response 81 of 232:

Jan 21 07:56 UTC 2003

Even Affirmative Action supporters don't tend to be terribly excited about
it, because its opponants are right that it's a lousy system.  It's just not
a lousy system in the way the opponants seem to think.  Just as nobody should
get sick and need medical care, nobody should be discriminated against and
need Affirmative Action.  But at least in the cases of sociallly acceptable
diseases, we don't withhold medical care because it's an unfair disadvantage
to the healthy people.

Taking that discrimination as a disease a step further, if we were to instead
consider the case of an applicant who had spent their childhood battling some
debilitating disease and instead ended up with an A- average instead of an
A average, we'd probably consider them far more worthy of adulation and
admission than a healthy A student.  By that thinking, if we can acknowledge
that discrimination makes life harder for some students than others, perhaps
a more worthwhile debate would concern the number of bonus points to award,
rather than whether to award them at all.

The stigma is of course a concern, but we are talking about educational
institutions here.  Perhaps that could be addressed with better teaching about
these issues.  Then again, I'm not convinced the stigma has any real
relationship to Affirmative Action at all.  This country has hundreds of years
of history of racial discrimination.  Blaming that on the last few decades
of desegregation efforts seems a little simplistic.