Clarence Thomas is one of the more startling examples of the "fuck you, I got mine" generation. How do you go from being in the black panthers to this?
The Insider article isn't paywalled for me. Are you referring to the NYT article? I intentionally didn't link the Times article because it is paywalled.
For sure, a lot of it is money, but he is also on a 30+ year revenge tour right now and will seemingly vote for anything horrible. This man was one of the pioneers when it comes to burning it all down to own the libs.
They get recommended pretty frequently, but the Behind the Bastards podcast did a pretty good review of who Clarence Thomas is and how he got to be that way.
No, he's a bad human for all the bribes he's taken to reach these decisions.
And all the other right-wing nonsense he's put out.
And the fact that he benefitted from these policies, and is pulling the ladder up behind him, because he mistakenly believed that because he got into law school via affirmative action, big law firms wouldn't hire him.
This was a black man looking for work at large, white run law firms in the early 70s. The reason they wouldn't hire him is because they were racist fucks.
Which is what affirmative action is meant to correct. Otherwise qualified applicants denied admission into universities because of their race.
Without affirmative action, you get state universities where the state population is something like 30% minority, and the population on campus is something like 1%, if that.
Which is what affirmative action is meant to correct. Otherwise qualified applicants denied admission into universities because of their race.
Without affirmative action, you get state universities where the state population is something like 30% minority, and the population on campus is something like 1%, if that.
So your solution for racism to be racism yourselves and make these minorities the beneficiaries of it instead of getting rid of it, in order words, you replaced racism you didn't like, with racism you do like.
They just removed affirmative action which hurts underserved minorities. They didn't touch legacy admissions which benefits rich white people. What they're doing is transparently racist. If they wanted a meritocracy why not bar legacy admissions as well?
Did you know 2 things can be wrong at the same time, meaning both AA and legacy admissions can be both wrong at the same time? meaning that even if they didn't turn down LA it doesn't mean turning down AA wasn't the right thing to do?
Shocking right!? that 2 things can be bad at the same time.
Lol, if your best argument against this ruling is "oh they only did because they racist because they didn't also do the other thing" that's how you know the ruling is correct, you aren't attacking the argument against AA, you're attacking the judges because they took a decision you didn't like
I would be for removing AA of they removed LA as well. Because they didn't, their motivation is clear. If we agree that both are wrong then removing only one shows that they're ok with the other.
Sure, i agree that both are wrong, my other comments were geared towards the people who believe AA is justified somehow.
There's a non small number of people believe that in older to compensate minorities who suffered discrimination in the past, we should discriminate people today as a form of payment to these minorities, in other words, to apply racism but in favor of minorities, and the people who argue for this actually believe they have the moral high ground and that this is justifiable, when in reality they behave exactly as the racist of the past, just with a different motivation.
I agree, somewhat. I feel like AA was a smaller injustice invoked to help repair a larger ongoing injustice. It may not have been the right tool.
There's another comment somewhere in this section where someone said that AA has been benefiting mostly white women and minorities that went to elite schools so it wasn't even helping as many people from disadvantaged backgrounds as it was set out to do.
Hopefully we'll be able to come up with a different system that is more just. I think a good start for that would be to remove legacy admissions and take an overall look at different solutions. I don't have a lot of confidence in today's supreme court on that front though.
Thanks for sticking with me through this, sorry about the bread stuff, I got a little tilted.
I agree, somewhat. I feel like AA was a smaller injustice invoked to help repair a larger ongoing injustice. It may not have been the right tool.
There's another comment somewhere in this section where someone said that AA has been benefiting mostly white women and minorities that went to elite schools so it wasn't even helping as many people from disadvantaged backgrounds as it was set out to do.
Hopefully we'll be able to come up with a different system that is more just. I think a good start for that would be to remove legacy admissions and take an overall look at different solutions. I don't have a lot of confidence in today's supreme court on that front though.
Thanks for sticking with me through this, sorry about the bread stuff, I got a little tilted.
