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Originally Posted by raytri";p="
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Originally Posted by Blade";p="
What universities are interested in is quite tangible - it's skin color. I actually agree with the idea of "intangibles", but you see, the academy has wrecked the use of that because they mischievously take advantage of it's subjective non-quantifiable nature as a means to effect the anti-white discrimination they want to perpetrate.
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While a fine theory, you have to ask yourself why colleges -- public or private -- would randomly choose to discriminate against the white majority that makes up the bulk of their customers and (in the case of public schools) tax base. |
They do it because academics are one of the four pillars of liberalism in this country (along with the media establishment, most of the judiciary, and corporations). In turn, liberalism has as it's most faithful political clients ethnic minorities, most importantly blacks. Another reason is it makes them feel magnanimous to the blacks, and has the wonderful side benefit that it costs them personally
nothing - their "magnanimity" is at the expense of white students and the taxes of their parents.
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Beyond that, it makes little sense to throw out all intangible criteria simply because you object to some of them.
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I've already explained to you that those would be of value if the universities didn't use them, coupled with their highly secretive admissions committee actions, to discriminate against white students for being white.
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(except the AA ones) making a non-frivolous application to U of M.
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One point that you seem to be missing. This isn't a matter of unqualified people being admitted. It's a matter of choosing among qualified applicants. Do you think all the people turned away by Harvard are unqualified to be there? Hardly. The fact is, far more people apply for slots at Harvard than could ever possibly get in. So Harvard turns away most of them -- including plenty of qualified applicants.
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Yeah yeah, this is the ol' "qualified" argument for anti-white discrimination - universities prior to "affirmative action" always took the MOST qualified candidates - rejecting a MORE qualified candidate in favor of a "qualified' candidate is unjust.
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What you're objecting to is a school, when deciding which qualified applicants to admit, considering race and student-body makeup as factors.
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Yeah - just like how country clubs used to "consider" religion in who to admit as members.
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You on the other hand, just like other "affirmative action" advocates, just dismiss with the wave of a hand what must be a devastating reversal for people who've worked hard toward a goal for a long time, merited admission, and then are told to hit the bricks for having the wrong skin color.
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As noted above, every school turns away applicants who merit admission simply because they have a limited number of slots. Are you prepared to weep for all those others who suffered "devastating reversals"?
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OBVIOUSLY, the ones who are turned away because they didn't make the cut for
legitimate reasons, viz, not having high enough grades, can be disappointed. This is not at all the same as showing up with credentials that rank you within the number of available slots, yet sent packing because you have the wrong skin color. The former were justly rejected, the latter unjustly. They have to cope with the fact that not only didn't they get in, but also they were a victim of injustice.
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I agree that, of all the factors a school can weigh, race is one of the more difficult to defend. But I also think a school does its graduates no favors if they educate them in an environment that has no bearing on the real world. An all-white student body doesn't properly prepare its graduates for the world.
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This is nonsense - the white applicants grasp "the real world" just because a minority student is sitting in the classroom. It is in fact the professors' job to teach "the real world".
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For that matter, neither does an all-black student body. Though in the latter case, since blacks are a clear minority, it's nearly impossible for a black student to be oblivious of the larger culture and its viewpoints. So the effect is smaller.
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If you went into a japanese business school marketing class now, or at anytime since say the 1970s, you would see japanese students that looked like xerox copies of each other. Would they be out of contact with "the real world"? Apparently not - they sold their products all over the world. This bogus "real world" diversity theory is just the latest example of a predetermined policy (anti-white discrimination) seeking a justification.
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All in all, giving a small bump to minority applicants in order to achieve a desired student-body mix is reasonable. Giving a large bump, so that minorities are overrepresented (and unqualified candidates are admitted at the expense of qualified ones) is unreasonable. Where the line is drawn is a judgement call.
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It's a small bump to tenured, established liberals who can only see people as groups and just look at statistics. To the white student who is treated unjustly, it's a BIG "bump".
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It's similar to other criteria used by schools, such as geographical distribution. Many schools strive to draw students from all over the country, and from both rural and urban areas. The goal is again the same: a diverse student body that will challenge students, or expose them to thoughts and viewpoints they might never have encountered before.
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That is PRECISELY the professor's job.
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You glibly talk about "redressing historical discrimination", as if you can somehow fly back in history and undo wrongs. You CAN'T - those victims are old or dead. Because A was ripped off by B, you want to punish C and reward D.
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Here's a hypothetical. Let's say the adults in Clan A decided one day to massacre the entire educated and professional class of Clan B and loot their villages, leaving only uneducated laborers and orphans with no money.
Immediately afterwards, motivated by the horrific bloodshed, members of Clan A revolt and overthrow the elders who made that decision.
Do you think Clan A owes anything to the survivors of Clan B?
