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I can take 10 million people that are all essentially identical, and assign them numbers 1-10 so one million of each group.
I then declare that everyone with the number 4 cannot attend school beyond the 5th grade.
Let the civilization run for a few hundred years and then come back and remove the restriction.
Not surprisingly, the number 4's are as a group are poorer and with less family history and involvement in education.
Additionally, let's say that the number system is completely abolished and nobody harbors any biases towards any other number group.
Decades later have the number 4's caught back up to the wealth, education etc. of the others?
This is where you are arguing a different point than what I made in the previous post.
You feel that there is no lingering damage or disadvantage if bias has been eliminated from the present and I am making the point that there is still disadvantage.
I mean holy crap, you think Al Gore is where he is today with a nobel prize, emmy, former vice president on his great abilities rather than where his father and grandfather positioned themselves in society and thus handed him an easy path to the top?
Al Gore represents the exception not the rule. Most of us are just average bums with average upbringings. The masses (white, black, brown, etc) have no excuse today why they are not successful. There are millions of examples of people who had nothing when they came to America and faced similar challenges as other poor people and excelled. The difference you ask? Not sitting around moping but setting goals for your life and setting about doing it. Not giving yourself excuses and also living with standards (ie not doing too many stupid things).
This pretty much sums up the problem and disconnect. Allow the unqualified in, they struggle, artificially prop them up and what do you get? Bad lawyers, bad doctors, bad dentists, bad nurses, bad pilots??? Do you really want that Marxist Progressives?
And they are OK with combating PAST Racism with more PRESENT DAY Racism. Wow.
I am sick and tired of the sentiment that students of color don't belong in school. Folk like this adjunct, plus Amy Wax at Penn (but Wax has full tenure but can get away with it!) have been preaching, for years, this garbage of "they don't cut it!" How can anyone trust a professor to be an objective grader, when he/she has views like that? If I had a choice, I go nowhere near this professor when registering for class!
Racist is not treating everybody as an individual.
Stupid is expecting that you can apply a lower admission standard to one group of any race, religion, gender etc. and EXPECT that there will be no discernable difference in the OVERALL quality of the students.
Racist would be thinking that ALL of that group is underperforming, not that some are struggling.
What if MIT just swung it's doors open to anyone that scored above 50th percentile on the ACT with a random lottery if too many applied?
You think that the Thermodynamics teacher is going to notice any difference in students when instead of having people like Neil Degrasse Tyson in his class, he's now got people like Penny from the Cheesecake factory in his class.
Racist is not treating everybody as an individual.
Stupid is expecting that you can apply a lower admission standard to one group of any race, religion, gender etc. and EXPECT that there will be no discernable difference in the OVERALL quality of the students.
Racist would be thinking that ALL of that group is underperforming, not that some are struggling.
What if MIT just swung it's doors open to anyone that scored above 50th percentile on the ACT with a random lottery if too many applied?
You think that the Thermodynamics teacher is going to notice any difference in students when instead of having people like Neil Degrasse Tyson in his class, he's now got people like Penny from the Cheesecake factory in his class.
The problem is that you have professors that believe that people from certain groups are automatically, using your example, "Penny from the Cheesecake factory" and not a Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
She should have more discretion and should know better than to share students private information with the public. Every black student will now be suspect to be one of the "a lot" she is referring to.
Some of her top students were also black.
she was lamenting on the schools entrance policies whereas the lower students may have been more successful in another school that fit an approach that may have been more beneficial to their academic level.
It was not a "black students are low achievers" discussion.
I can take 10 million people that are all essentially identical, and assign them numbers 1-10 so one million of each group.
I then declare that everyone with the number 4 cannot attend school beyond the 5th grade.
Let the civilization run for a few hundred years and then come back and remove the restriction.
Not surprisingly, the number 4's are as a group are poorer and with less family history and involvement in education.
Additionally, let's say that the number system is completely abolished and nobody harbors any biases towards any other number group.
Decades later have the number 4's caught back up to the wealth, education etc. of the others?
Simulations like that might be interesting for future generations to run on their super duper quantum computers. The real world is pretty complex though. It would probably take a super-intelligent AI to get all the initial conditions right... create the algorithms that allow all the various factors to interact and play out in a truly realistic way. To get a precise understanding of how hundreds of years of history effect the performance of a given individual sitting in a law school classroom in Georgetown University... that would be quite a feat.
Quote:
You feel that there is no lingering damage or disadvantage if bias has been eliminated from the present and I am making the point that there is still disadvantage.
We simply can't know how much actual advantage or disadvantage people have been given by history and all the various circumstances in their lives. There's no fair way to adjust or compensate for that. The best we can do is try to build a society where more people flourish and reach their potential, and treat all individuals fairly in this moment.
The reason for the poorer grades is that a higher percent of black students are less qualified. The reason they are less qualified? Seventy percent of all black children are raised in a single parent family. As a group, children from single parent families are less educated than those raised by 2 parents.
Sounds like the professor was simply concerned and wanted to brainstorm with a colleague about how to help her black students do better. Now she's branded a "reprehensible" racist, her career ruined permanently.
If you can't talk about your problems, you will never solve them.
I mean holy crap, you think Al Gore is where he is today with a nobel prize, emmy, former vice president on his great abilities rather than where his father and grandfather positioned themselves in society and thus handed him an easy path to the top?
Al Gore had Gore family privilege. Prince Harry has prince privilege. Any "white privilege" they might enjoy is negligible by comparison.
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