What you fail to understand is that the method for getting rid of racism in admissions decisions is to actually look at race.
Only willfully blind racists think that anything can ever be race blind. Because reality is not.
Another misconception that racists spread is that minorities who benefit from affirmative action are somehow not otherwise deserving. The reality is that you still need the grades (or money) to get in to the university. All that is different is that universities are rewarded (read as not sued) for having racist admissions. i.e. being an all white school in a state with a large minority population. Which was a real thing in the deep south into the late 1970s.
What racists also ignore is that having a mixed student population is actually good for the student body as a whole.
If that worked, then we really wouldn't need affirmative action.
Here's how the system actually works, because racists lie about it all the time.
Say you have two students, one gets straight "B"s in High School, one gets a mix of B and C. Their only main difference is that they're different races. One Black, one White.
Now, without affirmative action, the White student gets preference because school admissions is generally racist as fuck. Hall, look at Brandeis, that place has actually brought back "whites only" spaces.
Now, back to the two imaginary students, a racist would assume that the black student had the worse grades. But that's not how it goes down.
See, students are judged for admissions on a bunch of criteria. There are judgments on financial stability of the family, after school programs that the student is part of, previous family members that went to any college.
It mostly boils down to two factors, how likely is this student to graduate with a degree, and how likely is this student to pay off their tuition.
Now, thanks to a bunch of racist shit that happened at the end of the civil war and has continued in one form or another until today, black students score poorer on these random criteria than a comparable white student, even when the white student has slightly worse grades.
That's what affirmative action was trying to fix. Giving black students a chance to get an education, to fight for a higher paying job, to end the cycle of poverty that white people have knowingly inflicted on them since the end of the civil war.
The fact that affirmative action also helped other minorities was not an accident, because white people have fucked over every minority.
The final note here, the civil rights act didn't magically end racism. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan soared in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
Electing a black president didn't mean racism was over, The number of white nationalist and general hate groups in the US saw a rather large bump from the election of Barack Obama. That number died off a bit towards the end of his second term, but then soared again under Trump. They were pissed about Obama, but got a green light from Trump.
If you intentionally choose to completely misinterpret and misrepresent things then fuck off buddy, on the other hand if you truly can't see then I feel sorry for you friend...
You're spot on with noting that everyone should have a right to their own opinion, regardless of their race. This applies to everyone, including the hypothetical "black guy" you mentioned. No one should be discredited based on their ethnicity or for holding a viewpoint that deviates from any presumed norm.
Your other points, however, seems to conflate the objectives of affirmative action with racism. Affirmative action is not about advantaging certain races at the expense of others; instead, it's about leveling the playing field that has been historically skewed against certain minority groups. It's not "racism you do like," but rather an attempt to correct systemic disparities.
Let's look at your example about state universities with a 30% minority population in the state but only a 1% representation on campus. Affirmative action aims to bring that 1% closer to the 30% to better reflect the demographics of the society the university serves. It doesn't necessarily mean that admission standards are lower for these groups; instead, it recognizes that these individuals have likely faced systemic barriers that could disadvantage them in the admissions process.
In an ideal world, we wouldn't need affirmative action. But we're not there yet. For now, it acts as a necessary tool to combat systemic issues that can't be fixed overnight. It’s not about promoting one race over another but promoting fairness and equal opportunity.
Oh good, they finally legally mandated color blindness. Historic and pervasive systemic racism is solved once and for all thanks to the Supreme Court issuing an edict that it shouldn't exist. Huzzah!
They should legally mandate the nonexistence of poverty next. They can solve all the problems America has in a few weeks this way.
The same reasoning worked wonders when Justice Roberts told us that racism was over and gutted the Voting Rights Act. Nothing bad came of that except rampant gerrymandering, voter suppression, and minority rule!
