As long as there are isms... Genderism, Ageism, Racism, Sexism (sexual orientation), etc... then yeah we need to force people to get along better (if not well) with others.
Yes there are downsides to forcing companies to hire based on sex, color, orientation, whatever such as hiring incompetent people.... However that is better than the alternative, a society that is class-ist, racist, gener-biased, whatever.
I read an article a couple three years ago where two guys were given suits and the same resume, the only difference on the resume was name and mailing address.
These two guys were sent to various companies to apply for jobs, time after time one guy was hired over the other. The only difference between the two men was the color of their skin.
And before we wander off into the land of ebonics and other sterotypical 'black culture' stuff, the black guy was educated, spoke like a regular person, articulate and didn't come off in the sterotypical 'black' manner.
When it came time to confront those in charge of interviews and hiring, most decided to not comment, those who did made some pretty lame excuses about why they hired the white guy over the black guy. They knew why (skin color) but worked real hard to come up with an excuse which would seem to not be racist.
This sort of thing goes on all the time out there - be it blacks, Mexicans, obvious homosexuals, women folk... Those who hire for companies use their own personal bias more often than not to hire a person.
Its not based on education, experience or any of the things that really matter, it boils down to superficial differences and biased minds.
Governments try to address this bias with general one size fits all laws. But then all laws are pretty much one size fits all because there is no rational way to address every single individual case out there.
I abhor the idea that people need to fill a quota of minorities by law - not because the law exists, but because here in the 21st century we still need these laws because humans are so terrible at the humanity thing.
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I'm very, very much opposed to it. It's discrimination. Period.
You're supposed to pick people - whether you're a business or a college or whatever - based on their talents and/or scores, regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender, etc. Hiring a gay person just because he's gay is just as much discrimination as hiring a person because he's straight. You don't solve discrimination by discriminating.
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Evan Wrote:I'm very, very much opposed to it. It's discrimination. Period.
You're supposed to pick people - whether you're a business or a college or whatever - based on their talents and/or scores, regardless of sexual orientation, race, gender, etc. Hiring a gay person just because he's gay is just as much discrimination as hiring a person because he's straight. You don't solve discrimination by discriminating.
The point of these systems is not to 'hire gay/other people because they're gay/other.'
It's to combat a measurable, tangible, real tendency for people to not hire those people even with the same qualifications as another applicant, and to come up with a laundry list of reasons why they didn't which seem legitimate.
If you ask someone like the people who did the hiring in the study Bowyn mentioned why they didn't hire the black guy, you'll get these vague answers: he didn't seem as professional, we weren't sure if he was the right fit for the job, etc. etc. Have that happen on a macro scale and you start seeing numbers (like we do in reality) where even when you control for numbers of qualified applicants, you still see gaps where there's a 15, 20, 25% difference in how often people from a certain demographic will be hired or promoted within certain types of businesses or industries or jobs.
Again, you seem to be looking at the issue from the point of view that it all starts off even playing field and it's only these systems like AA that suddenly make it uneven. It's completely the other way around.
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I know a black guy who comes across as white easily in how he comes across, from interests to how he speaks (he's been called "oreo" so much that he actually can't stand the sight of literal oreos as it brings back so many unpleasant memories). One dramatic time he was hired over the phone for a studio job but when he went in to deal with the paperwork of his being employed the security tried to kick him out. After it was confirmed that he had an appointment he was escorted inside where the shock of his being black was visible and they quickly invented a lame excuse on the spot why they couldn't hire him (sarcasm: *had absolutely nothing to do with his skin color, of course*).
Relatives of mine worked for a black guy who owned a restaurant but pretended a white guy did because that drew more customers. And while that's rural East Texas it happens in areas where I think that wouldn't be the case, such as one advising black entrepreneurs even in Silicon Valley to get a "white man to front for you."
It's quite shocking how bad it still is. I was able to get a carry permit for a gun but my blasian girlfriend could not though she was just as qualified (in this state deputies don't have to give a reason why they deny someone a permit). My black BFF doesn't rise up in the ranks despite years of dedicated and competent service, and how I've seen others react to her is just absurd (flinching if she reaches inside her purse, a politician who stammered and back away after she politely corrected the politician on how to pronounce her name, a landlady who thought she was a drug dealer, and more).
I once lived in a neighborhood where whites were the definite minority. And still it was white girls who tagged our basement against my blasian girlfriend.
All in all I just can't take it serious when someone in the USA say, "Don't white people deserve a break?" Though had I not mixed in certain circles where I witnessed it then I wouldn't have realized myself just how bad it still is.
