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Affirmative Action is Racial and Gender PREJUDICE. It's already unconstitutional yet corrupted courts uphold it.
Affirmative action cases have come up in fairly conservative courts in the past, Texas, Harvard and most recently in 2016. So was the 2016 court corrupted.
The point is should universities be allowed to use other than just grades in their selection, is background and experience a consideration. UNC offered admission to 19% of the 53,000 that applied, you can bet that anyone accepted is a solid student.
They accepted 62% women, 20% Asian, 11% black, 11% Hispanic.
We will see how this conservative court rules but it seems NC has been very considerate and thorough in their determination.
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.
This is a conclusion I'm not sure I'd agree with. Black poverty rates, inflation adjusted salaries (especially for college graduates, and I'd wager even more true for those attending top schools), etc., have all trended in the right direction over the last however many so decades.
Here is a chart on black poverty rates over the decades.
There are certainly cultural ills that plague the black community today where certain indicators are worse off than in the past (such as the prevalence of single parent households), which gets to my biggest point. The issue of affirmative action is hardly the main issue that is holding black people back today. I wouldn't even put it in the top 10 of issues. Indeed, even on the college education front, affirmative action is certainly not the reason why 64% of all black college students are females; things have been this lopsided for a long, long time. https://www.jbhe.com/news_views/51_g...versities.html Affirmative action isn't to blame for these gender imbalances among blacks in higher education.
And as I wrote back on page 3 of this thread, at what most would consider the most competitive schools in the nation, black graduation rates are generally essentially on par with white and Asian student graduation rates.
Compare this to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), which have SIGNIFICANTLY lower graduation rates for black students than more selective national universities do.
Quote:
“Nationally, for all schools [black and white], the graduation rate is 60 percent,” Taylor said. “So, no one really is doing a good job.”
The graduation rate for HBCUs is only 35 percent, Taylor said. The journal reported that at half of the HBCUs surveyed, the black student graduation rate is 34 percent or lower. And there are seven HBCUs in which fewer than one in five black students earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
This is so because, unlike was the case pre-affirmative action, the best and the brightest among black students are now no longer going to HBCUs as a general matter, but to more competitive and often better-funded non-HBCUs.
You do have schools like UT where there is a larger disparity in terms of racial graduation rates, but this just goes to how different schools are using different criteria on the issue of affirmative action; an affirmative action admit at an Ivy League school is clearly generally going to have superior standardized test scores than an affirmative action admit at certain other schools. I do note that Texas does not use race-based affirmative action for the overwhelming majority of its public school system admissions, but instead relies on the top ten percent (TTP) program, where the top ten percent of students throughout high schools in the state are guaranteed admission to public universities in the state.
While I remain against race-based affirmative action on fairness and constitutional grounds (for public schools on constitutional grounds), I think that people greatly overestimate the negative impact that affirmative action has on the black community and black students in general.
As I've written before, there are many legitimate reasons to be against race-based affirmative action, IMO. I haven't been convinced this this so-called "mismatch theory" is a strong reason.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eddie gein
Well, when you consider that the only reason he is on the Supreme Court is because he is Black and replaced a Black Guy.
He's just one of those guys that realized early on that the line was a lot shorter on the Republican side for a Black dude to get to the top.
If not for stuff like Affirmative Action there wouldn't be as many Blacks in "White" Colleges and their wouldn't be any minorities or women on the Supreme Court.
Maybe Affirmative Action has outlived it's usefulness but for conservatives to claim that Clarence Thomas would be on the court without it is laughable.
touché
It is so cringey to listen to him rant about how black students shouldn't be picked for admission because of their race.
Ouch.
Maybe someone will pull him aside and tell him?
edited to add: In rereading the thread, I see other posters have quoted him thanking AA for getting where he is today. So I guess we're to assume he's forgotten his earlier statements? That doesn't bode well for his ability to function as a justice.
It is so cringey to listen to him rant about how black students shouldn't be picked for admission because of their race.
Ouch.
Maybe someone will pull him aside and tell him?
edited to add: In rereading the thread, I see other posters have quoted him thanking AA for getting where he is today. So I guess we're to assume he's forgotten his earlier statements? That doesn't bode well for his ability to function as a justice.
Respectfully, Thomas states that it is precisely because of the experiences he faced in the legal profession and subsequently after graduating from Yale Law School that shaped his views on the affirmative action picture.