•AA benefitted white women more than all other groups COMBINED—plaintiffs never complained about that
•43% of white Harvard students are legacy or athlete students, of which 75% would not be admitted otherwise—plaintiffs never complained about that
•Asians are 6% of the population & 26% of Harvard admissions—plaintiffs never complained about that
If I suppressed your people's ability to create generational wealth for hundreds of years and suddenly stopped, would that be enough? Is everything better now? Or should you be compensated in some way?
The taxpayers? Sure, there's an argument for reparations and pumping money into forcing systemic change.
College students competing for a limited number of slots to schools? I'm less convinced of this, it's a zero-sum game where if you're admitting one person you're denying others from that slot.
IMO there's probably better ways you could incentivize colleges to aim for a diverse student body that would be more equitable. The goal should equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.
@EffectivelyHidden UBI just puts a floor on how far one can financially fall, it improves the minimum possible outcome. It does not provide equality of outcomes. Some UBI recipients will have higher incomes and more wealth than others.
But you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally.
The people who are already at an advantage will just continue to grow that advantage, while the people at a disadvantage will fall farther and farther behind.
That's why, despite being found repeatedly to be a form of racial discrimination, affirmative action was previously found to meet the standard of Strict Scrutiny on dozens of occasions. The Supreme Court backtracked on decades of rulings today.
You only don't like context because it, like so many things, is inconvenient to your ideology. Cant' have things like facts and nuance, no sir.
Let's say your neighbor stole your lawn mower. You petition to the court to get it back. The court receives your request the you want your neighbor to give you the lawn mower in their possession. You would argue that the judge should only decide on whether you should get your neighbor's lawn mower while excluding the context that they stole it?
You: I want my neighbor to give me the Ryobi lawn mower in their shed.
Affirmation action mandates a historically and currently racist society to demonstrate commitment to end subversive racist policies.
Maybe, but with some amount of collateral damage that will never be truly avoidable, because it’s still a system explicitly based on race. Society can never fully heal under a system like that. It can make some progress, but that progress has arguably already been largely achieved and somewhat plateaued; continuing an upward trajectory now requires different tactics.
Declaring everyone equal under the law doesn’t begin to put forth the required effort to actually make the country a more equitable place.
That was true at one point, but a lot has changed since that time.
If you think a few decades of asking some institutions to diversify their population based on some criteria other than test scores has run its course and we're in a position to move on to some other policy, you're going to not only need to describe that policy going forward but you'll also have to explain exactly what makes you think racism in this country is sufficiently dead enough to justify that position.
Because from where I sit, racism and bigotry are very much alive and well in this country, and I have no reason to believe that things won't revert to pre-civil rights sentiment. In a lot of places, it already has. In others, that never went away.
That was true at one point, but a lot has changed since that time.
Like what? They stopped stacking black people like cordwood into boats and selling them like property? They stopped lynching black kids for looking at a white woman on the street? They stopped writing language into land deals that keeps black people out of the suburbs? They stopped dumping crack into black neighborhoods to keep them incarcerated? They stopped denying black people loans to build equity and wealth? They stopped unofficial policies about hiring whites over blacks? They stopped demonizing black culture? They stopped shooting black kids for being in the wrong neighborhood?
Please, do tell me that all these things are in the distant past, no longer relevant, and shouldn't be in the smallest way considered when admissions looks at thousands of perfect test scores and says "we can't fit them all in, so let's try to have a diverse group here to represent us and provide some much-needed opportunity for a historically oppressed people, in whatever small way we can."
Please, tell me that we are past affirmative action, and why.
Affirmative action was trying to compensate for implicit anti-minority bias with explicit pro-minority bias. Today in many places, Republicans have outlawed even teaching people that this implicit bias exists with their war on critical race theory. There's a troubling recent resurgence of open racism on the right. We clearly haven't fixed the problem.
And yet, fighting institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism seems very hypocritical to me. It's much like how murder is illegal yet many states implement the death penalty. If we want our society to be a meritocracy we shouldn't grant opportunities based on the intersection of socioeconomics and genetics. This would presumably lead to a system where political and ethnic groups fight over which groups are disadvantaged and by how much, and whom the rules should favor, if it hasn't already, (the arguments made regarding Asian applicants presented in this case seem a lot like this.)
