Caging the Gyro
One of the central questions in the novel, The Great Gatsby is whether it is ever possible to fix the past. To make it all come out the way it should have. Nick and Gatsby were having a conversation about whether Daisy liked the party he threw. Gatsby wanted to start over again.
He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house — just as if it were five years ago.
“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours ——”
He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.
“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
Nations sometimes want the same thing as Gatsby. To make the iniquities of history go away; to make up for slavery or dropping the Atomic Bomb on far away peoples a long time ago. And in so doing they unconsciously perpetrate new ones. Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy examines an interesting brief brought by Asian-Americans in Fisher vs Texas involving the University of Texas. “In the brief, four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions, arguing that race-neutral policies are the only way for Asian-American applicants to get a fair shake.”
Somin seems to argue that it alright to use public policy to right wrongs; that it is acceptable to pursue the ends of “compensatory justice” but not some abstract goal like “diversity”. He writes:
To avoid misunderstanding, I should reiterate that I have some sympathy for the compensatory justice rationale for affirmative action, and do not believe that such policies are categorically unconstitutional. I also have significant reservations about the Fisher case in particular. My general position is the exact opposite of current Supreme Court precedent, which holds that racial preferences can be used to promote “diversity” but not compensatory justice for minority groups that have been the victims of massive “societal” discrimination.
Let us grant the premise for the sake of argument: we want compensatory justice. But it still raises one logically obvious problem. How do you know when the compensatory justice process has returned things to “normal” and thereby know when to stop? What is normal. Unless some reference exists, like an artificial horizon in an airplane, then there is no objective way to tell when the thing is flying constantly above the earth.
The problem with compensatory justice is that someone must always pay for the compensation. That gives rise to other obligations. Unless there are identifiable ways to determine when the accounts are squared, then it never stops. There is no reason in principle why future generations of Asian-Americans can’t sue to compensate them for all the “stolen diplomas” or all the “missing careers” caused by affirmative action to compensate Latinos or African-Americans.
“It went too far. They were overcompensated. We paid surplus reparations.”
And should their demands for re-compensation prosper, what prevents African Americans and Latinos in turn from embarking on a new round of affirmative action to fix the consequences of the fix that was caused by the original fix? At what point is the government relieved from the duty to apply compensatory justice by observing that the ends of compensation have been reached?
Simply doing nothing, as the Asian-American petition suggests, does not help with the central question of determining the artificial horizon. When “four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions” the result will almost certainly be that these “race-neutral policies” will net Asians more seats at universities than they otherwise would. And here we go again.
There is no use in pretending the problem can be settled scientifically or “fairly”. The question of when normal has been reached it seems, is ultimately a political one. It’s over when the body politic says the ends of compensatory justice have been served. But Somin partially identifies at least one obstacle to reaching a normal state by linking to his colleague David Bernstein.
The obstacle to ever reaching normal is the “ethnic spoils system”.
Bernstein uses the Elizabeth Warren incident, in which a white person identifies as a “woman of color” to illustrate the pernicious effects of an ethnic spoils system. An ethnic spoils system is not operated in order to attain “compensatory justice” but to create opportunities for gigs; to a permanent system of privileges for one group over another.
That’s the whole point of an ethnic spoils system. Not to make things fair, but to get mine.
Bernstein shows that politics in fact drives “affirmative action”. Although the historical evil of slavery is often cited as the reason for compensatory justice, in Texas, where Hispanics are in the majority, they then become the designated victim group.
Affirmative action is generally justified by reference to the African American experience (a justification I have some sympathy with), but if you are running a university in a state like Texas, where Hispanics are a huge political force (and 37% of the population), you need to throw them into the mix as well for political reasons (largely at the expense of Asian Americans, who are a much smaller percentage of the population). Native Americans, however, as a tiny percentage of the electorate, can be safely ignored.
According to this reasoning, the four Asian-American groups should forget filing briefs. Instead they should simply embark on a crash program of population increase, by whatever means, after which they can fix the problem by simply ramming their own version of affirmative action through the legislature by overwhelming vote. Then they can get the goodies. After all, if Elizabeth Warren can successfully claim the compensatory justice as a native American, then any ethnic group can concoct whatever stories it likes after the fact, just for appearances.
What neither Berstein nor Somin explicitly point out, yet what is most crucial, is that an ethnic spoils system, unlike the flight controls of a well-designed airplane, has no natural neutral. It’s a nonstop card game. Any society run along those lines becomes a zero sum game and in it, the very notion of compensatory justice becomes anachronistic on its face. What meaning could compensatory justice possibly have in a society designed along ethnic spoils? The concept itself vanishes along with such other notions as “equality”, “merit” or “fairness”.
That’s not to say such a society can’t work. Lebanon, for example, is giving it a try. You could argue that the Ottoman Empire long operated according to this method. You were a Turk, an Armenian, a Greek, a Kurd, or a Jew … but there was never an equivalent to concept of American. The Ottoman Empire had its merits, but it was never going to be America. At least not America as conceived. But if you can’t always get what you want, if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.
Of course we can change the past.
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A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that the only way to change the past is to forgive those who have wronged you. Once that has happened, the past no longer has any hold over you. Unfortunately, all attempts at compensatory judgement prevent the forgiveness from happening. In fact, they reward people for not forgiving.
The problem with compensatory justice is that someone must always pay for the compensation.
Therein lies the rub. Affording preference to one category cannot be accomplished except at the expense of other categories.
Reparations are a fine idea. Every living former slave should receive certain compensation extracted from every living former slave owner. Beyond that, it makes no sense for government to purposely disadvantage any group, in favor of others.
It really comes down to the same line used in War Games – “the only winning move is not to play”.
Well, some will say, something must be done about the situation of the descendants of slaves. They still have not achieved parity or ‘social’ equality.
This is probably true. Moreover, we must admit that the descendants of slaves have a heavier burden to bear in many ways. Certainly some prejudices are real. Some may be imagined. Neither can be abolished by legislation, unfortunately.
Over 20 years ago a white man who had been denied entry to medical school nearly a decade before secured a judgment that said that if he had been black he would have been admitted. He was then admitted to the school.
This produced black people stomping up and down the street in front of the school with signs, decrying this violation of their rights. But in reality what they were protesting was that the decade old denial of the white student’s rights had been overturned.
Unfortunately, in at least some people’s minds, denial of rights to others is part and parcel of their getting theirs. Revenge is a factor, as far as they are concerned. It’s a zero sum game because they want it that way.
