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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (137)	1/10/2001 10:59:19 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 82486

My personal preference would be to see affirmative action or similar programs directed at providing educational opportunity, rather than employment opportunity, and to have the unfair advantage distributed purely on the basis of economic status, not race. Hi Steven. I think you're doing affirmative action a disservice by casually redirecting it away from the workplace. Original purposes often change. It is fairly apparent that our legacy of formal discrimination has created what could become a permanent underclass, and that merely removing these barriers has not significantly altered that situation. I've been around long enough to remember the original purpose and to have seen the change in the workplace. I remember when I, as a woman of childbearing age, couldn't get meaningful work because my prospective employer assumed I would soon quit to raise a family. I remember when a black man, no matter how qualified, couldn't get a job as a sales rep in a business that wanted to do the right thing because of fear that the company's clients wouldn't accept him and the company would lose business. It was unfortunately necessary to force action. Now, it's normal to see all kinds of faces in any work environment. I think that's an enormous improvement. Did the ends justify the means? Probably, as long as we don't perpetuate the negative side effects and further. I spent some time in the trenches of the civil rights movement. I remember when affirmative action started. I remember how strange it seemed to me that we would choose a color-conscious solution to the problem of racism and I was never comfortable with it. But it was necessary to jump-start the process of integrating the workplace and it worked, not without ironies and corruption and casualties, but it worked. I think that Eric got it exactly right when he said it is now passe. We should declare victory and back off, IMO, rather than further perpetuate the undesirable side effects. One of the mistakes of the civil rights movement, IMO, was to not distinguish between racism and classism. They're two different problems. Those who want to deal with the problems of classism should do it in a different venue. Since I'm taking this trip down memory lane... Affirmative action evolved enormously during the time it's been in effect. As best I recall, affirmative action originally addressed the issue of employers who said they'd be happy to hire blacks but they had no black applicants, possibly because blacks knew better than to apply. Affirmative action required that employers take affirmative action to reach out to a diverse applicant pool. It took a while before affirmative action came to mean quotas and the word, diversity, was co-opted to mean what affirmative action used to. It's interesting, too, the way data was recorded over the years. In the beginning, employers were not allowed to keep records of the race of their employees, but they had to provide statistics on their progress. Then they were allowed to keep records, but they had to be separate from the personnel file. At one time, employees were eyeballed to determine race. Later, employees self-reported. Most recently, employees can choose to identify with more than one categories. And the categories have changed a number of times over the years. A fascinating odyssey, to be sure, but time to move on. Karen

To: Dayuhan who wrote (137)	1/10/2001 3:04:28 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I am a Caucasian male and I apply for admission to a state university. At the same time a black who has a higher high school GPA, higher SAT scores, and was more active in his high school applies. There is only one slot open. I get it; the black does not because of his skin color. That is racial discrimination and is illegal. Now interchange the words "Caucasian" and "black". That is affirmative action and is legal. Why? I've had one hell of a lot of advantages, none of which were due to anything I did to deserve them, and it doesn't really disturb me that someone who has not had similar ones might be given a little artificial assistance Yes, but government in theory should be neutral; there is no such requirement on your parents. Certainly it's unfair, but a lot of the advantages I have are equally unfair. Two wrongs make a right? My personal preference would be to see affirmative action or similar programs directed at providing educational opportunity, rather than employment opportunity, and to have the unfair advantage distributed purely on the basis of economic status, Shouldn't qualifications, preparation, and ability figure in here someplace? I'm also not convinced that affirmative action was ever practiced on a large enough scale to make it anything more than a facade, to be trotted out whenever an administration needed to cater to minority opinion. It applies to any universities that recieve federal funds; that is essentially all. In education, how large a scale do you want? What do you think of the defense budget? Does the current level of external threat really justify an increase in what is already - by a huge margin - the world's largest military outlay? I haven't paid that much attention to this issue lately. I do remember, though, that Russia is still in possession of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them. They are not exactly our friend. I think you can count on them exploiting a blackmail capability if they get it. Also, the military budget has dropped a great deal since the end of the cold war. What capability should we have?