Clearly some groups were directly historically disadvantaged by the state, most notably African Americans and Native Americans. The government that did this to them should have responsibility for the consequences of these injustices, and not unrelated universities. If we are to target aid in a racial way it would make sense to do it as reparations targeted at the groups that were disadvantaged in a racial way, rather than forcing colleges to abandon meritocracy. If anything I want colleges to be more meritocratic, to the point of no longer letting people in for being legacies or donors.
Although racial disparities aren't fixed, addressing it this way is illegal and problematic. It seems the only viable alternative left to address remaining social inequities is to elevate all socioeconomically disadvantaged people in a colorblind way.
As for colleges, if they want to avoid racial bias they could omit racial identifiers and correlates like the name and location of the applicant and choose their students in a truly colorblind and meritocratic way, because without such identifiers implicit biases can't be expressed.
But you can't fix inequality by treating everyone equally.
The people who are already at an advantage will just continue to grow that advantage, while the people at a disadvantage will fall farther and farther behind.
That's why, despite being found repeatedly to be a form of racial discrimination, affirmative action was previously found to meet the standard of Strict Scrutiny on dozens of occasions. The Supreme Court backtracked on decades of rulings today.
The people celebrating this are celebrating that it hurts Black and Hispanic students. White kids might get helped, or might not, but that was never really the goal.
Probably going to get downvoted for this, but I tend to agree that AA, as it stood, had run its course. Getting rid of it now clears the way for new and better solutions.
“Universities all across the country will begin to experiment with a whole variety of admissions techniques that are race-neutral in the sense that race is not an explicit factor, but not race-neutral in the sense that they’re intended to produce diversity,” says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.
Paul says many universities are going to have to up their recruitment efforts, increase partnerships with community colleges and high-poverty high schools, and invest more in scholarships and financial aid.
“These are things that universities will want to do anyway, because they’re good things to do,” Paul says.
Dan Urman, director of the law and public policy minor at Northeastern, who teaches courses on the Supreme Court, says the ruling means that universities will have to redouble their efforts to maintain diverse student bodies. Urman says there are examples of states opting out of affirmative action policies to mixed results.
“My home state of California abolished affirmative action in 1996 in a vote called Proposition 209, and California universities spent a lot of time and resources recruiting, establishing programs,” he says. “They were able to get diversity, not back to where it was before … but let’s say they were able to avoid some of the worst predictions of what would happen to diversity.”
One potential solution to maintain diversity are so-called percentage plans, where students who graduate at the top of their classes at each respective high school are guaranteed spots in universities. The first percentage plan was signed into law in 1997 in Texas by then-Gov. George W. Bush. It permits any student from “a Texas public high school in the top 10% of his or her class to get into any Texas public college, without any SAT or ACT score.”
Removing legacy admissions would help a lot. I've seen people arguing that admissions are a zero sub game. If someone gets in because of AA then someone else didn't get in. Ending legacy admissions would free up a much larger portion of admissions for a more diverse student body to get in, instead of some rich person's dumbass kid.
Colleges give preference to legacies because the admissions department is judged by its yield (the percentage of accepted applicants who actually enroll), and legacy applicants are more likely to enroll if accepted.
It's not necessarily related to being rich. A legacy is about as likely to be wealthy as other students at the school, because after all their parents were also students at that school.
Another important reason is that colleges rely on alumni donors, and alumni are less likely to donate if their children are not accepted.
I understand where garretw87 is coming from here with the cautious optimism. Unlike the Voting Rights Act (section 4, iirc) that was struck down a few years ago and then multiple republican-led state legislatures immediately moved to find ways to disenfranchise any demographic they deemed to vote democrat, these race-conscious policies are a result from internal motivations and commitment to diversity.