I may benefit from student loan deferment today even if I am ultimately against the practice (I'm not paying the government back more than I am legally required to and I will take advantage of opportunities that are open to me). I'd only levy a charge of hypocrisy if I was to speak out against student loan deferment while simultaneously voting to keep it in place. I hardly expect people who are against policy to not take advantage of policy that has been lawfully passed, etc.
What would you or others have advised Thomas to do when applying to the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School? Not put down his race? Why should he deny who he is as an applicant because he's against affirmative action on policy positions? One can be against affirmative action and still be for honestly answering questions on an application. I don't see a disconnect.
In any event, while Thomas talks about his personal experiences, his legal views are ultimately shaped by his originalist views to interpreting the Constitution and inferior federal laws, not on his views of the harm that affirmative action causes to racial minorities. Thomas has opined of his personal opinion on other matters, too. As an example, he noted that Texas' anti-sodomy law was "uncommonly silly," but still would have upheld it as he found no general right of privacy or relevant liberty in the Constitution.
The pushback that you and others have on Thomas would be more appropriate, in my opinion, if he used his personal views on affirmative action to justify how he interprets the law. But he doesn't. Instead, he touches as an aside (as a form of dicta had his opinion been in the majority) why he believes affirmative action causes more harm than good.
That said, I disagree with Thomas on the mismatch theory and find that it is one of the weaker arguments against race-based affirmative action. To your and others' point, can Thomas truly say--even with the discrimination that he faced subsequent Yale Law School--that his life would have turned out better had he attended Howard Law School or a "lesser" law school? He sits on the Supreme Court, was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and served as the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for 8 years. I argue that these are all positions that his status as having attended Yale Law School afforded him. And, yes, race played a role in his admission to the school, which he had readily acknowledged.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with several colleagues when I was in law school. They were arguing the mismatch theory as proof that race based affirmative action was harmful to students. I said to them--speaking solely on the mismatch theory--do you really think that a black student who happens to graduate in the bottom third of his or her class at Harvard or Yale Law Schools is worse off than a black student who finishes at the top of his class at Cooley Law School?
That response is most commonly brought up when the leftists in question cannot refute the arguments they face, but do not have the honesty or integrity to admit they were wrong.
The left: "What an Uncle Tom! He's supposed to support affirmative action and every progressive cause because he's black. He's only saying that to impress the white man."
There is an alarming percentage of our population that think like this. It's very bigoted, but it's just one example of hypocrisy coming from the left.
In Debate Circles that is known as 'Ad hominem' attack... completely worthless and does little to feret the truth.
Judge Thomas has a lot of courage to speak his mind...Leftoids don't appreciate it~
So you agree that affirmative action was a good and necessary policy in the 70s. Cool.
At what point did it change?
1. I never said it was good or necessary. The highest college dropouts are those who "benefitted" from affirmative action.
2. 2008, America elected it's first black president for 8 long years. That's when it changed. When a black man with no father became president in a country founded by slave owners.
If Obama's election didn't indicate a historical change in social progress and endless opportunity, then he should've never been elected and his entire presidency was a waste.
My biggest issue with AA is that it will continue in perpetuity. These sort of policies are going to be harder to argue in favor of once Whites are no longer the majority, but at the same time these policies will become stronger as demographics shift towards the individuals who benefit from them. Make no mistake, systemic and pervasive racism are part of the history of this country, particularity against African and Native Americans. The effects of systemic and pervasive racism still have an impact today, but I believe cultural rather than discriminatory factors are currently more responsible for achievement gaps. AA has become a band-aid for deeper issues, such as single parent households and the lack of English proficiency, rather than a tool to combat systemic and pervasive racism.
The presumption that individuals need to go to college and there's something wrong when groups on aggregate display less interest in academics is a flawed one. There's nothing wrong with being a plumber, carpenter, mechanic, welder, etc.
The point is should universities be allowed to use other than just grades in their selection, is background and experience a consideration.
Of course it is, and has been for decades. When did you last apply for college? I did in the 70s, and if I hadn't been Pres of the Drama Club and a pitcher on the baseball team, as well as Senior Assistant in the Marching Band, I wouldn't have gotten into the college I did (and graduated).
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One can be against affirmative action and still be for honestly answering questions on an application. I don't see a disconnect. 