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I totally believe in affirmative action. There should be quotas. For every girl a straight boy fucks, he has to fuck three gay boys. 
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Pix Wrote:I know a black guy who comes across as white easily in how he comes across, from interests to how he speaks (he's been called "oreo" so much that he actually can't stand the sight of literal oreos as it brings back so many unpleasant memories). One dramatic time he was hired over the phone for a studio job but when he went in to deal with the paperwork of his being employed the security tried to kick him out. After it was confirmed that he had an appointment he was escorted inside where the shock of his being black was visible and they quickly invented a lame excuse on the spot why they couldn't hire him (sarcasm: *had absolutely nothing to do with his skin color, of course*).
Relatives of mine worked for a black guy who owned a restaurant but pretended a white guy did because that drew more customers. And while that's rural East Texas it happens in areas where I think that wouldn't be the case, such as one advising black entrepreneurs even in Silicon Valley to get a "white man to front for you."
It's quite shocking how bad it still is. I was able to get a carry permit for a gun but my blasian girlfriend could not though she was just as qualified (in this state deputies don't have to give a reason why they deny someone a permit). My black BFF doesn't rise up in the ranks despite years of dedicated and competent service, and how I've seen others react to her is just absurd (flinching if she reaches inside her purse, a politician who stammered and back away after she politely corrected the politician on how to pronounce her name, a landlady who thought she was a drug dealer, and more).
I once lived in a neighborhood where whites were the definite minority. And still it was white girls who tagged our basement against my blasian girlfriend.
All in all I just can't take it serious when someone in the USA say, "Don't white people deserve a break?" Though had I not mixed in certain circles where I witnessed it then I wouldn't have realized myself just how bad it still is.
And those are just the overt type of examples that are easy to spot, and perhaps more dramatic.
It's almost impossible to know, as one individual person or one family, why you were turned down by every bank in the area for a homeloan. Then you see statistics that black people are 20% less likely to secure a homeloan in the same zip code and you start going "hmm..." Employment situations are similar, frankly. Lots of times when you aren't hired you don't really have an incredibly clear reason why, and it's certainly jumping the gun to conclude that any job you do not get is because of race. But when you see the statistics, and when you see a given employer who turned you down has 96% white and Asian employees, and is facing a lawsuit for discrimination from some totally different person... yeah, these things happen.
AA isn't a perfect solution, by a long shot, and the biggest single problem with it is not taking socioeconomic status into account. It's long been criticized even by minority groups who "benefit" from AA programs that what winds up happening is that affluent or comfortably middle class members of that group, who likely had access to college or good jobs anyhow, wind up benefiting from it. But it just takes either an innocent or a willful blindness to the actual reality of the situation for anyone to say "AA is wrong because it discriminates against whites." Discrimination is going on every single day... in favor of whites. That's what programs like AA were intended to equalize. No matter how far we've come, we're not a colorblind society.
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Buzzer Wrote:If you ask someone like the people who did the hiring in the study Bowyn mentioned why they didn't hire the black guy, you'll get these vague answers: he didn't seem as professional, we weren't sure if he was the right fit for the job, etc. etc. (you fail to mention lower standards and extra points on job aptitude tests given SOLELY on the basis of race. Have that happen on a macro scale and you start seeing numbers (like we do in reality) where even when you control for numbers of qualified applicants, you still see gaps where there's a 15, 20, 25% difference in how often people from a certain demographic will be hired or promoted within certain types of businesses or industries or jobs.
Ever delved into the real life things called 'unintended consequences?"
AA is in the process of changing its name to POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION... you can go onto some websites and find them already doing this rebranding. I've been following the entire Positive discrimination push since 2009 because guess who came up with it???? Christian Fundamentalists! Google religious positive discrimination and just PD itself for some education.
RPD = discrimination on the basis of religion in hiring, firing, contracts and alllllllllllllll things associated with religion. Do ya know the big deal about Hobby Lobby? Read up on the court rulings on that and see that it was allllllllllllllllllll about RPD... Do you remember a long time ago, maybe before you came out of a coma or something, there was a push for a bill in Arizona to allow religious people to discriminate against others based on religion????? That was more RPD!!!!! They've bought housing projects and apartment complexes and guess what???? They are protected by law to discriminate on the basis of religion as to who moves in or who gets evicted!!!
And if you think you've heard the last of this.... well... I wonder why so few have heard about it before now... this is going to be a BIG ISSUE in just a few more years and it's all an unintended consequence of AA.
