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Yep, basically.
Black people (and to a lesser extent Latino people) still trail white people in measures of wealth and educational attainment by a significant margin. This isn’t accidental; systems of structural inequality in the United States have persisted for hundreds of years up to this very day, disenfranchising minorities, siphoning their wealth away, and preventing them from accruing more.
Yet attempting to address the problem where it exists – in targeting structural racism by directly aiding the communities most-affected by racist policies – routinely results in white people claiming that actually racism is real, but only against white people. The way white people benefit from systems of racism and exclusion are totally invisible to them by design.
While affirmative action is not perfect, throwing the baby out with the bathwater will hurt the must vulnerable Americans even more. This is a very sad day for the United States in particular and the idea of racial equality in general.
Why not change admissions to focus more on accepting lower income students? Wouldn’t that fix the entire problem?
No, because the problem being solved is the racial wealth gap. If you want to solve the problem of the racial wealth gap, you have to solve… that problem, not some other problem.
It seems like accepting lower income people would fix that problem then. On average, college graduates make more than nongraduates. So getting lower income kids admitted will fix that problem.
No, accepting more Black people would fix the problem, since not enough Black people being accepted into colleges is the problem. Not sure why everyone is recommending that their pet problem be fixed instead of the actual problem.
You’re creating a problem by discriminating based on race. If the goal is to break the poverty cycle, which is what it’s been stated as being, then targeting lower income individuals would fix that problem.
The racial wealth gap and educational gap is the problem, as stated in @Veraticus@lib.lgbt op. Apparently you didn’t read that part.
I’m not creating a problem by discriminating on race; we’re fixing a problem by discriminating on race.
Discrimination based on race is real and has existed for hundreds of years. Slavery, Jim Crow, reconstruction, red-lining, leaded paint… all of these were targeted by race, not by income. Pretending we can fix the enormous (and on-going) disenfranchisement of Black people by not targeting them is simply naïve.
My goal here is not to break the poverty cycle, though I obviously want less poverty. My goal (and the goal of affirmative action) is to fix the problem of racial wealth and educational inequality. Those are separate problems from poverty that must be targeted for fixing in exactly the same manner they were targeted in creation – by race.
You can’t fix racism with more racism… That’s the worst take yet.
You seem pretty slow, so I’m going to explain this to you one last time:
To fix the problem of racial wealth inequality, we have to fix the problem of racial wealth inequality. You can’t ignore race to fix problems created by racism.
Think about that for awhile before you respond again. Hopefully something will sink in.
So there being more black people in poverty, would selecting more of the impoverished not work towards solving the racial wealth gap?
And why should a white or Asian person that can’t keep the lights on be given less of a chance than an affluent black person with a worse application?
No, because you’re not targeting the racial wealth gap, you’re targeting impoverishment.
Because we’re trying to fix the endemic, pervasive, and unchanging racial wealth gap. Not something else.
Not sure what’s so hard about this concept. Can’t we try to fix the racial wealth gap? And also, separately, whatever causes you otherwise care about?
The racial wealth gap is a selective problem that is encompassed entirely within the general, race-less problem of poverty in the United States. Fixing the big problem also checks off your small one.
Great; then you shouldn’t object to fixing the racial wealth gap as a way to end poverty. Unless you actually are fine with Black people being poorer and having worse access to education than white people?
I object to only solving part of the problem in a way that disadvantages other groups. Lifting a certain group out of poverty while suppressing another, entirely based on race is, well, racist. Kinda simple
So we enslave, murder, and steal from a whole group of people and then turn around and say that helping them afterwards is racist?
What a bad take.
@RIPSync I mean, if you tell a racist they have to take more poor people, why would they take non-white poor people?