The Supreme Court ruled colleges and universities can no longer take race into consideration as a specific basis in admissions — a landmark decision that overturns long-standing precedent that has benefited Black and Latino students in higher education.
Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.
This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to “solve discrimination”, it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they’re in without additional opportunity.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination.
Agreed, seems like the intentions were good but the desired effects were not realised.
You can’t correct discrimination with discrimination since that just maintains the whole foundation of categorising people and seeing them as inherently different from others, purelly because they were worn born with differences in a handful of genes with highly visible expression and which are totally irrelevant for who they are as persons.
In this I always go back to what I learned when it came to the treatment of homosexuals in The Netherlands: when people treat something as normal there is no descrimination - when homosexuality is “just another sexuality”, homophobia is as senseless as discriminating against people for having blue eyes or thicker eyebrows.
Exactly, can’t solve discrimination with more discrimination.
Questionable. In Northern Ireland, the police used to be something like 7% Catholic, policing a population that was over 40% Catholic. It was controversial at the time, but a 50:50 recruitment policy was put in place in the mid to late 90s, until the balance of the police force matched the wider community.
This is now very broadly accepted as a necessary and beneficial move. The current police force is generally seen as impartial (in terms of this one issue) while the old one was generally not trusted by the minority, to put it mildly.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Affirmative action was never meant to “solve discrimination”, it was meant as a step towards correcting systematic bias. Even if discrimination disappeared today, the socioeconomic situation certain minority groups face makes it impossible for them as a collective to get out of the hole they’re in without additional opportunity.
Problem with affirmative action is that it treats people’s livelihoods as data points in a metric. These groups should get more opportunities, but in this case they’re directly taking opportunities away from others and, like you said, that’s discrimination. Can selective racial discrimination solve for systematic bias? Maybe. Should it? Probably not.
Agreed, seems like the intentions were good but the desired effects were not realised.
You can’t correct discrimination with discrimination since that just maintains the whole foundation of categorising people and seeing them as inherently different from others, purelly because they were worn born with differences in a handful of genes with highly visible expression and which are totally irrelevant for who they are as persons.
In this I always go back to what I learned when it came to the treatment of homosexuals in The Netherlands: when people treat something as normal there is no descrimination - when homosexuality is “just another sexuality”, homophobia is as senseless as discriminating against people for having blue eyes or thicker eyebrows.