W said:
“Simply doing nothing, as the Asian-American petition suggests, does not help with the central question of determining the artificial horizon. When “four Asian-American organizations call on the justices to bar all race-conscious admissions decisions” the result will almost certainly be that these “race-neutral policies” will net Asians more seats at universities than they otherwise would. And here we go again.”
What is wrong with that? That taxes are being taken from non-asians to pay for the education they won by merit?
Simple – stop taking money from people to pay for other’s education.
Government theft is usually at the start of the wrongs that need compensation.
Just stop the government theft and things will begin to get better.
It is a fool’s game to seek justice, or to correct injustice. Such a procedure is worse than a zero sum game, it is a negative sum game.
When someone has a complaint, the proper procedure is to follow existing law, whether or not that produces a”fair” outcome.
Otherwise, there is no civilization. Unfortunately that is how the socialists would have it.
They like to rewrite the past and ignore existing law.
“Socialists” “Anarchists” “Liberals” whatever.
“a crash program of population increase, by whatever means”
Dear Kamerad it is for Social Justice and the Revolution. We must have sex for reparations.
Some of us remember the 60s. Is wretchard reaching for the youth vote?
Who has clean hands? Who is external to the corruption and able to judge? What Presidents in the last century are descended from those who profited from the slave trade? Possibly FDR, probably Carter, and certainly Obama.
If you can change the definitions and the terms in an equation then you can predict the answer. Reality does not give the answers that Obama wants. So he changes the past, not just to justify his present but in order to rearrange the future, where all his accomplishments are expected to be.
Can the past be rewritten? For four years this country has been enmeshed by a slowly unraveling psychodrama as Obama, a man with no past and a present based on a constantly repositioned set of lies, has relied on messaging, that is propaganda as crude as anything from the 20th century, to redefine not only his own past but that of everyone and everything else in order to force a favorable result in some distant future.
The whole point of the post is that fairness may not longer have anything to do with it. Once government is in the business of creating fairness, retrospectively or prospectively, it is necessarily in the business of defining fairness. The way it does this is politics.
Getting the government to redress a wrong just creates another claim. And it never ends. The only way out, as you note, is to remove government from the fairness (redistribution game). That approach has been disparaged as “social darwinism”. Many people don’t like “social darwinism” because they regard is as unfair. What is unfair? Well this is where we came in.
Ultimately the body politic has to decide where to draw the line. That includes whether it is in the business of drawing such lines. My own personal opinion is that the legal system is incapable of solving this problem because it goes outside their scope. Probably what will happen is that when everyone gets tired of this “ethnic spoils system” that will express itself in the abolition or curtailment of many such programs. Either that or they’ll decide they like it and everyone piles into the identity politics game.
Oddly enough, in one of my increasingly rare spots of television watching, last weekend I saw a promo for a hatfields-n-McCoy’s show. A perfect example of the logical conclusion of compensatory justice. (it’s also, by the way, potentially applicable to the recent Walker-Kimberlin thread).
The same meaning that pretty much every phrase used by a Leftist has: “shut up and do what I say.”
Really, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that all leftist arguments are at heart a basic power grab. It’s what distinguishes a leftist from anyone else. They are all, consciously our unconsciously, Alexrod’s at heart. Every crisis, problem, injustice, fear, or simple unfortunate result is an opportunity for them to claim they should be lording it over everybody else.
The thing that keeps a racial spoils system going isn’t the demand for the spoils, it’s the opportunity for the spoils brokers to take their vig – whether it’s money, power, influence, status, if there wasn’t a payoff to the politicians for running the brothel, there wouldn’t be any prostitutes inside displaying their grievances.
My uncle died in 1942, on Bataan, participating in the infamous death march. My father was captured on Corregidor and spent over 3 years as a Japanese POW.
So does that give me a right to compensatory justice?
The answer of course is NO. General MacArthur knew that the only way to rebuild a new Japan was to wipe the slate clean so that the Japanese people could get past the stigma of war.
Why were our forefathers so wise compared to today’s bunch of boobs?
Rick, no. 1, that’s a very savvy point. Thank you.
Some have said that the original idea of “Affirmative Action” was to ensure that competent persons got an equal chance for employment. For example, Polish plumbers might not apply for jobs at a particular building site because ‘everyone knew’ that employer would hire only Irish plumbers. The legislative idea of Affirmative Action was to make sure that Polish plumbers as well as Irish plumbers were interviewed for job openings — and may the best man win. Equality of opportunity.
Then a judge got involved, and decided that the only way to tell if the employer was implementing the program honestly was to compare the number of hires to the relevant populations. Since there are no data available on the actual relevant populations (numbers of competent plumbers by ethnic group in a particular catchment area), judges turned Affirmative Action into a quota system — without regards to individual competency. Equality of result.
The underlying problem is judges legislating from the bench — and perverting the original intent of the legislative branch. After the coming revolution, that type of judicial behavior will be a capital offence. Judges will be required to implement laws exactly as written by the legislators — or else. And if the legislators did not cover a particular set of circumstances in the law, then the judge will be required to dismiss the case because of the lack of ‘controlling legal authority’.
Questions about unstated assumptions:
1. Who is better off today, American Blacks, or the current descendants of the tribes in Africa who enslaved and sold their ancestors? Perhaps there is actually net benefit now?
2. What is the “value” in current dollars, of the extreme life and treasure expended by the Union in the Civil War and reconstruction (by the government of the United States and its citizens))? Is reparation owed by descendants of former slaves to descendants (of those who lost so much freeing them? To relatives of those who had no descendants? To the US Treasury?
3. What is the current value of damage done to those denied jobs, university/medical/law school admission because of race-based “diversity” preferences? What is the current value of losses to our country if companies which have had to hire less-capable “diverse” employees become noncompetitive and go out of business, or ship jobs overseas to survive?
4. Like Bakke, for every “diversity” admission, a more qualified applicant is injured as a result of racial prejudice. Why shouldn’t the more deserving applicants (who are denied a career) be compensated in reparations from directly those admitted because of racial bias? They are no less injured by race prejudice against them than other victims of racial bias.
5. What does our society do with those who (or whose cultures) are less able or willing to work or excel? How long can our country survive, if it continues to penalize capability and excellence, while expending resources on incompetence and proven mediocrity?
5. Why does reducing the number of high-performing Asians increase “diversity”?
Following on Wretchard’s #7, we have just been through the university selection process here in Texas with our son, and this is what we learned to underscore our host’s point.
A while back to redress these prior wrongs, public universities in Texas were required to admit anyone who placed in the top 10% of their high school class. Didn’t matter if the student graduated from Super Dallas Prep School in Highland Park or from Crackhead High in East Houston. Top 10, you’re in. The thought being that this would create a diverse mix of students. Result being that a lot of the better students ended up leaving the state as they were displaced.
