response 121 of 232:

Jan 23 01:18 UTC 2003

Re #120: Regardless of whether or not anyone thinks you're a racist (and
I don't think we have enough information to claim you are or aren't) I
*am* curious about your answer to the question posed in #117.  Why is it
that legacy points are considered okay by pretty much everyone, but
affirmative action is strongly opposed by conservatives?

response 123 of 232:

Jan 23 01:49 UTC 2003

Re #116: that's right, "I always get the strong sense that those that
 argue against affirmative action......etc". But that's how they come
across: I don't know nor did I assert that they are racist. I did not
suggest what you suggested I suggested (this sort of thing happens a
lot here - people jumping to unwarranted conclusions). 

But read all the pronouncements from the anit-affirmative crowd: do you
get any sense that they have a *better* idea, or that they even recognize
that there is even a problem with prejudice and discrimination? No. 

response 125 of 232:

Jan 23 02:09 UTC 2003

re resp:123: Rane, when you strongly suggest, as you did, that someone 
is a racist, people are going to notice.  When you then deny you meant 
any such thing, it makes you seem like you're being deceptive and 
trying to hide from the direct implications of your comments.

If you don't want to stand behind what you said, then apologize and 
correct what you said.  Don't blame me for drawing the obvious 
conclusion about what you *did* say.

I have strongly advocated, in this item, against the U-M's racially 
unbalanced admissions policy.  You have called me, solely because of my 
position, a racist.  I am offended.

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.

response 129 of 232:

Jan 23 05:02 UTC 2003

re resp:127: At various points in American history, Italians, Germans, 
Chinese, Irish and many other ethnic groups have been singled out as 
being inferior in various ways, and denied the capability to compete on 
equal terms with other Americans.  They almost all overcame it, and did 
so without affirmative action.  Some were pretty easily distinguishable 
from "white" Americans.  Irish weren't considered white.  Hispanics 
aren't now, though I cannot figure out why.  Aren't they as Caucasian 
as I am?  Not that anyone should care, other than census bureau folks 
who want to figure out how much affirmative action to give them.

The handiest example of another group which was separated from the rest 
of society and given "advantages" that mostly weren't advantages at 
all, is the American Indians and the reservation system.  Those who 
stay on the reservations live a lot differently than other Americans.  
They don't have much money, or much chance of getting any.  They have 
very high unemployment, alcoholism, drug usage, rates of child and 
spousal abuse, and crime, and low life expectancies that remind one of 
Third World countries.

I think the nation's minorities, including African Americans, would be 
better off if treated like the minorities which came before them who 
became "just plain Americans", than they will be if we continue to 
treat them as a separate class of people.  

response 131 of 232:

Jan 23 06:23 UTC 2003

(it's worth noting that the Indian Reservation system was not designed as an
advantage, but rather as an exile for people who were forcibly moved from the
valuable land they inhabited to worthless desert.  That things don't work well
on reservations should be an anti-segregation argument, not a pro-segregation
argument)

response 133 of 232:

Jan 23 13:06 UTC 2003

Re: #127  Nice response, Steve, as always.  But I'm left
with this question.  You suggest we need to compensate for
disadvantage yet the current system (at UofM) does already,
in awarding points for social and economic hardship. 
And if that's what you're trying to do then selecting those
with the most social and economic hardship, while being 
blind to the color of their skin, somehow seems more
genuine.

Under the current system a very bright black student from
a wealthy neighborhood with all the trimmings gets a
leg up.

Maybe we should shift the color points to the economic
hardship category?

response 135 of 232:

Jan 23 14:40 UTC 2003

I agree that the Indian reservation system is an argument against 
segregation.  I am not in favor of segregation.

I agree, by the way, that white middle class Americans enjoy many 
advantages in the United States, as a group.

In the past, English-Americans enjoyed advantages over those from 
Eastern and Southern Europe.  They don't now.  Protestants enjoyed 
advantages over Catholics.  If they do now, it's not because of 
differences over religion, it's because there are a lot of recent, some 
illegal, Catholic Hispanic immigrants.

Affirmative action builds into the law a system where some people, 
because of their ethnicity, are treated differently because it is the 
prevailing view among policy makers that they are unable to compete 
equally with other people.  That's almost exactly what segregation 
did.  Affirmative action, in my view, is essentially a type of 
segregation.

response 137 of 232:

Jan 23 15:17 UTC 2003

Re #136: Yes, but you can still only get a maximum of 20 points in the
'miscellaneous factors' category.  You can't get 20 for being black, 6
for being rural, and 4 for being a legacy and end up with a total of 30.

response 139 of 232:

Jan 23 17:24 UTC 2003

re:  "#130 (rcurl):   a nation that has a large percentage of active or 
venal racists."

You've taken a poll or something to substantiate this, I presume.

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.