Your Humble Blogger has recently had yet another frustrating conversation about affirmative action. So I'll post what I have to say here, and you can tell me why it isn't persuasive...\n\n
My father went to Queens College<\/a> and Columbia Law School<\/a> in the fifties. At the time, neither was actually segregated, but I think we can safely assume that applicants with dark skin were viewed with some skepticism by the admissions boards. With some reason, as elementary and high schools were segregated across much of the country at that time, and most people of color received an inferior education, which did not prepare them for places like Queens and Columbia. Thus vicious and illegal discrimination at the earlier levels coupled with the relatively benign discrimination at those institutions to deny an African-American student an equal shot at admission. Right? Everybody knows that, right?\n\n And now, most admissions boards are not racist, and differences in elementary and high schools are much more class-based than race-based (the obvious overlap makes that murky; plus residual racism mixes with the class struggle in a variety of ugly ways, but in general, rich people of color have opportunities denied to poor European-Americans). To many people, this means that the need for race-based preference has disappeared.\n\n Here's the thing, though. When a group of people was denied equal opportunity to get into Queens College, another group of people benefited. Was my father one of those people? Who knows? I like to think that my father (a very smart man) would have got in over any competition, but then I'm his son. If things were fair, somebody's father would not have been accepted; for the sake of argument, let's say mine.\n\n Now, if my dad hadn't gone to Queens (and later Columbia), he probably wouldn't have become a successful attorney, and I wouldn't have grown up in a nice house, with occasional vacations. It's even possible that he and my mother would not have been attracted to each other, had my father not been a professional; of course, it's unlikely they would even have met, but let's leave that aside. Further, his education helped him support my siblings and me as we grew up. When I applied to college, I had in my favor (a) some success at a reasonable high school in a reasonable neighborhood. I was well-read for a 17-year-old, I had exposure to culture in a variety of ways, and I had parents and siblings with bachelor's degrees. These are all advantages that I might well not have had, if things had been fair when my father applied to Queens.\n\n And what about the fellow my age whose father was screwed out of a good education? What did his application look like? Even if he were smarter and more disciplined than I (he probably was), would he have even been sending college applications out? Maybe. Maybe to different places. Maybe to the schools I wanted to attend. Maybe, just possibly, the last decision for the admissions office came down to him or me; my application looked better in a lot of ways, but they gave the other guy some preference for his race.\n\n So if I had been screwed by affirmative action, would it have been fair? No, of course not. But I would have had no beef; you win some and you lose some, and I have won plenty. Fairness, in the specifics, is not the point; in the big picture, I'm still on top.\n\n Statistically, the best predictor if a kid is going to go to college degree is if the kid's parents went to college. That's not necessary, but it's true at present. As long as that's true, then the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, the unfair benefits of the fathers are visited on the sons, and the injustices endured by the fathers are visited on the sons. That's why, as a society, we must take action, affirmative action, to redress the wrongs.\n\n Redintegro Iraq, Your Humble Blogger has recently had yet another frustrating conversation about affirmative action. So I’ll post what I have to say here, and you can tell me why it isn’t persuasive… My father went to Queens College and Columbia Law…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16816,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1336\/revisions\/16816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"