Nothing is going to make Harvard enact a policy that it doesn't ultimately believe in (although we clearly see that court cases can dissolve existing policies). And even if the laws say that Harvard's goals of increasing diversity can't be through race-conscious admissions, then Harvard can and will find another signifier than race to achieve its goals. One way may be to add points during the review process to an applicant who reports that their family received social benefits, or maybe even go so far as to demarcate a map of zip codes and add points if an applicant grew up in specific communities that are well known for specific demographics.
I anticipate that something like this that is broadly defined but catches prevalence for certain ethnic groups while not being exclusive to any one ethnic group could be the way for Harvard to continue recruitment and achieve its diversity goals.
Also, before my comment here gets reduced down to " OP assumes all X race must be poor, hurr durr" I want to add that there is a small batch of elite high schools in America that recruit very talented students of all races from some of the poorest communities (the Bronx, Appalachia, South side Chicago, etc.) that extend generous scholarship packages for room, board, and tuition from which universities like Harvard are recruiting about half of its prospective diversity students. To put all the focus on universities for being race-conscious is to turn a blind eye that there exist private high schools that are doing the same thing.
This is exactly right. There have been various interviews with college admissions directors over the past year, and they pretty much all said the same thing. To paraphrase, "We expect that AA will be struck down. If we can't directly ask about race on the application, then we will achieve the same result by indirect means".
AA opponents mistakenly believe that colleges will now be forced to consider only grades and test scores. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't come to the same conclusion that AA had allowed institutions of higher education to be lazy in their admissions process.
I read this excerpt to mean that now these institutions that used to have race-conscious admissions will have to go the extra mile to communicate to prospective students of color that the institution is amenable to that student's application and is interested in recruiting them despite rulings like today's from SCOTUS.
The institutions impacted by this decision are self-motivated to increase diversity because those are values established and held by those institutions. So this excerpt saying they'll have to double recruitment efforts just means that they will have to demonstrate their doors are still open to students of color despite SCOTUS barring this particular avenue in.
An analysis of student records by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative activist group representing Asian American students in the lawsuit against Harvard, found that the institution, on average, rated Asian American applicants lower in personality and likability ratings than others.<
I didn't see that approach coming, but I guess I should have. Conservatives have always argued that affirmative action was racist, but racist against white folks. Now they've found a non-white group that they could argue was discriminated against based on race.
Oh yeah, that's what this case has always been. Cynical conservatives used a group of well-meaning Asian students to push their hateful, bigoted agenda. Exploiting minorities is what these people do best.
I'm not a fan of this ruling. Not on the merits, but on the results.
Affirmative Action fell into the "Equity" column in that "Equality - Equity - Justice" spectrum. Remember that comic with the baseball game, a fence, and 3 kids of varying heights trying to watch?
Equality says they can all go to the fence and try to watch, and everyone gets a box to stand on, though, even with the box, the shortest kid can't see over the fence.
Equity says that everyone gets boxes of varying heights so they can all see over the fence.
Justice advocates replacing the fence with a chain-link fence tat everyone can see through without the need for boxes in the first place.
It's nice to pretend that we don't need boxes, and racism is "over", but that's just pretending.
I’m not american, so I don’t have a horse in this race. But I believe that being racist to fix equity is a terrible compromise. It’s putting people of a certain ethnicity (white & asian) into their own little box with more competition.
Give black & hispanic people monetary aid. Aid them more in high school by assisting black majority schools. But if the system lets you say the sentence “I would have gotten into X university if I was a different race”, then the system is broken.
Finally, it’s not usually “black people” vs “white people”, it’s “poor people” vs “rich people”. Black/hispanic people might be over-represented in the poor group, which is a huge problem. But aiding the poor is completely non-racist, benefits virtually everybody, and has the side effect of slowly reducing the amount of poor black/hispanic people.
I’m not american, so I don’t have a horse in this race. But I believe that being racist to fix equity is a terrible compromise. It’s putting people of a certain ethnicity (white & asian) into their own little box with more competition.
