response 91 of 232:

Jan 21 19:37 UTC 2003

klg continues to look at the issue out of context.  We have a group in our
country whose ancestors were kidnapped, brought over to the US or the colonies
that preceeded it in conditions that would amount to torture, and, if they
survived, enslaved for several generations.  The slavery officially ended less
than 140 years ago, and was replaced by a legal system that forbade people
from that group from living in the same neighborhoods as the rest of the
population, attending the same schools as the rest of the population, or in
many areas using the same drinking fountains or bathrooms, eating in the same
restaurants, or sitting on the same part of the bus.  During that period, it
was also perfectly legal to discriminate based on race in hiring, and this
was done blatantly (take a look at the employment classifieds from the Ann
Arbor News in the 1950s -- they had separate sections for "help wanted, male,"
"help wanted, female," and "help wanted, colored").  That system didn't go
away until the 1950s and 60s, at which point it was replaced by a less formal
system, in which black people are no longer prohibitted from moving into white
neighborhoods or sending their kids to white schools, but doing so often has
the effect of getting the white families in the area to decide the
neighborhood has become "unsafe," and to pack up and leave, generally taking
the jobs and other opportunities, not to mention the resale value of property
in the neighborhood, with them.  So now we have a situation where most members
of this group continue to live in poverty, do far worse economically than the
rest of the population, and score lower in school.  Given all this, what do
those who want to eliminate Affirmative Action now want to do instead to
remedy the situation?

In #83, jep raises some more interesting points, in terms of medical care
treating only those who need it, versus Affirmative Action treating an entire
segment of society.  It should first be pointed out that that isn't always
true in the case of medical care, in dealing with big crisis situations such
as a big outbreak of some fast spreading infection.  In those cases, often
everybody who has been exposed is given a vaccine or antibiotics, because it
just isn't possible to test them all, and overtreatment is considered a lesser
risk than undertreatment.  Aside from that, however, if you can find black
people in the US who haven't been negatively affected by discrimination, and
can develop an easy to apply test for this, I'm eager to see your proposal.

jep also suggests that what I call "better teaching about these issues" would
really be "indoctrinating students with different political beliefs," which
he opposes.  I don't think that's what I meant at all, though.  When I was
in school, we generally had one week a year, around Martin Luther King Day,
when we would learn about racial discrimination.  We would be told,
essentially, that The South (in other words, somewhere else) used to be
segregated, but that Martin Luther King had come along, led some marches, and
made us good Northerners aware of the problem, and as a result the problem
had been fixed and everything was equal now.  To some extent, all teaching
is indoctrination, and this certainly was.  It was indoctrination in a belief
that the problem was solved, and hadn't really concerned our part of the
country anyway.  Imagine instead in depth presentations of the history
involved, not just in The South, but in all parts of the US, charting of
demographic data over time, up to the present, in depth discussions of how
things got to their current state and what the current state is, presentations
and analysis of arguments on many sides of the issue, and so forth.  It may
be that most reasonable people woudln't come out of such a class with the
views that jep wants them to have, but the goal should be to make sure they
have enough information to make their own reasonable judgements.