Well, the thing that hates a bureaucracy most is another competing bureaucracy. The University of Texas administration found themselves overwhelmed with Top 10%’s from all over, including numerous Crackhead High types. To the point where they lost control over who was entering their school, and thus diminishing their most significant power; the power to select who got in. So they fought back by admitting these students, but not granting them the college of their choice. Result being that the Engineering and Business schools tended to be composed of White and Asian students, while General Studies and Education tended to have more Black and Hispanic students.
So the rebalancing knows no end, and the tinkering continues. There is always someone trying to get the last word in, which of course is never that.
Interesting topic as always.
Affirmative action has devolved into naked revenge. Nothing more. All platitudes about its loftiness of purpose are lies.
The reality we are living today is that Barak Obama was intended to, among other things, be the object example and proof in the principle of affirmative action. Take an average skilled and average intelligent person of color, send him to all the “right” schools, put him in the “right” office, and he’ll be excellent, was the argument. Much in the same way limousine liberals are exactly 180 degrees wrong about cause and effect of middle class values and material wealth, and have for 80 years postulated that simply giving people middle class income would inculcate the values, they got the Pygmalion thing wrong with regard to AA, too. Instead of having a shining example of state enforced nurturism uber alles, much to the consternation of AA’s proponents, Obama has become perhaps the very best argument and proof in existence that AA does not work. All the schooling and all the rubbing of shoulders and hobnobbing with the ruling elite did not, in fact, magically transform Obama into a Jefferson-level politician. When you educate a mediocre mind you do not get an excellent mind, you get a educated (or more likely these days indoctrinated) mediocre mind.
Add to this the smelly little Elizabeth Warren affair, and in the public realm AA can no longer lay any claim to moral or functional high ground, forever. It is laid bare for what it actually is – revenge, redistribution of wealth in the form of job opportunities, and a means of appeasing intergenerational grudges and envy by urban leftists who live in fear of retribution by minorities during riots.
The past is the past. It is set in time, which is much less yielding then stone. What can be changed is our perception of the past. That is a bad thang, since all the past is good for is providing lessons for the future. Changing our perception of the past only invalidates lessons for the future.
That is why Liberals keep repeating mistakes.
Socialism has been a failure everywhere it’s been tried. Liberals re-write the past to avoid that lesson so they can repeat the failure of Socialism yet again.
“That approach has been disparaged as “social darwinism”. Many people don’t like “social darwinism” because they regard is as unfair.”
So the answer they come up with is Social Marxism.
It is interesting how many people who claim Darwinism as their religion also insist that it should never apply to human beings and our institutions.
I think that what happened — or is what is in danger of happening — is that a system initially designed to attain compensatory justice has instead become a system of ethnic spoils. The difference is that compensatory justice has a terminus, but ethnic spoilage is open ended. One finishes, the second goes on forever.
What is worse, the system of ethnic spoilage operates under the justification of compensatory justice. So while people think they are pursuing the ends of justice or redress they are in fact supporting something entirely different.
The main distinction, it seems, is that compensatory justice has an end-point. At some date or sum or milepost, the debt is paid. We are all familiar with this concept. The payments on our car, the mortgage on the house. All of them end when we get to the last check. Paid in full.
The characteristic of identity politics and spoilage is that there is no such thing as a receipt labeled “paid in full”. Even to suggest it exists will provoke howls of outrage. And yet such and end line is the keystone to the concept of compensatory justice. If it doesn’t exist, then it will never exist.
So the solution to the problem is to re-raise the question. What is going on? How much is enough? What is normal?
W said -
“That approach has been disparaged as “social darwinism”. Many people don’t like “social darwinism” because they regard is as unfair.”
Have you ever noticed that the people who claim not to like/believe Darwin do everything they can to make his ideas work while those who claim to like/believe Darwin do everything they can to stop his ideas from working?
Wretchard says After all, if Elizabeth Warren can successfully claim the compensatory justice as a native American, then any ethnic group can concoct whatever stories it likes after the fact, just for appearances.
It’s also true of so-called sexual minorities. Interesting case in Canada regarding a porn actor alleged to have mailed the body parts of someone he murdered to the headquarters of two political parties:
“Lafreniere also said police have been trying to take down an online video that they believe shows [Luka Rocco] Magnotta murdering a man he dated.
The video shows a man stabbing another man with an ice pick while the victim lies naked and tied up. The first man later reveals he has slashed the other man’s throat. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts with it. . . . Police said Magnotta is also known by the names Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov. They described him as white and 5 feet 8 inches tall with blue eyes and black hair. A police official said he was a porn actor. . . .
An online video shows a man who looks like Magnotta committing violent acts against kittens. The video contains at least one photo made available by Montreal police Wednesday that identified the man as Magnotta. For nearly two years, animal-rights activists have been looking for a man who tortured and killed cats and posted videos of it online.”
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/31/porn-actor-named-suspect-in-body-parts-case-may-have-fled-country-police-say-511829829/?test=latestnews
Magnotta’s aliases are a veritable United Nations of ethnic diversity, not to mention his being bisexual and an animal killer. Kind of makes one wonder whether there is a spoils system among sex workers (I think that’s the current PC term for the occupational category) similar to the one in academia.
My own experiences with affirmative action in the academy included a welcome-to-grad-school cookout at the home of the director of graduate studies in my department on the Saturday after the first-year orientation period. The then-DGS was a classic liberal moral preener. He came up to me and asked how I felt being a beneficiary of affirmative action, obviously expecting an expression of gratitude of some kind. I said, “Well, you had to fill your Republican quota somehow, didn’t you?” He just about lost it. I hope Wretchard managed to escape the Harvard version of institutional self-congratulation.
THE PENDULUM
The pendulum at top of arc
Will briefly pause ‘fore it descends
To leave once favored in the dark
To favor whom? Well, it depends
On where the pendulum in flight
Is at at any given time
To pendulums no wrong or right
Pertains, nor reason and or rhyme
For pendulums think not at all
About the nature of those arcs
Or for the reason for their fall
From favored whites to Rosa Parks
Who for the briefest moment shone
Reflected light upon her kin
Who by the pendulum alone
Were favored with a transient win
The pendulum now upward swings
And those now favored must adjourn
And leave the arc and gifts it brings
To those believing it’s their turn
W wrote:
“Getting the government to redress a wrong just creates another claim. And it never ends. The only way out, as you note, is to remove government from the fairness (redistribution game). That approach has been disparaged as “social darwinism”. Many people don’t like “social darwinism” because they regard is as unfair”
There may be a third way out: the rehabilitation of the gift economy, wherein education becomes again a privately-endowed service whose owners are able to attempt to redeem those who would not meet market-oriented, “meritocratic”, terms for admission, according to whatever “horizon” they, in their property rights, deem fit. Indeed, it may be the only way out of stateism – wherein the centralized imperial state reduces the gift economy to an ethnic spoils system that it controls – to rebuild private property rights in tandem with a renewed gift economy. Perhaps we can understand “social Darwinism” (for which Darwin was not exactly responsible) as part of the attempt of the early free market to win its freedom from the controls of the imperial gift economy. But in doing so, it denied the centrality of gift exchange to humanity; ultimately, no system can sustain itself without remembering the more primitive forms of economy, in some shape or form – they are too essential to the human. These ideas are being developed at the GABlog.
