University Of Texas Conservative Students Hold Affirmative Action Bake Sale

We don't live in a race neutral world when it comes to primary and secondary education and your proposal is certainly not any type of answer to the issues AA attempts to solve.

 

This is great if the State has no interest in supporting historically disadvantaged groups and/or the University as a whole doesn't have any interest in or get any benefit from having a diverse population. But I don't know that either assumption is particularly accurate.

 

did AA work in India?

 

What does AA do for the poor, who are also at a large disadvantage? It isn't like kids of all races are never at a disadvantage educationally. The education disparity should be addressed in elementary school, not college.

But it does so to the detriment of others. The people that would be cut out, are also the least likely to make it. This will not change overall college acceptance, just how you begin your college journey.

 

Arguably no, but can you explain the relevance to the United States? There are clear differences in what led each country to institute affirmative action. There are also clear differences in what affirmative action programs exist here and in India. I have never heard of using the efficiency of programs in developing countries to decide whether they should be implemented here.

 

When I was at UT, they grade on a bell curve.

I wonder how many AA students that are below the top 10% can survive the first 2 semesters when they are competing against the top 10% in their class.

Do they grade on a bell curve based on race too?

 

How does discrimination come into play when you consider the class rank and not what high school the rank was from?

If you diversity simply for diversity's sake, just say so.

 

Yes, this country just loooooves Asians and gives them free handouts since Grade 1, that's why we gotta try our hardest to keep Asians from flooding our colleges and split those seats off to Blacks/Latinos

Yup, definitely an accurate reflection of reality

 

How could it?

 

As a Hispanic AA is demeaning and a joke. I don't need special attention or preferences based on my skin color, my freaking skin color, which has no bearing on my mental fortitude.

What makes it worse is those Hispanics that support these programs and have the mentality that they are the victims. We want everything to be equal yet support actions that give us a "level playing field," when in reality we are just supporting the notions that those of us with color are not on par with others and need that help.

 

I don't even know what you're talking about.

 

AA isn't a poverty based program. If you want a poverty based program then support one. I agree it should be addressed earlier in education, I already said as much. The people that are generally loud in their condemnation of AA and sue to overturn it don't give a damn about education of the poor.

 

You didn't only consider class rank in your post. The fact is only considering class rank will result in the same law suits that have attacked the 10% rule.

 

He's talking about the kids of Asian immigrants who grow up poor, live in bad neighborhoods, have to start working before they are teenagers, and get picked on everyday for having an accent or looking different being told they are "not diverse" or less "worthy" of a place in a university and disadvantaged relative to literally every other racial group in the US when it comes to college admissions.

 

Simple solution to the stupidity. Native american students should buy all of the bake sale items at the beginning of the day and hand them out to everyone. If the bake sale has no goods, then they gotta leave.

 

I'm not interested in helping poor white kids; I'm well aware that white people probably have the most to lose if admissions became totally merit based. Frankly, I would love something like CA's system becoming national, which is highly unlikely.

Thus, I'm merely participating in this mental exercise because AA is a logical cesspool. What is the rationale for rich black people getting a leg up over poor Asians or poor whites? What is the rationale for white students getting a leg up over Asian students? Why can the "reflecting the community" argument be used to reduce the number of Asians, but not the number of black people? What is more "diverse" about being black than being Indian? If AA isn't a measure meant to right past wrongs, why are we basing a national policy on vague notions of modern racism? You yourself used wealth as a proxy for how "little" racism Asian-Americans encounter; so why not just use wealth/income directly? Thus, I'm really just advocating income-based AA because its the only way to make AA somewhat logically consistent and palatable to people who are not benefited.

 

That's not really the type of racism I'm talking about. You can't legislate being made fun of or being picked on. I'm talking about more tangible effects of racism.

 

Being rich doesn't make a black person any less black in America but really the rich black kid that benefits from AA is just a red herring, making the exception pretend to be the rule. Second, I didn't say Asians experienced little racism, I said it didn't affect them materially in the way it affects others.

Making AA based on income isn't logically consistent with it being a policy to address the effects of racism.

 

I also think that people are missing the broader point of AA. Affirmative action was a backdoor attempt to address the educational inequities of America. After schools were integrated, you had a ton of local school districts that did nothing to address the educational disparities of local schools once court mandated desegregation programs were ended. In a lot of communities, you flat out had communities do everything they could to resegregate schools.

If you go to Mississippi or Alabama today, you'll find private schools that are 99% white and the public schools are mostly black. That's a reintroduction of segregation via the development of an alternative private school infrastructure that is largely "whites only." Now that's an extreme example but even in Houston you simply have schools in poor black and hispanic communities with no property tax base and poor institutional support. Even if those schools are given money, they suffer from poor management, broken communities, and poverty. There's a reason why courts ordered busing programs to force integration across communities. It was the only way to bridge the insane inequities of our schools.

However, those programs were shut down rather quickly after Brown v Board. Inter-district busing programs were ended rather quickly and court ordered programs were scaled back. School districts basically re-segregated within 20 years after Brown v Board.

So in the face of a systemic failure to actually deal with our poorly managed school systems, we now have affirmative action as a backwards mechanism to makeup for the shortfalls that come with failing schools that give students zero chance in hell to ever compete with a child from a quality school. It's definitely not an optimal solution. Hell its a bad solution. But until we finally come to grips with how unequal our educational system is, it sticks around as a policy option.

As for addressing this by income, it really varies by community. Poor blacks have it much worse than poor whites in some Southern states. It's not even close. If you're a poor black person in the deep south, (and I'm excluding Texas since Texas is kind of a strange case for the deep south) you're life will be noticably worse than an equally poor white person. In areas like that, income isn't a proper variable since it doesn't account for very intense racial segregation that exists across society.

In Texas however, the segregation isn't quite as pronounced and historically it has taken a very different form. Income actually serves as a reasonable metric to encompass racial segregation. Hell, the top 10% really has done a reasonable job. I do however hate the argument that wealthier african americans are getting admission via affirmative action. Of course they're getting in because of it but that's what happens when you dont actually address educational inequalities in our school system. You end up with imperfect solutions like affirmative action or the top 10% rule.

All of the options we have now suck. They all have various problems associated with them. But policymakers continue to do nothing and our obsession with local control of schools has had the effect of r****ding any effort to change this. Many of our school district lines are themselves segregated and if they're not, many of the power brokers have an interest in maintaining a level of internal segregation among schools. White people had several hundred years of ownership of a superior educational system and its unreasonable to suggest that local leadership would just forgo that in completely redesign their school system. That's why court ordered busing programs were met with such revulsion. They directly challenged the ability of local communities to maintain segregation in school districts.

So unless you want to bring court ordered desegregation back in an attempt to cleanup our school districts, you're going to get AA or top 10% or whatever else the alternative is.

 

So you conveniently ignore every other thing on that list? Poor Asian kids and poor black kids are starting in the same place; there is no reason to treat them differently. If you agree that Asians also face racism, why is the so-called "tangible" effect so much greater on black people? Clearly, to make such an assertion, you're implying that something about anti-Asian racism must be less severe or it is simply less frequent...unless you mean to imply that black people cannot overcome racism as well as Asians, which, given your posting record, I highly doubt.

Secondly, when I say consistency, I mean internal consistency. It doesn't matter if the rich black kid is the exception (which it isn't as middle/upper class black people along with white women are among the primary beneficiaries of AA), it shouldn't be happening at all if AA were a policy meant to be internally consistent. Neither would other ridiculous things like white people getting an advantage over Asians. I understand that making AA based on income would somewhat go against it's envisioned role as a race equalizer.