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Then he should have explained why he changed his mind on Affirmative Action. Does he think it has become obsolete for the current times or what?
America elected a black man as president for 8 years, if that doesn’t mean anything regarding what’s possible in America, then it should’ve never happened.
Are you claiming no social progress for people of color has been made since 1975?
Special treatment, welfare, and handouts must be permanent in the “land of opportunity?”
Our society also needs a sea change in its way of thinking. People need to accept reality and their lot in life.
It is a fact that the vast majority of people of any race are not cut out for our nation’s top universities. People need to fall in line and come back down to earth.
Shooting a kid into an Ivy League school based on his race makes as much sense as putting gold wheels on a rusted out, worn out Cadillac. They need to start with a foundation and that starts at birth if they want minorities to reach their potential.
True. Only thing I can think of is boarding school or some kind of very well guarded community like a military academy. This is what the super rich do for their kids to keep them on the straight and narrow.
Then he should have explained why he changed his mind on Affirmative Action. Does he think it has become obsolete for the current times or what?
I think what Thomas is saying is that over time, the AA hasn't done much to help matters because the colleges ended up requiring lower test scores in order for an AA student to be accepted and pass. If they never did that, then there never would have been a problem. SO I think he's trying to get rid of the AA so the colleges are forced to have a level playing field that way only the best of the best are being admitted into college. But I still think someone who is black, female, Hispanic or all of them weren't admitted into a college even thought they out performed their peers, they would have had standing for filing a lawsuit since the first amendment protects them against discrimination. Don't need AA to fight for your constitutional right.
So you agree that affirmative action was a good and necessary policy in the 70s. Cool.
At what point did it change?
When colleges started to change the required testing scores for Blacks and Hispanics compared to Whites and Asians. When doing this, like Thomas says, it created a pool of kids who would end up failing either in college or in life and this brought down the whole race. Back then, this never existed. Only thing that existed was some rich prude would use his money or power to get his brat kid in school, and that too is a bad thing.
So you agree that affirmative action was a good and necessary policy in the 70s. Cool.
At what point did it change?
By the 1990s, at the latest. The experiment has overstayed its welcome.
But I do agree we should have affirmative action based on poverty. People of any race who grow up destitute should have some aid in college admissions.
For years, many minority students in middle and high schools have been allowed to slip by with substandard performances, and have been pushed very little compared to other students to put in the long hours needed to study hard and learn difficult material. Why parents and teachers allow these students to slip by without getting the training their classmates get in good study habits etc., remains unexplained.
Then when far lower percentages of these under-trained and underperforming students are accepted to top colleges, some schools have practices what they call "affirmative action", taking into account the race of the students and boosting the acceptance rates of minorities.
Thomas argues here that simply admitting them to a difficult college, does them more harm than good, since often they have not been inculcated with study habits that would enable them to keep up with their fellow students who did get such training. So their likelihood of absorbing less of the material, or even flunking out, is greater in the absence of the study habits that would enable them to learn as well as they can.
Can the U.S. Supreme Court do something to get parents, high schools etc. to push their students to develop the study habits they need? Maybe, maybe not. But is simply letting colleges discriminate by race in accepting minorities who cannot benefit from a difficult course of study, is not the solution, Thomas says.
If "affirmative action" is eliminated (as the 14th amendment and other laws demand), will parents etc. respond by training their children to study hard and succeed?
“I note that racial engineering does in fact have insidious consequences,” Justice Thomas wrote, concerning a challenge to an affirmative action program at the University of Texas. “There can be no doubt that the University’s discrimination injures white and Asian applicants who are denied admission because of their race. But I believe the injury to those admitted under the University’s discriminatory admissions program is even more harmful.”
“Blacks and Hispanics admitted to the University as a result of racial discrimination are, on average, far less prepared than their white and Asian classmates,” he said.
“The University admits minorities who otherwise would have attended less selective colleges where they would have been more evenly matched,” Justice Thomas argued. “But, as a result of the mismatching, many blacks and Hispanics who likely would have excelled at less elite schools are placed in a position where underperformance is all but inevitable because they are less academically prepared than the white and Asian students with whom they must compete. Setting aside the damage wreaked upon the self- confidence of these overmatched students, there is no evidence that they learn more at the University than they would have learned at other schools for which they were better prepared. Indeed, they may learn less.”
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