Compensatory justice is code for revenge. Affirmative action describes a social pregnancy whose delivered child quickly turned to ethnic piracy.
What is needed is a society where the supply of opportunity equals the demand. The place to start with that is to make access to real education universal so that people get an education that corresponds to their capabilities. We have an educational disaster on our hands today that systematically and intentionally denies young people the opportunity to use their inherent capabilities. A vengeful social pregnancy that gives birth to ethnic pirates is one important reason for the destruction of public education.
As long as public education is dominated by ethnic piracy, by political correctness and by attempts to re-write the past, we are hooped.
“It is interesting how many people who claim Darwinism as their religion also insist that it should never apply to human beings and our institutions.”
Darwin doesn’t include humans in his THEORY. Modern humans adapt their environment to suit their needs. Plants and animals adapt to their environment.
Don’t know of anyone that treats Darwinism as a religion. It would be strange, since religion is the triumph of faith over facts. Darwin’s theory is based on observations supported by facts.
Both are good. Did you know that Darwin was a religious person?
http://www.aboutdarwin.com/darwin/WhoWas.html
{ snipped}
“Now, there appears to be a common misconception regarding the religious views of Charles Darwin. First of all, Darwin was never an atheist. While it is true that in his later years he was not religious to any extent, he never entirely discounted the existence of god. In his Autobiography, Darwin says he was a theist by the time he wrote “Origin of Species” and that he believed in an intelligent first cause. However, it was his view that the nature of this “first cause” was something beyond man’s vision. The death of his daughter, Annie, on 23 April 1851 was a crushing blow to his religious beliefs, and from this time forward he stopped attending church with his family. It was only after a very long and slow process spanning his entire life that Darwin came to be an agnostic.”
Darwin was anti-church, not anti-religion.Some people refuse to open their eyes and see the difference.
Back a decade or so ago there was a black musician with a symphony orchestra. A civil rights group agitated that he should be promoted to a first chair position in the name of fairness. He was upset about this because he felt it invalidated the progress that he had made in his career. He explained to them that all promotions to available openings were made on the basis of blind auditions. That is the judges sat behind a screen and they couldn’t see the contestant, they could only hear them. They didn’t know the name, race, or sex of the applicant. The so called “civil right group” didn’t want to accept this but the orchestra and the musician stood firm. The “civil rights group” only gave up because of local ridicule and bad publicity for the most part.
PA Cat@19: “Well, you had to fill your Republican quota somehow, didn’t you?”
Well played.
The whole idea of AA is stupid and unnecessary. How do I know? I came from a broken home and barely graduated high school. I enlisted in the military as a private, just like the other 60 men in my basic training platoon. It was a mix of all races, backgrounds and geographical locations. Just by making a commitment to serve the country we got job training, free college education, medical, dental, etc, etc, etc. For my part I earned a commission and got an education from one of the nations best private universities.
Race didn’t matter; drive, commitment and work ethic were key. Still there are 3rd and 4th generation people in the US complaining about opportunity. It isn’t a lack of opportunity, it’s a lack of drive, commitment and work ethic. Losers will always be losers.
The right to participate has become the right to win. In criminal court, where I toil, the right to a fair trial has become the right to a favorable result. The Bill of Rights no longer guards against government intrusion, it demands the government intrude on someone’s behalf. Fundamental personal freedoms cannot, by definition, be divvied.
So what exactly is the question, shall affirmative action aka racial quota systems be eliminated? Are they justified?
Well here’s the thing, as originally conceived they were to be a stopgap measure and in due time would presumably not be needed. And as a stopgap measure one might approve of it, in spite of its moral and ethical shortcomings, difficulties, whatever.
Now what if, a generation later, they still do not seem to have withered away, like Marx’s communist state is supposed to? We have a new value proposition, maybe affirmative action is necessary ad infinitum to achieve what we perceive as social justice. Well, you just have to cross that affirmative action bridge when you come to it, and hope it doesn’t collapse under you.
And that’s about where we are on it, I’m afraid.
–
wretchard @ 58 previous thread: thanks for liberating my spam-trapped post, I wondered where it had gone.
Is there a Lawyer in the Club that can direct me to a legal definition of “Race”?
Is there a Melanin;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanin
range that separates Black from yellow from pink?
Where does Elizabeth Warren’s melanin count need to be for her claim to be upheld?
AFAIK, there are no genetic markers for race. It’s not a subject I keep tabs on so if science can now look at a chromosome and say, ‘this came from a Native American, or a tie foot boxer’ please post the URL.
#29 stoicheion
From what I understand, genetic anthropologists can now trace the geographic locations and migrations of a person’s ancestors, but whether the category of “race” is applicable to these findings is still disputed. Some forensic experts think “race” is still a valid concept; others maintain it is a historical construct. They “note that what is really identified is the geographical phenotype of the remains which can then be used to infer how the individual would have been classified racially according to the local social construction of racial categories.”
Sorry about the medical/anthropological gobbledygook. Here are two URLs that you can wade into:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics
http://dnareferencelab.com/ancestry.html
Hope these help, at least a little. I do remember reading about one murder case in which the medical examiner consulted a private laboratory for DNA testing of crime scene evidence. The lab reported back that the detectives needed to look for an African American suspect on the basis of genetic markers.
Probably what will happen is that when everyone gets tired of this “ethnic spoils system” that will express itself in the abolition or curtailment of many such programs.
Payers shall tire. For others, only pride restrains their demands. Keeping pride in short supply is the key to profit in many industries.
Either that or they’ll decide they like it and everyone piles into the identity politics game.
Having ensured equality between races, we will then have to contend with “I, Robots” and the rights of other species. Grab your wallet.