Give black & hispanic people monetary aid. Aid them more in high school by assisting black majority schools. But if the system lets you say the sentence “I would have gotten into X university if I was a different race”, then the system is broken.
Finally, it’s not usually “black people” vs “white people”, it’s “poor people” vs “rich people”. Black/hispanic people might be over-represented in the poor group, which is a huge problem. But aiding the poor is completely non-racist, benefits virtually everybody, and has the side effect of slowly reducing the amount of poor black/hispanic people
I'm sure everyone supporting this decision is also for making legacy admissions, college prep, and AP courses illegal too. Or is it only racist when the outcome favors people of color?
What a massive win for Asian Americans! They'll finally be allowed to apply to universities and jobs across the nation without facing legal systemic racial discrimination. I'm surprised by the negativity in here. It's 2023. It's time to end systemic racial discrimination in America.
Trying to create equitable outcomes for people who our great grandparents ripped from their home, deleted their cultural and familial history, tortured and raped them, bought and sold them as property, and forced them to work for free essentially at gunpoint, for generations, is not racism.
Words have meaning. Pushing back against the results of 400 years of systemic oppression to try to create equitable outcomes is the opposite of racism.
People like yourself don't even understand what affirmative action is in reality. Either that, or all of the talk about undeserving minorities "stealing" positions from white people is in bad faith.
Trying to create equitable outcomes for people who our great grandparents ripped from their home, deleted their cultural and familial history, tortured and raped them, bought and sold them as property, and forced them to work for free essentially at gunpoint, for generations, is not racism.
If you're using racism to achieve those outcomes, it is racism, discriminating Asians in favors of black for college admissions is racism, you can try to rationalize it however you want, but this was plain racism, the people that got discriminated by AA today don't and have never owned a black slave, the people who benefit from AA today are not and have never been slaves, i am sorry but they ancestors had it shitty, but that's not excuse to hurt people today just to pay some sort of moral debt.
Words have meaning. Pushing back against the results of 400 years of systemic oppression to try to create equitable outcomes is the opposite of racism.
No, you are not "pushing back", you are just replacing racism you don't like, with racism you do like while trying to appear to have the moral high ground, you are a hypocrite.
This would be a good point if it weren't for all of the systemic racism that tilts the scales towards white people from before the birth of the country into the present day.
Slavery, Jim Crow, chain gangs, loitering laws, segregation, redlining, political violence, lynching, the war on drugs, the school to prison pipeline, school districts funded by local property taxes, longer criminal sentences for black people, school voucher programs, outlawing the teaching of black history.
No one is denying that these things did happen, but the problem here is that your "solution" for systemic racism, is to apply systemic racism to other races in benefit of minorities, now if you want to argue "oh but we must do so because every bad thing that happened to these minorities!" then you aren't actually fighting to end systemic racism, what you actually want is to have that power for yourselves, you want to be able to discriminate and suffer no consequences for this, in other words, this is pretty much revenge for what happened back then.
Two wrongs don't make a right, if you support committing injustice just to compensate the victims of previous injustices, you're no different than the original criminal.
As a white, I think whites should be ground into bread. They should be shot into space as bread where they can expand to fit the container they're placed in while in microgravity. This isn't hypocrisy, it's cosmic baking. Get in the rocket with me, brother.
You would rob yourself of the glory of living as interstellar bread? Being baked to a golden brown by cosmic radiation while aimlessly shooting across the void infinite?
Join me, our bodies no longer bounded by our form. We expand, yeast eating sugar, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. We intermingle, no longer you, no longer me. Just intimately bread, endlessly bread.
As opposed to you who want a world that favors black people over other races? get down from your high horse, you don't want "equality" you want the privileges and powers you cry white people having for yourselves
There’s a lot of really good discussion in this thread, but this entire comment chain is not part of that lol. I’m actually impressed you’ve all managed to represent both sides of this conversation so poorly and devoid of all nuance.
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