Affermative action: yes or no?

[Uneunsae]

Can someone please explain the definition of privilege in this context? Someone with an education on this subject? It doesn't simply mean you have a luxurious lifestyle.

Sorry, I'm having a rough night an cannot explain this right now.

[Buzzer]

Can someone please explain the definition of privilege in this context? Someone with an education on this subject? It doesn't simply mean you have a luxurious lifestyle.

Sorry, I'm having a rough night an cannot explain this right now.

In academia the most basic umbrella concept of privilege is that a privileged group defines, and conceives of, its own identity and experience as normal. The experience of any different group, whether it is connotated negatively OR positively in comparison to the privileged group, is not the norm but an exception.

"Oh my friend Jeff.." (white guy)

"Oh I'm friends with this black guy named..." (black guy)

It's when the assumption of a group's experience or identity is considered so much the 'default' that it requires no qualification or special identification, and, on the flipside, any other group is conceived of as a different/special/not typical case, generally warranting spoken qualification as different.

Because of that, it's largely invisible to anyone who belongs to the group.

Many people confuse the concept with the idea of material inequality or de jure inequality. It can be completely divorced from the two.

Just some random examples: not handicapped vs. handicapped, male vs. female, cisgender vs. every other gender identity, etc.

[Aike]

NO ONE can legislate to change people's hearts.

I can quite easily imagine, though, that after a company or some other organization has adopted positive discrimination/affirmative action the general atmosphere has shifted towards being more minority-friendly, perhaps even to the point of making the practice redundant over time.

It's an empirical question though and cannot really be completely settled by arguments alone.

[Aike]

Sorry for double-posting but I did a quick search for research literature in this field and wanted to share a couple of articles, which review and analyze studies on affirmative action that have accumulated so far.

This one is a pretty good introductory article to the field and addresses many of the points discussed in this thread too.

And, if you can read statistical language, this one is a very analytic treatment of studies concerning attitudes towards affirmative action policy.

Always look for scientific studies, seriously...

[Buzzer]

Thanks for the links, Aike.

I studied the topic pretty extensively in undergrad, so a lot of the information was familiar to me when I looked over the articles. After reading, however, there were two quick things they reminded me of that I wanted to comment on briefly.

The first is that I think a lot of Americans still to this day associate Affirmative Action with quota systems. These are generally seen negatively because of the implication of an unfair race right at the gate -- "we're only taking 8 men, even if we find more than 8 qualified men and not enough qualified people of other demographics", for example. Whereas the quota system has been banned since 1978, it remains in many people's minds a defining characteristic of Affirmative Action and there very much is the belief that quotas are used when Affirmative Action has existed for a longer period without quotas than with them.

The second article mentioned that attitudes tend to coalesce around Affirmative Action policies and around changes to them based on whether or not they believe a change will hurt or help their group. That reminded me that there are many problems with broad groupings in the first place. As one example, Asians are typically not helped by Affirmative Action programs, because Asian Americans are vastly overrepresented in good job fields and in good universities compared to their population size. However, as the demographic of Asian immigration has changed over time, one of the problems is that the large lumping of "Asian" in the first place is misleading insofar as it assumes all people of Asian backgrounds fit within this "mold of success." As poorer, more urbanized Asian immigrant groups from Southeast Asia have replaced the older Northeast Asian immigrant groups, there are today many populations of dense urban poverty today which are Asian, and which experience all of the social ills of urban poverty as any other less privileged group, but for the purposes of Affirmative Action, they are "Asians" who do not require any assistance because of the statistics largely being created by well established Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants whose families have been here longer and who have traditionally had good access to education and jobs-- in part because of the Model Minority perception of them.

[Aike]

I think it's interesting in the second article that they didn't find a connection with personal experiences of discrimination and attitudes towards affirmative action policies (even though the connection between gender/race and positive attitudes existed). I was immediately reminded of a study I read recently about working-class young adults in the United States (Coming Up Short by Jennifer Silva) where it was found that even those young people who were black (and disprivileged) tended to entertain beliefs in meritocracy and place value on their self-reliance and individual efforts, even if they had in fact experienced or perceived blatant discrimination. In fact, they even complained of some other black people (as they perceived them) who can't make it on their own and attribute their shortcomings to racism. It shows to what extent even disprivileged groups have internalized the discriminatory conceptions of the white majority.

One advantage of reading articles is that you learn new terms. Now I have another concept in my arsenal of arguments against fanatical advocates of liberal-meritocratic individualism: laissez-faire racism.

[Buzzer]

I think it's interesting in the second article that they didn't find a connection with personal experiences of discrimination and attitudes towards affirmative action policies (even though the connection between gender/race and positive attitudes existed). I was immediately reminded of a study I read recently about working-class young adults in the United States (Coming Up Short by Jennifer Silva) where it was found that even those young people who were black (and disprivileged) tended to entertain beliefs in meritocracy and place value on their self-reliance and individual efforts, even if they had in fact experienced or perceived blatant discrimination. In fact, they even complained of some other black people (as they perceived them) who can't make it on their own and attribute their shortcomings to racism. It shows to what extent even disprivileged groups have internalized the discriminatory conceptions of the white majority.

One advantage of reading articles is that you learn new terms. Now I have another concept in my arsenal of arguments against fanatical advocates of liberal-meritocratic individualism: laissez-faire racism.

I remember there was a study I read in undergrad, and I can't remember the precise name of it or I'd try to look it up to link here, which investigated the notion that the reason why urban poor minority groups tended to not do as well was because their parents placed less expectations on them to value education or higher paying jobs. What the study actually found was that among non-white parents in urban poverty, parents actually averaged higher expectations than middle class white parents, particularly emphasizing on jobs like medicine. White parents, especially those from more affluent neighborhoods, increasingly expressed their desires or pressures for their children along the lines of "I want them to do whatever makes them happy." The parents with the highest demands on their children were first-generation immigrants, including those from Latino and Southeast Asian backgrounds (two generally poor-performing groups as far as economic success today.)

[Uneunsae]

This is so true.

[Buzzer]

^
I

can't

breathe

Not as good as yours but check this one out

[Uneunsae]

That was awesome. I was cracking up when he showed his calculator - which is the exact one I have. Yeah...