Believe me this is ON TOPIC: This year I started reading a book that’s a compilation of first-person recollections of experiences of America’s Civil War. One of the first essays makes the point that the Confederacy had an immediate advantage over the Federal government because while the Federals were hamstrung by a long list of rigid and unyielding requirements governing their war preparations, the Confederacy had organized itself so as to leapfrog over all those. A few f’rinstances:
Lincoln was severely restricted in his choices of commanders – because of long-standing traditions, regulations, and legislated ranking criteria in the U.S. Military. In Contrast, Jefferson Davis – West Point graduate with combat experience – was able to select commanders without such restrictions. Similarly, Congress was utterly confused about implementing actions – funding, ordering & authorizing call-ups and assignments of new military units – largely because there were a number of reps sympathetic to the Confederacy who continued in Congress precisely to use their power to frustrate action.
There are many parallels in our present situation. The vandals, terrorists, and criminals intent on looting this country are not bound by any rules, only practicality. We who have placed so much value on decorum and civility have our swords “peace-bonded” and our ankles shackled by all the constraints we’ve imposed on ourselves.
I read in this thread, and elsewhere, the common misconception that AA was ever legislated into being. It was not.
It started out as Executive Orders under Kennedy and Johnson. These were so toothless that they constituted a sop to African-American voters — and not much more. They had no enforcing agency at the Federal level. Instead, they functioned as boiler plate in Federal contracts. And with all of the massive spending by Kennedy and Johnson — no contractor was ever punished for AA failure. ( Please correct me if you know of any such. )
Then comes RM Nixon’s EO. He establishes an office to pursue contractors that don’t toe the mark, too.
Wham! Case law begins in ernest. It is in the 1970s that all of the case law is laid down.
When Nixon drafted his EO he was told in no uncertain terms that it would NEVER pass Congress. His own Republican base was against it.
All of their objections have become true: the thing morphed all out of proportion – - exactly as detailed in W’s post.
Like slavery, it can’t be redeemed. It must be terminated. 42 years is time enough.
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The OTHER kicker: no one foresaw that AA would morph into a Women’s Preferred Hiring Rule.
The vast bulk of AA has spun on XX vs XY.
Hence, our net benefit from Medical Colleges has been gravely compromised. Female MDs have to either live a barren life or become inferior doctors. For neither infant nor patient can NOT demand FULL attention.
This truth is denied by the sisterhood.
I fear for my genius niece: she’s been accepted to medical school.
Tragic.
The concept of compensatory justice is flawed from inception it is simply not possible for two wrongs to make a right.
30. PA Cat
Thanks! My formal education was in different fields. My understanding was that while there are no genes for race, different combinations of genes determine “race”. That makes sense. Ot, have you heard from Omar lately? Would you mind nudging him to drop by the club every now and then to let us know how things are. Last I heard he was in school in New York.
Blert wrote:
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The OTHER kicker: no one foresaw that AA would morph into a Women’s Preferred Hiring Rule.
The vast bulk of AA has spun on XX vs XY.
This truth is denied by the sisterhood.
Blert nails the great untold and unexamined truth of AA. One of the things that has motivated women to be Dems (admittedly there are many) is this very truth. Even if some individual women have not benefited, they like the idea that they or their daughters could at some future date is highly appealing for all the reasons other posters have noted above. The femalian half of America to one extent or another is quite content to allow the rage and argument to be about the racialist aspect of AA, which distracts from the fact that the greatest beneficiaries of AA have been white women. The denial by the sisterhood isn’t so much denial as deception and distraction. “Look, squirrel!”, while they were reaping the benefits of preferential hiring.
A corollary of this is that once a position is held by a woman/minority, particularly in government work, it is then considered that said position will be held by women/minorities forever going forward.
@3 RWE: “Unfortunately, in at least some people’s minds, denial of rights to others is part and parcel of their getting theirs. Revenge is a factor, as far as they are concerned. It’s a zero sum game because they want it that way.”
That’s the idea behind Obama’s “fair share” campaign. It is admitted that the extra taxes raised will have no practical effect on the deficit. The money might as well be thrown into the river. The real payoff is seeing the rich bastards get theirs.
No Mo Uro #36
Read the Book “Who Stole Femanism”
The author, a noted old-fashioned feminist, Christan Hoff Summers, points out that there are two kinds of feminists:
1. The old fashioned “Equity” feminists, which believe that woman should be given equal opportunities.
2. The gender superiority feminists, who believe females are naturally superior and that laws and policies should recognize this.
She decribes the consternation and outright horror she has due to the way that feminism has progressed.
I think Summers hit upon a basic truth of all “Civil Rights” movements. They start out with the objective of equality and then become efforts to secure superiority by means of laws, bureaucracies, lawfare, and thuggery.
Blert @ 33: “… the common misconception that AA was ever legislated into being. It was not.”
Blert, thanks for that correction. Much appreciated. The collective knowledge of the participants is one of the things which make Wretchard’s blog so valuable.
Related — the conventional story is that Affirmative Action started off as a (praiseworthy) attempt to level the playing field; most of us would agree that competent people should not be denied the opportunity to compete because of arbitrary judgments. And then the judicial branch morphed it into an ‘equality of result’ quota system.
Since this is ancient history to some of us, do you have any insights about whether the conventional story is accurate or not?
The point is moot isn’t it? Whatever the people think, however they vote on initiatives, they can’t change the government’s policies on this, or indeed on most things.
Inertia will keep affirmative action in place in perpetuity, alongside milk subsidies long after we are all gone.
@stoiechon (29) who asked “Is there a Lawyer in the Club that can direct me to a legal definition of “Race”? Is there a Melanin range that separates Black from yellow from pink? Where does Elizabeth Warren’s melanin count need to be for her claim to be upheld?”
Who needs legal definitions when Warren so clearly fits the Urban Dictionary’s definition of “Pretendian?” Legal definitions are for courts of law. Warren is going to be tried in the court of public opinion for Pretendian in the 1st degree. I predict that even in Massachusetts she’s convicted.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pretendian
A wannabe American Indian. Usually exhibited by white people but blacks do it too. Claims to be 1/4th Native American or a lesser percentage, but usually have no definitive proof of it or of what tribe they’re from (unless it’s Cherokee of course). If such ancestry exists, they tend to exaggerate the very small amount that they have after generations of their family neglecting this heritage.
Most annoying thing about these people is the smugness that they claim this lost heritage with. Upon being told by some senile relative or actually finding proof, they suddenly claim to know EVERYTHING about Native Americans and press for tribal membership while buying ambiguous, commodified Indian-themed jewelry and merchandise like dream-catchers. It’s usually the first thing they put on their Myspace biographies, and get miffed when people don’t referred to them as Native American or take them seriously as such (but say that they don’t want people to “judge them for embracing their ancestral roots”). They also spend their time discrediting other white people who display Indian Princess Syndrome or people who actually have accountable Native ancestry.