You do realize that there are SEVERAL minority owned businesses that have been taken to court about discriminating on the basis of race ---- and not one of them has ever lost! In fact they've all used PD as their defense.
Let's agree discrimination is wrong but NO ONE can legislate to change people's hearts.
The only thing AA has done is permit government sanctioned discrimination rather than deal with the real issue which is educating minorities to levels that would make discrimination on the basis of race totally pointless.
But the friggin idea of AA is no more than government sanctioned discrimination in order to ATTEMPT to stop discrimination. Using this logic maybe we should start killing people to stop murder and raping to stop rape.
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First off, Memechose, Christian Fundamentalists attempting to claim that they are a discriminated against minority group entitled to Affirmative Action (or a re-branded name of it) has absolutely nothing to do with the racial discussion, at all. Particularly when their actual aim is not to rectify some purported (as opposed to real, which we could see with racial minorities) imbalance in their hiring so much as their right to impose religious restrictions or discrimination in their hiring or compensation policies.
So you're not talking about the same concept, at all.
Quote:Let's agree discrimination is wrong but NO ONE can legislate to change people's hearts.
The only thing AA has done is permit government sanctioned discrimination rather than deal with the real issue which is educating minorities to levels that would make discrimination on the basis of race totally pointless.
But the friggin idea of AA is no more than government sanctioned discrimination in order to ATTEMPT to stop discrimination. Using this logic maybe we should start killing people to stop murder and raping to stop rape.
I agree with you. You can see in an earlier post that I have said the real long-term solution is to get rid of the feudal school funding system which hovers around local property taxes (and which affluent areas can exploit by breaking off to make private school districts) and insist, as a nation, upon a standardized funding level and quality level of education which every single school should meet, as the UK and other developed countries have done.
That's the real, long term solution. You and I are in agreement about that. But I can tell you flat out who is going to be opposed to that-- affluent and middle class whites. The people who fuss and plan and scheme around buying houses in certain zip codes or certain school districts, and have the jobs and the income and the skin color to walk into banks and get the homeloans for the nice areas, and may spend much of their adult parenting life doing this to manipulate it so that their kids are in the very best schools-- to hell with the underfunded inner city cesspools. Once we've got our kids into good schools, who cares about those? Those kids don't really value education anyway. That's the message out there, once you strip away all the niceties. That's what white America largely thinks about every nonwhite group (excepting Northeast Asians.) "Throwing money at the problem won't fix it"-- that's another way of saying even if their schools weren't dilapidated, underfunded, with the worst teachers who couldn't get postings at any better school districts, it would be a waste anyway because you can't educate those people. That's what's really believed at the heart of those kinds of statements.
Given that we're talking about a major revolution in terms of an all-inclusive civic ethic to make the kinds of changes necessary to equalize education so that we do not see these major gaps between racial groups (which mirror economic gaps, largely), the short term bandaid is to make it as undesirable as reasonably possible to fall into serious suspicion that your operating definition, based on your hiring patterns, of a "professional looking, qualified applicant" is a white male in a suit, and only a white male in a suit.
And these issues do not just hit nonwhite people, either. The largely unspoken belief that women are unsuitable for certain kinds of aggressive jobs, leadership positions, or management of teams of male employees is responsible for a lot of pay and promotion gap even for white women in a lot of industries out there. So even if you just fixed the schools, not having any kind of legal policy out there to try to counterbalance these kinds of prejudiced practices won't change much for white women in the workplace.
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Buzzer Wrote:The point of these systems is not to 'hire gay/other people because they're gay/other.'
It's to combat a measurable, tangible, real tendency for people to not hire those people even with the same qualifications as another applicant, and to come up with a laundry list of reasons why they didn't which seem legitimate.
If you ask someone like the people who did the hiring in the study Bowyn mentioned why they didn't hire the black guy, you'll get these vague answers: he didn't seem as professional, we weren't sure if he was the right fit for the job, etc. etc. Have that happen on a macro scale and you start seeing numbers (like we do in reality) where even when you control for numbers of qualified applicants, you still see gaps where there's a 15, 20, 25% difference in how often people from a certain demographic will be hired or promoted within certain types of businesses or industries or jobs.
Again, you seem to be looking at the issue from the point of view that it all starts off even playing field and it's only these systems like AA that suddenly make it uneven. It's completely the other way around.
We have a completely different opinion about this. Let's just leave it at that. 
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Evan Wrote:We just have a completely different opinion about this. Let's leave it at that.
Err, okay but I thought this was a debate area?
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Affermative action: yes or no?
