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Centuries of racism can't be fixed without compensation for those harmed.

People looking at an issue surface deep is never the answer.

It's good.

There are people who are arguing it's bad. They are either doing so in bad faith, or have the luxury of either never experiencing the racism that made affirmative action necessary, or never looked into the historical reasons for it.

A good place to start to understand why laws like this we're enacted is Redlining

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

The TL:DR here is maps would be drawn that we're used to determine how risky it was to loan people money. These maps would be drawn based on the ethnicity of the neighborhood (this can be verified, there are poor white neighborhoods). If an applicants address was in a neighborhood that was Redlined, they could be denied a loan.

A modern example is the NFL. In 2021 they were ordered to pay a billion dollars to retired black players. The reason? The NFL were "race norning" cognitive tests designed to see if players had suffered mental decline over their career.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002627309/nfl-says-it-will-halt-race-norming-and-review-brain-injury-claims

Essentially if a white player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old (this example is made up, I don't know the exact metrics) that player would be paid for their injuries.

If a black player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old that player would not be paid for their injuries. Because the NFL was working under the assumption that black people are fundamentally less intelligent than white people, so for them to be "damaged" they needed a higher level of mental decline to qualify.

This was happening in 2020.

The US needs affirmative action. We're a wonderful country that does many things well. We also still have a fuckton of racists at all levels of government and business. We're simply not there yet.

Depends...

In the case of West point, the criteria for preferential admissions is going to be based on maintaining the number of officers who are black at 15% or so (to align military officer demographics with the general population). By and large there won't be any actual action, they aren't going to actively go looking for black people to enroll to add numbers. If there is an occasion where candidates are competing for seats, they will adjust preference to pursue their demographic targets. The standards won't get lowered, it's just a bias in competition among those who otherwise qualify.

In some cases, it ends up being a little different. It won't be preference among similarly qualified people, it will be an active pursuit of getting a specific number of black people into seats, sometimes with no regard at all for other qualifications. The qualification for a seat becomes skin color. Essentially, the standard becomes inherently racist.

I don't know exactly how affirmative action was implemented at Harvard or West point, but there's a very real chance that West point will fare better in a lawsuit, because the merits of affirmative action aren't fixed, it depends on how it's implemented. It can be good, it can be racist. If a white guy needs a bunch of qualifications and a black guy just needs to show up with his melanin, that's not cricket, but if both meet the qualifications (to a roughly equivalent degree) and you preference for a target demographic outcome (that roughly mirrors population demographics), thats completely sound and entirely laudable.

The devil's in the details, as with most things. It's not a black and white issue, despite the obvious :)

Good. Correcting historical systemic injustices are always good.

I think there are two separate questions. The first is 'Is the concept behind affirmative action valid?' and the second is 'Is the implementation of affirmative action effective, fair and just?'

I believe there shouldn't even be a damn debate about the first question. This country has a massively problematic history with race relations and there are obviously still ripple effects in modern society, and we should take active measures to fix that. Minorities have been explicitly excluded from opportunities to gain wealth and status up until disturbingly recently, and many are still implicitly excluded from them to this day. Anybody who says that racism and the problems that come with it is a thing of the past is straight-up wrong. They are either not trying to understand the problems, or they are actively trying not to. Both of those are unacceptable to me.

The second question does merit some debate. Is it effective to simply say 'if we have two equal candidates we'll hire the minority'? How often does that really happen? Is it fair to do things like the NFL rewarding teams that hire a minority head coach? Is it just to implement quotas and percentages? I don't have answers to all of these questions. I have some opinions. But as a straight white cis dude, I feel like my voice doesn't need to be the loudest in the room in this one.

It's like asking if investments are good or bad. Depends on a lot of factors. Affirmative Action is meant to be an investment in an underperforming, underdeveloped, section of the population.

Education Is directly correlated with long term income. The more educated a population is, the more money they make, the more taxes they pay. In most countries, free education pays for itself as the educated citizens earn so much more than uneducated citizens that their increased taxes easily pays for the cost.

I think everyone can agree with the above but the questionable part is: What does being Black have to do with it? There are a lot of Americans who are born into poor and uneducated families. Why can't Affirmative Action apply to anyone who meets that description regardless of skin colour? I think the general argument here is that Black Americans faced historical oppression and there needs to be some kind of amends for that. Which brings up another contentious question: When does it end?

The answer to that question is "are people today still suffering from the domino effect of past discriminations and loss of opportunities?"

I don’t even have to check comment history to find out this is a leading question

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WlPTmXi0pVk/hqdefault.jpg

For whom? For white woman it works pretty well for Asian males not so much.