These people often have no grasp on Native culture and issues, both historical and contemporary. In the end, most people with accountable ancestry don’t whore their heritage in order to look “exotic” and interesting.
Rick #1
Anyone who has time should read, Up From Slavery, by Booker T. Washington. He advocated the forgiveness route. Too bad the path of W.E.B. Dubois won out over Booker T.
As I tell my college aged children – anytime you add a modifer to a pure word like “Justice” you can only diminish it.
This reminds me of very sad stories from the Cultural Revolution, and the lengths some people went pursuing justice many years afterward. He Jianming wrote a novel Xin tian you, later adapted for film, about the government’s appeals process and their efforts to fix things.
@11 – “…if the legislators did not cover a particular set of circumstances in the law…”
The legislatures rarely write laws, rather they write vague directives embedded with golden nuggets for favored constituencies which are to be interpreted and implemented by the executive. Our government has been transformed from the rule of law to that of men. Not that it matters, but this has been done intentionally and with malice aforethought.
Comprehensive, historic, encompassing, far reaching, equality, justice, fairness and bipartisan are all red flag markers that characterize such legislation.
Caveat Emptor!
@18 – “Have you ever noticed that the people who claim not to like/believe Darwin do everything they can to make his ideas work while those who claim to like/believe Darwin do everything they can to stop his ideas from working?”
That is justified in the name of progress. Mankind may be Darwinian, but only the beasts remain that way. Overcoming is the name of that game.
While the analogy is imperfect much of this education/affirmative action kerfuffle reminds me of the Tsar Cannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Cannon). The Tsar Cannon was produced more for spectacle than as a useful artillery piece.
As the education blue model collapses affirmative action will become a sideshow. Subject mastery and skills certification will become the employment coin of the realm. What employer wants to risk money on some plain vanilla BA or BS? The currency is so debased that the degree itself tells you little about the abilities of its holder.
With few exceptions (nepotism, politics, old-school networks) labor is becoming too expensive or too easily re-sourced to hire someone without the requisite skills. Within five years we will see obsolete college campuses become alternative living spaces or ivy-covered business parks. We will know this wheel has truly turned when we begin to see movies where an independently educated, street-smart fly-over guy saves the day from some snobby ivy-league pinhead. I’ll buy a ticket.
W said- “I think that what happened — or is what is in danger of happening — is that a system initially designed to attain, compensatory justice has instead become a system of ethnic spoils. The difference is that compensatory justice has a terminus, but ethnic spoilage is open ended. One finishes, the second goes on forever.
What is worse, the system of ethnic spoilage operates under the justification of compensatory justice. So while people think they are pursuing the ends of justice or redress they are in fact supporting something entirely different.”
In situations like these, we are forced to work backwards, to where this thing, this aberration originated, only to find that the presumptions we’ve been attaching to it don’t hold up to the record.
It was always a fact that the arbitrary changes to the societal system (or more specifically, to start officially with government/court enforced Federal contracts), the goal (or the goad, in fact) was always originally to institute a new mandate of a newly defined ethnic spoilage to replace a previously defined system of ethnic spoilage based (loosely,in fact) on an old mandate and to relegate the old mandate into a relic.
To concoct the conclusion, that “compensatory justice” would magically, mystically, and spontaneously emerge as a byproduct from the rock slide of lawsuits that would “begin in earnest” is logical fallacy at it’s finest (or worst), as the case may be. The conclusion was advanced as premise, and the presumptions that follow and are based on the notion that if “compensatory justice” is the premise, then whatever means be used to that end must be right, and are therefore justified, tacitly. before the fact.
The means are…
“If we can do it, and get away with it…we will do it.”
It’s a power grab, so all and anything that facilitates this is privately usurped, and all negative consequences are filed publicly under the rubric category of “compensatory justice”.
The fast and dishonest work of plotters to contrive such a deception.
If you feel the narrow and confining group you are defined as has been traditionally been getting the short end of the stick, and you feel, that the criteria that confines you is specifically based on race or racism, and that defines your grievance, is abolishing one form of racial preference with a new form of re-arranged government, or court enforced racial preference system considered “compensatory justice” from your point of view? Probably, or at least that would be what you would say “publicly”, or does it just suit you, as the nose has now been cut off to spite the face? Do two wrongs make a right? It depends on how much you covet a version of the old system that would now favor you and how much you are prepared to justify this new version of the old thing despite any evidence to the contrary if only because now it appears to favors you? (Or usurps power to your previously defined group.)
Any definable ethnic group contains a minority within it that seeks privilege and more and more authority over the whole of it. If these select gain power over more and more outside their group, in the midst of a “diverse” society, then that’s not a temptation those so privileged would likely pass up, in favor of pursuing a higher ideal.
In an imperfect world, that is anything but “fair”, the object, the goal, should always remain the pursuit of equal application of the law to all, and not to use nor usurp the authority nor the power of the state to abolish societal customs and remake them into “the law” for “thee, but not for me” as well.
But we’ve lost our way from that republican bedrock ideal, and are now in the loosey goosey world that masquerades these usurpasions in the conceit of “democratic” ideals, the “will of the peoples”.
Before any “affirmative action” actions were ever taken, many a qualified (white) H.S. graduate was passed over to make way for some lesser (white) H.S. graduate of wealth, privilege, and connections to get into Yale or Harvard only to go to state college instead. Things are far much worse now than that ever was. It’s all based on it to begin with. Somehow the wealth, privilege, and connected oligarchs of old decided to remake the oligarchy into a rainbow system of wealth and privilege to make themselves feel better about themselves in a grand re-segregated inclusive PR makeover of new wealth, privilege and connected connections, and to hell with the rest of you, and your meritocracy!!- they know better for all of you and all of the rest of you had better learn to like it.
A new bunch of rainbow Brahmin twits trying to lord it over the rest of us ad infinitum ’til kingdom come…
Someone else, apparently, will have to clean up after them.
Someone will.
pac @ 30: From what I understand, genetic anthropologists can now trace the geographic locations and migrations of a person’s ancestors, but whether the category of “race” is applicable to these findings is still disputed.
It’s a sorites problem.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
Certainly all human races can interbreed, so we’re all one species, but is species a real thing or just a convenient but fuzzy construct? Genes tend to spread out in all directions, varying unnoticeably until changes in environment cause previously neutral variation to matter dramatically. So not only is there no such thing as a white “race”, there is no such thing as a “cat”, if you want to press the issue. AND YET, we find that words like “heap” and “beard” and “race” and “species” are useful constructs. Best not always to listen to philosophers who tell you what doesn’t matter, I guess.
