotten me into any college I would have
wanted to go to, but that was ok.  Job offers for stuff that I was interested
in doing appeared without me even having to look for them, and the job I took
led to contacts that led to another job, which led to experience that led to
another job, and now here I am.

So, how did my family get from poor immigrant farmers and storekeepers to this
in a few generations?  A lot of hard work, the classic "American Dream" of
upward mobility, and taking the opportunities that presented themselves.

So then we've got this other class of people, who were enslaved, tortured,
and not getting any of the benefits of their labor, while my ancestors were
working their way up.  As slavery ended, segregation ensued, isolating those
people from the resources that tend to present the opportunities that my
ancestors and I were able to use so well to our advantage.  As segregation
has in some ways gotten more absolute, going from black people and white
people not sharing the same drinking fountains to in many cases not sharing
the same cities, the gap between poor black people and the resources that tend
to make success just a matter of hard work has gotten more extreme as well.

When people do get out of that environment, even when they've been out of that
environment for generations, or even if they're recent immigrants whose
families were never in that environment, they still report being treated
differently, by white people who see black people and don't know what to say,
or worse wonder if they're about to get robbed.  My step step grandmother
tells the story of how when she was working for the NAACP in New York in the
1940s, her friend Thurgood, already the most influential civil rights lawyer
in the US and a future US Supreme Court justice, defiantly refused to be
intimidated by the doorman in her apartment building, something her other
black friends didn't manage.  Even now, even in a part of the US known for
its liberalism, a friend who had recently arrived in the US was complaining
a few years ago that of the several countries he had lived in, the US was the
only one where he'd ever felt like his race was an issue, and he wasn't
talking about being treated better here.

And as for the poor black kids who never get out of their neighborhoods, who 
go to schools where getting shot is a bigger worry than failing a class, 
schools without computers, or up to date text books, or frequent field trips 
to major universities, or doors that will open to let them out if there's a 
fire, and whose lucrative connections tend to be drug dealers and gang members
rather then professors and computer geeks, many of them don't even get the
chance to be treated as suspects in the neighborhoods where real opportunities
are.

So, I'm not sure if this makes any sense to anybody but me, but this is why
I support Affirmative Action.  To reward people who have had to struggle a
lot harder than I have for their hard work, to provide people who wouldn't
otherwise have access to them the kinds of connections and opportunities I
had, to hopefully boost the number of well off black people who are members
of integrated communities to the point where black people in privlidged
neighborhoods are no longer automatically treated as suspects, and to expose
people from more privileged backgrounds to people and stories they would
otherwise be unaware of.  I support Affirmative Action with some reservations,
however, because I worry that it's too little, too late.  I would be much
happier to see this integration happen long before we get to the point of
college admissions, but that doesn't seem to be the direction the US is going
at the moment.