Look.....color blind policies do no work in this society for one simple reason........this society is not color blind. That's what they were inferring when they discussed this particular myth.
1 - Society is not 100% more color blind but that doesn't mean color blind polices don't work. They help us to become more color blind and they are simply more just.
Why would color blind policies work in a society where race is very evident? Your comments make no sense. If people are not forced to look at people of other races, more likely than not they will blow the whole concept off.
2 - They didn't show that society is not color blind. They implied that when you measure the statistical overall average black people might start out in a less advantageous position. That doesn't mean society is not color blind, although I will agree with you (and probably with them) that it is not 100% color blind.
Its about 25% color blind.
3 - The argument was not "color blind policies will not work". But that color blind polices give white people an advantage.
That's the equivalent of not working if the goal is to remove racial advantages in certain important aspects of a society.
If you want to say that color blind policies do not erase preexisting advantages then I would agree, but they do not give anyone an advantage.
Yes, they do......a white male is free to choose a white male for a job, and if the majority of supervisors are white males than white males have an unfair edge. Tim, this is not rocket science.........I am not sure why you are refusing to see this basic concept but I am not about to repeat it again.
Its too small to make a significant difference if their SAT scores are bad and/or their hi school record is poor.
If they have poor grades and SAT scores then they are less qualifed, atleast by the measures that we currently have available.
If they have poor grades and SATs, they won't get in period......AA or no AA.
Its only a real
advantage when all things are equal.
An advantage is an advantage. Even if someone else has other advantages which are bigger.
And that's to neutralize the inherent advantage whites have had til this point.
If in most industries in this country, black representation was as profound as it is in the NBA, then I would say yes you should get those points.
I of course disagree.
What if in most areas there was no history of discrimination and no obvious current racial discrimination? But the NBA was like it is now?
And if choices were made purely on talent, and never on race? Then, you should not get any extra help.
And the NBA and other sports entities have
developed into the very thing you want........an institution with a color blind policy.
A good thing. Black people are not held back artifically just because they are already a larger percentage of the NBA.
Right.......and that's the goal of AA.......to encourage all public entities to develop that kind of policy.
Like I said above, long ago, whites forfeited their positioning in sports.
They didn't foreit their position. They where beaten out for many of the spots by more qualifed aplicants.
Bullshit......it became a less acceptable way for whites to move up in income and class. Ten years ago, I bet the NBA was close to 90% black. In the past few years, that has started to change and you see more whites playing. In fact, I was blown away that the father of J. Olerud of the Mariners is an MD [I think J. Olerud himself has gone to medical school but has not done his residency yet]. A doctor's son playing ball? That was a major no-no just a few years ago.
Blacks are no more athletic than the rest of us but sometimes its the only way out of the ghetto and so they push hard for it.
Whites are not more powerful. Specific people are more powerful. Many of those people are white but being white doesn't give you power or special advantage.
Yes, it does, because white males are the entrenched power elite.
BS. I get no special power from being white.
Yeah, you do......you don't know it because you've never been without it except for brief periods in your life. But if you want to find out how it feels......go down to a black neighborhood and live there for a couple of weeks. You'll then know what it feels like to have your white specialness stripped from you.
BTW its the same with a male vs female. A woman as smart and as competent as a white man does not have the same experiences as she goes through her life day to day.
It doesn't seem that way to you but it does in practice make a difference. When you were a kid, you knew that it was possible you could grow up to be president. A Latino kid doesn't know if that future is possible for him.
A Latino or black kid who is the child of a rich, powerful well educated parent has a lot more chance to be president then a white kid living in a slum or a destitute rural area with one drug addicted parent.
Bull shit......how many black or Latino presidents have we had?
Blacks and Latinos statistically have a disadvantage because a larger percentage of them come from poor backgrounds, but black and Latino kids born today do have a shot at becomeing president.
How? Each race makes up roughly 11-13% of the general population. Whites very much vote in a bloc.
"White people are not a group. Something that helps some other white person doesn't help me or hurt black people in general. White people, black people, whatever, we are all individuals."
You say that as if it were true but it isn't.
The core point of our disagreement. Everything else is just dancing around this point.
People are individuals.
People are individuals but they act and vote in groups.
Treat people as individuals and you can hope to make racism disapear even if it takes a century. Treat people as members of racial groups and racism will never go away even if you wait a thousand years.
How can you say that? The GOP fought implementation of the 1964 Civil Rts Act well into the '80's.
No it didn't. Not as a party. Perhaps some individual members did but it wasn't a plank of the parties platform, or a policy of any GOP president (Nixon even pushed AA, which in a certain odd way could be considered fighting the 1964 Civil rights law because AA is against the stipulations of that law but I know you don't see it that way). Fighting the 1964 Civil rights law wasn't the parties policy.
It may not have been the party's formal plank but it certainly was the party's informal plank. Blacks represented voters for the Dem. party........why would the GOP work towards that goal?
But other reasons are, affirmitive action laws that don't include AA,
Look at this statement you made...."AA laws that don't include AA". That's exactly right.....without AA laws, there is no AA.
Correction - Civil rights laws that don't include AA.
Too late.........the freudian slip has been made. <g>
"No it began in the 1800s."
What? When they freed the slaves.......even you can't believe that.
Yes exactly that. They gained their freedom. And very slowly gained more.
So slowly, that American cities burned in the '60s with their frustration. Many slaves were not free even after they were emancipated. The owners refused to let them go and hunted them down if they tried to escape. That lasted about 20 years. Then most of them became indentured servants for the next 60 years. By the 1960s, formal segregation was common in the South, and existed to some degree in the North. Informally, segregation was everywhere. Whites in the South had devised any manner of laws so that blacks couldn't vote. Most were poorly educated and dirt poor. When blacks made their first feeble attempts at integration, they were rebuked severely by whites. Gaining their freedom took decades and a great deal of pain and loss.......so stop rewriting history to make it look much nicer.
The typical black American in 1950 was a lot wealthier and more educated then the typical black American in 1866. Of course that is an absolute measure but its also true that relative to the average American, or the average White American, that there was a lot of progress even before Black people enjoyed full equality under the law and equal oportunity laws.
I give up. You have a fantastical view of history that has little bearing to reality.
ted |