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b @ 33: I read in this thread, and elsewhere, the common misconception that AA was ever legislated into being. It was not.
The roots go back to the difference between “de facto” and “de jure” in racial matters, particularly school segregation IIRC. Southern states *said* there were no legal (de jure) reasons why all the black kids were in one school, and the courts decided that wasn’t *good* enough, you had to make the facts on the ground (de facto) *show* that all the black kids were not in one school.
This was quite a leap.
As to the assertion that most affirmative action has in fact (!) related to (white) women rather than racial quotas, two comments. The first is: mebbe. The second is: but it doesn’t matter as much there. In particular, I find your protest against women doctors to be odd, that is your faith in the dedication and focus of male doctors seems to me overdone. Seems to me the woman physician is less likely to be running ESPN Zone on a screen in the operating room. Where I see women in quota/AA jobs is in IT, where they are almost confined to the “soft” jobs of analyst and PM, just to make the numbers, but for the most part they do those jobs as competently as the men. Sadly, when it comes to finding minority (black) candidates, those remain terribly rare, and a number of them are there JUST for the count, getting little done. Plus, nearly every recruiting company is a “women or minority owned business” that gets tax breaks or preferential treatment, and those are usually white women.
Josh…
To be a physician is an all immersive experience. You can forget forty-hours a week.
Further, you can’t take a maternity ‘break’ — ( hardly a vacation ) and stay up to speed.
To analogize: ask a musician to put down his instrument — not for two days but two years — and then ask him to step up and perform — at which point he is expected to be flawless.
It does not happen in the real world.
Our ‘Batman’ might weigh in on this …
But, a huge part of the profession is the ART of the profession. One must constantly STAY in practice to be in the Practice.
There’s no squaring that circle.
You see some of the same effect in software creation – - with the caveat that beta testing should make your code non-lethal.
Doctors don’t have ‘beta’ error traps.
BTW, my doctor is female – and terrific. Yet she has no babies. So, it’s not their sex, per se; it’s the Human Condition.
Unlike XY doctors, XX doctors have to surrender their genetic endowment.
I didn’t make the dilemma. To deny it does not change it.
b @ 48: To be a physician is an all immersive experience.
Bullcrap left over from the pre-scientific era of medicine, basically all of time before about 1960. It’s being the patient which is all-immersive, and there ain’t no way you’re going to get a physician along with you on that ride unless you’re a billionaire, and even then you need a team, because one doctor running 60-hour shifts will do you little good.
The reality of medicine these days is 300% overscheduled doctors and 500% overburdened nurses, doing everything by rote. You have to pray the science is good enough, because the human elements are way overstressed.
Don’t even get me going …
48,49—
As a physician presently recovering from a bad chest injury–multiple rib fractures, severe blood loss, 80% lung collapse, multiple clots in lungs, all at the ripe ol’ age of 71–I can say you’re both right.
And I can say this as one whose career harkens back to the time when I routinely worked 65+ hours weekly, nights and weekends, and even made occasional housecalls in my small town.
Aside from the technical gadgets in the ICU, the biggest thing I noticed was the docs and nurses (and esp the nurses) being so disgruntled over the time spent pecking away on computers. Electronic medical records? Some good, a lot bad and it really takes away from the bedside time.
So, yes … you’re both right but not exactly the way you probably think. The shining core of professionalism is still there but under severe attack from outside forces. Who knows how it will work out?
Hispanics are not in the majority in Texas, whites are, or, at least, whites are in the plurality. Hispanics are right behind, and catching up to whites.
M @ 50: Aside from the technical gadgets in the ICU, the biggest thing I noticed was the docs and nurses (and esp the nurses) being so disgruntled over the time spent pecking away on computers. Electronic medical records? Some good, a lot bad and it really takes away from the bedside time.
First, hope you’re doing better, you sound good in your post!
As a computer guy, I try to look at some of the medical systems when I’m in any of the medical environments – and the systems mostly suck, are obviously difficult to read and to use and ERROR PRONE.
The overarching theme here is the bleeding edge of technologies, medical or computer or most any other, tends to be waaaay far away from average daily practice. It’s often like watching a monkey with a chain saw, not quite sure even which is the business end. In brief, that’s sort of my theory of how we got into this financial meltdown, even the leading lights of our financial system think the tools are magic and cannot be misused, do not require understanding and judgement. Maybe only 1% of the population is capable of producing leading-edge science, but the danger part is maybe only 2% are even capable of *using* it to any complete degree. The other 98% are driving their Ferraris around at 12mph, and the like.
I hope the numbers for doctors are better than that, but given the system, and my real-world observations, I just dunno. But to a very large extent the science and technology can, should, and will replace a lot of silly medical traditions, and produce far better results.
May that be true in the finance markets as well, btw, though there we see small signs of progress.
People: this is one of the great threads in one of the great blogs of, like, anywhere and ever. Thanks to all, but particularly W for his magic. Never would I think to take “The Great Gatsby,” rewriting the past, artificial horizons, and the Fisher case, and blend them with that 180-proof Wretchard wry distillate, and come up with this. Wow.
May I offer this cross-cutting idea? Spoils systems arise naturally in government because government is done by lawmakers (who want to categorize things) and bureaucrats (who want to apply the laws to those categories). And what could be better than taking a disparate bunch of people with unique experiences and claims, and lumping them together under a handy label like “Black” or “Hispanic” or (my personal favorite) “Left-handed Lithuanians”? And for those who rejoice in that label (or who can plausibly pull a Warren and claim the protection and benefits of the label), what could be more lucrative?
The solution is to abolish the concept of group rights. I suspect there is a pathological intersection in our culture between group rights (for AA and similar grievance-hustling purposes) and class actions (for industrial torts and similar “generic” litigation purposes) but that’s for another day. The key idea is –or at least for our founding Fathers, it was– that each of us is created equal. And each of us must be judged by what we do and what we suffer. We cannot be allowed to base our claims on what others have done or suffered.
Maybe that is a way to cage the gyro. But I am not optimistic.
Rick@1 A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that the only way to change the past is to forgive those who have wronged you.
I think that works just as well the other way around. Attribute crimes to those who never wronged you, cry loudly about the inhumanity of it all, rope as many people as possible into the newly-invented victim class, and push for social justice in the form of power over other people’s money.
It’s memes all the way down.
52. Josh—
Yes, I am better and learning the difference between 21 and 71 in terms of healing time.
I’ll expand a bit: the good thing I saw with the computerization was that all data such as xray reports, lab results, etc were instantly available to anyone with access to the system, anywhere. Thus, my nurses could see my latest blood count as soon as it was entered by the lab.