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No, Clan A doesn't. Clansman A1 (
) and clansman A17 and clansman A334, who executed the massacre, owe Clan B.
A13,567, who wasn't even alive during the massacre, can hardly be said to owe Clan B anything.
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Because to me, Clan A owes a lot to Clan B -- especially to the orphans, who deserve a decent education and a shot at the life they were traveling towards before Clan A removed all of their intellectual and financial capital.
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Your problem is that you are fixated on groups, whereas just action can only be rendered to
individuals. Your notion is no different than if one particular white guy robbed a bank and was caught, the judge said throw this guy and ten another white people in jail.
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Given limited resources (teachers, schoolbooks, classrooms), the only way to guarantee that education for the Clan B orphans is to do so at the expense of some of Clan A's own children, either directly or indirectly.
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Clan A can hardly remedy old injustices by creating new ones.
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I think it would be the height of cynicism for Clan A to hold up one of those kids and say, "we can't help Clan B because it would be unfair to punish this child."
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It would be the height of cynicism for Clansman A13 to say "I was one of the people who benefitted from the massacre and looting of Clan B, but now I feel all guilty, and I'm going to make amends by screwing over A13,567."
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Now, in theory you could say that Clan A should fully fund the education of everybody and give up something else instead -- something that only harms the adults who committed the massacre in the first place. But the world doesn't work out that neatly. Any restitution paid by Clan A results in Clan A being poorer and budgets being squeezed everywhere -- including education.
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"Affirmative action" doesn't make people "everywhere" pay for past discrimination - it dumps it ALL on the people who had nothing to do with it.
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Your approach essentially discards the whole idea of group responsibility.
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That is the KEY to this whole thing - the very heart of anti-white discrimination devolves around this evil idea of group responsibility, which strikes at the very core of the concept of justice, which is that
individuals get their merited rewards and punishments.
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Let's assume that there are still lingering effects of past racial discrimination. Why should today's whites benefit from that? It doesn't matter if they're still actively discriminating or not; they're benefiting from ill-gotten gains. Attempting to redress that is not punishing C and rewarding D for the actions of A; it's rebalancing a scale that is still out of whack, a scale that unfairly rewards C and punishes D
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Another bogus argument. I grew up in an extremely poor environment. Exactly how did I benefit from "lingering effects of past racial discrimination"? How about the tens of millions of other poor whites? Were we supposed to register for "lingering benefits" at some government office and we screwed up??? But even for middle class whites this idea sounds untenable. An argument can be made that whites PAID, not benefitted, for former mistreatment of blacks, starting with the hundreds of thousands of union troops who died dismantling slavery. Whites in WWII who were sent into combat roles excluded to blacks PAID disproportionately with their lives for discrimination. In later years, if one accepts blacks' (and liberals') claim that the residual poverty in the ghetto and its consequences are due to past discrimination, then whites are paying for that too, with taxes for trillions of dollars for war on poverty programs, welfare checks, black on white crime, and other things that are easy to hypothesize such as higher taxes since blacks have less wealth to tax. Sorry, I don't buy the "lingering" argument.
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Irish, for instance, were never prevented from learning to read, or forbidden to hold property, or things like that.
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You are apparently unaware tricks of the british landlording system in ireland, and blacks never experienced widespread famine, much less engineered famine.
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When I was a struggling undergraduate, I would have said "bring it on". But now I realize that neither the interests of society nor the long-term interests of individuals who make it up are served by oppressing people of ability and merit.
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Where did I say we should oppress people of ability and merit?
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Say it or not, that's what you support.
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Do you agree that, all things being equal, it is more difficult to succeed if one is born into poverty than if one is born into wealth?
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Yes.
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If so, would society not benefit from recognizing that and taking it into account when weighing who has "ability" and "merit?"
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No, because you either have merit or you don't. I was in for a giant shock when I first got to university - I made a "D" average because of the low standards of the ghetto government schools I had attended. I realized at that point what my situation was, dug in like crazy and EARNED a 3.5/4.0 grade average when I graduated - in physics. Society isn't served by pretending people have merit when they don't.
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Further, doesn't society benefit from enabling economic advancement, so that even the poor feel they have a fair shake to get ahead, rather than blaming their problems on a system that favors the wealthy? Never mind the individual contributions from those people who climb out of poverty -- contributions we might never get if we make the barriers to such a climb excessively high.
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Within a democratic polity only, I agree with broadly based assistance to poor people, not selecting out particular ethnic groups for privileges. That assistance should be of the kind that encourages such people to improve themselves. In no case do I support racial discrimination.
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I don't agree with this "debt" - go after the creators of the debt, which is not me, and not any young white student applying for a job or university position.
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That's a dodge, as I noted above. If you are still benefiting from the lingering effects of past discrimination, you can't say "it's not my problem."
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And that's yet one more bogus argument for anti-white discrimination, as I showed above.