Re the time spent pecking on keyboards: besides my recent hospitalization, I have volunteered several years at a clinic that serves mostly immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They purchased the program that is commonly known as the least user-friendly of those ”suitable” for a clinic operation. Why? Beats me, all I’ve ever gotten is vague answers such as ”standardization”—I suspect payola somewhere.
But anyhow, the doctors and nurse-practioners, all skilled and bilingual, sit endlessly and enter data into this really complex program which takes about two weeks to learn, I’m told. Time with the patients? Much, much less and everybody hates it; one of the NPs has already left and I happen to know another is looking.
Whoever put this thing together should be condemned to use it the rest of his life but I can guarantee you it wasn’t someone whose main orientation was patient care and clear records. It was the triumph of form over substance, of information over understanding, of process over outcome.
And … be asking yourself how long until people, hurrying to get through this damn thing so they can get to their next patient, start cutting corners. I’ve already seen one record where the thyroid was recorded as ”normal” yet the patient had a thyroidectomy scar on her neck.
It happens, sure, but this ain’t good. One of the editors of American Family Physician has already started a study of who, how, and where it’s been shown that all these electronics improve medical care for Joe Patient (and believe me, I had this much in mind lying flat on my back recently). You might be shocked to know that all this was imposed on American medicine without any pilot programs or any evidence that it actually works.
And … I’ve read tales of politics, crony capitalism (naw, couldn’t be).
m @ 55: Whoever put this thing together should be condemned …
The big topic here at BC is always a refined and informed gloom about things, and in my case the contribution has to be the loss of the idea of “quality” in things computerized – or not.
What we seem to get is not a metric, but a pass/fail – does the program “work”? Then it could not possibly be any better. If you point out that it crawls instead of walking, much less flying, you just get blank looks.
People then use these marginal products because they promise at least marginal improvement, though that often considers the benefits and not the costs included. Then everyone just curses the damned computers, when it’s not the poor dumb computer’s fault it was programmed by cheapskate morons and bought in a delusion of hope.
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Glad to hear you’re doing well, and I wouldn’t want to have those injuries at 21, either. But, bitching aside, I guess if I had the choice, I *would* rather have those injuries with 2012 medicine and not 1962 medicine!
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5 of 4, but I hadda
@23. Don’t know of anyone that treats Darwinism as a religion. It would be strange, since religion is the triumph of faith over facts. Darwin’s theory is based on observations supported by facts.
Actually its not based on facts … at least not any facts in the fossil record … and Darwin knew as much.
Google “evolution in the fossil record darwin quotes”
Darwinism is like a religion in that the people who “believe” in it do so without physical evidence.
I was around for the beginning of AA, and close enough to see where it went very wrong. If the objective was to give someone from the protected class a leg up when you had two candidates equally qualified…no problem, and the vast majority of hiring managers would agree with that. The biggest problem was sourcing qualified minorities, primarily African Americans, but non-profits shot up that were there to “help”. The real problems started when some of those African Americans were fired for poor performance. Common sense would say that a company willing to hire blacks in larger numbers wasn’t a company that was discriminating against them, BUT, if you fired a black for poor performance, that is precisely what was presumed., and presumed after the very first of these people filed a complaint with the State Civil Rights people who told the fired employee to also file a charge with the Federal EEOC. To call what resulted from this as anything less than a witch hunt would be dishonest of me. “Shame on YOU, company, for ending up under our microscope.” Not going to go into all that entailed, but just to put you in the ballpark, think “IRS audit”, and how there really is no limit to how miserable your life will become for a long, long time. That’s just about the same time that companies realized that AA was a time wasting, manpower sucking, money draining quota system that you couldn’t possibly escape….
UNLESS!
Unless you did one of two things. One, never fired an African American, or two, if you did, understand that there would be a financial payoff that was totally unfair, but all in all, cost effective for your company. Needless to say, African Americans picked up on this advantage, and almost immediately. Was that because of the non-profit “helpers” advising them? Was it because they were “street smart”? Was it because they never let personal pride get in the way of some sort of a “pay day”? “Pay day” meaning money for getting fired, or perhaps even worse than that, employment that bore no resemblance to contribution. Rather like union protection, and I say that only to put you in the mind set, because it was quite like that.
You know who lost in the end? African Americans who really wanted to compete without such a “deadly” advantage.
Just a few more comments here.
In my thirty years of being up close and personal, at least through 2000, Hispanics and white women were rare participants in the culture described above.
But then, or… AND then?
Women went CRAZY when “sexual harassment” was pretty much defined however their personal Webster’s Dictionary said it was, and massive subjectivity ensued!
Ha ha
OK, I shared enough of my “personal journal”.
But I am going to leave you with this…
At least in the Northeast, and for my 30 years of up close and personal, Hispanics seem to “dance” to a different drum. One which I personally admire.
Family, community, church…and a whole helluva lot of HARD, back-breaking work…. to do better and be better.
They’re not anything like what we’ve become, and I truly believe they are here to remind us all of what we once were.
Science fiction?
That would be pretty much up to the “aliens” to decide.
It’s my understanding in California that AA is a crucial tool for keeping Asians OUT of the University system. I remember an administrator/admissions officer (and vocal critic) stating that if admission were purely on merit, the state’s universities would quickly become 70% Asian, 25% White, and 5% Black/Latino. The Asian applcants are that much better qualified across the board.
And that would be a financial disaster.
The problem being that Asians generally don’t play the big-revenue sports of football and basketball, and also don’t tend to be alumni boosters of such, and that historically, Asian alumni have much lower levels of alumni donations overall.
Universities exist to make money. The administrations have maximized tuition revenue by getting the government to pick up most of the tab, and expanded into more and more soft science and arts majors to bring in new students, largely women in the last 50 years.
Maximizing sports revenues and alumni donations is another prime directive for trustees.
Franking 61,
It has been argued (See, I just did?) that AA was invented by the Ivy League to keep Jews out. By their white shoe standards it was better to fill the places with blacks and import more foreign students, Latin or Muslim, than Jews. The Jews were seen as professional rivals but the blacks were not. The expectation of the elite bigots was that only jobs the blacks were expected to take would displace lesser whites from schools in flyover country or similar less important places. The foreigners would bring money. Neither were seen as threatening the dominance of the old elites. “Diversity” means fewer of those competitive New York Jews. Professor Charles Lipson was the textbook example of a Yalie. If you opened the dictionary you should see his image. He stated in class that “Yale had been looking for someone other than another New York Jew so they cast their net wide, and ended up with the smartest Jew in Mississippi.”