Black and White

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I don't know how I missed this the first time. Unqualified candidates are not--typically--affected by Affirmative Action. AA draws from the pool of qualified candidates. No college admissions officer is going to repeatedly and deliberately admit unqualified candidates, because if they did, they'd lose their job. Ditto HR staff at ye olde corporation.

 

Just a quick comment for those who want figures to back up the bilking of the Public Assistance programs.

A person who has successfully taken improper advantage of Public Assistance is not going to appear in any statistics proving this.

 

Jews aren't a race strictly speaking. Proper races are three, the rest are mixes or ethnic groups. I suppose some people think you're white only if you're Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but come on, weirdos are everywhere.

 

To be honest I don't know much about the current affairs with blacks in America, what I do know about is the situations with some of our national minorities most notably the Roma that have been here for hundreds of years a bit like the blacks in America. While they have never been enslaved, they have never been in a situation of acceptance in society and still plenty of white people see them as nothing but welfare bums and criminals. The view is not improved by the fact that there is a lot of drug abuse and unemployment amongst them (no proper statistics are available since racial branding for statistical purposes is illegal in Finland, however an organisation representing them openly accepts these problems so I think we can accept them as facts).

Now this is obviously a very difficult situation. On the one hand they are not fully accepted in society as equals and there is a lot of mistrust towards them, and on the other they themselves keep feeding this mistrust making it more difficult for those who want to integrate to do so. How can this vicious circle be broken? I'm not sure I even know the answer. They have had equal status for a hundered years in law, still they haven't managed to integrate, but there is also no doubt that the white population has not fully allowed this to happen. Which part is to blame of all this? In my opinion a bit of both but I the majority which is the white population has a bigger chance for change but it would need a major change of attitudes and I really don't know how that might be achieved. I also think that the minority needs figures that can raise their confidence and get them to participate in society much better, that's why I think Obama might be good for America, allthough I really don't know how the blacks really feel about him.

 

Oddly enough, I've never encountered such a case. Have you?

 

Any of them. And yes, I've met racists from all groups.

 

Affirmative Action Again

Here's one problem I have with affirmative action - that applying the practice destroys the spirit of what it is trying to accomplish.

Whether your talking about school admissions or employee hiring, the reason why affirmative action was implemented was that people were being excluded from being admitted or hired based on race. So to counter this, we institute a policy that requires an employer or school to admit/hire a certain number of students/workers based on race.

The counterintuitiveness of this practice aside - it raises two more questions for me. The first is the one that dmc points out - the possibility that someone less qualified is getting a spot ahead of someone more qualified. But there is another avenue in which to take that logic. Let's say a school has a policy in which 30% of the student population must be minorities. To meet this requirement, every year the admissions board select exactly 30% minorities into the incoming class. But what if minorities actually comprise 40% of the most qualified applicants? If the admissions board sticks to its policy, here affirmative action can actually hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

I agree with this. There was a Newsweek article I saw about a year ago, and what it did was break down people into five groups called "quintiles" The first quintile represented those people whose salary was in the bottom 0 to 20th percentile of all wage earners. The second quintile was people whose salary was in the 20th to 40th percentile of all wage earners, and so forth up until the 5th quintile which represented the top 20% of all wage earners. An overwhelming majority of people (it was over 90% although I forget the exact percentage) tend to end up within one quintile of whatever quintile their parents were in. So if you are born in the bottom quintile, chances are you're never going to do better than the second quintile.

WARNING - RANT TO FOLLOW: That I don't agree with. That's because there have been so many other groups that came to the U.S. in the post slavery years that have risen up from very humble beginings. My family immigrated to the U.S. in the middle of the 20th century. My father was the first American born member of my family. If you want to talk about having a hard time getting a job, imagine getting one when you don't speak English - which was a real problem for my grandparents when they first arrived. They eventually learned to speak English, but it took a while.

My grandparents didn't have great jobs. They were coal miners and manual laborers, because they didn't speak English, and minimal training is needed when the primary requirement of your job is to use a pick axe or a shovel. They were also poorly educated - many of them lacking the equivalent of a high school education. Yet their children (my parents) did get a high school education. My dad even got a college education. My siblings and I are all educated - all but one of us have graduate degrees (and the one that doesn't is the youngest one who is still in undergraduate school). One of my brothers is an emergency room doctor.

So I don't buy that the legacy of slavery is why blacks are still so disproportionately poor. At least they know how to speak English. Too many other groups (mostly from central and eastern Europe) have come to this country with just as many disadvantages and within a generation or two aren't poor anymore. My family, in the span of two generations, went from peasant Eastern European farmers to white collar professionals. Here's another surprising fact. Blacks who immigrated to this country post slavery tend to follow the trend of whites - they stay poor for a generation or two and then gradually improve. So there is something - culturally or otherwise - that is significantly different from blacks who came here willingly (i.e., are immigrants) versus those who were brought here unwillingly (i.e., decendents of slaves).

 

Three, Chev? I'm not sure what three you mean. Just off the top of my head I could easily come up with seven major racial groups (and many smaller ones): Caucasian, Oriental, Middle East (Arab nations and India region), African, Native Americans, Polynesians, aboriginies. Which ones do you cut in order to have three? I can see grouping Oriental and Native Americans; however, the two diverged over 12,000 years ago. The other races diverged even earlier in history. The Hebrews have been fairly insular for over 5,000 years -- how much time is necessary to make a race?

I will follow what Aldeth said by stating that prejudice and discrimination exist in the US (and the world for that matter). Although, in America, the primary prejudice is against poverty. If you are one of the 'have nots' you are discriminated against. I have seen people from all races milk the system, whether welfare, social security, food stamps, unemployment, etc.. Such actions are not universal to one group of people -- unless that group is the poor.

In poor areas (whether the inner city of Chicago or the hills of Kentucky) one common denominator is lower quality education. Many people, such as Aldeth's family, work to move up in life -- often that leads to living in better communities and their children receiving better education. A better education gives a greater chance of rising to the next higher 'quintile.'

More important than education is attitude. Often, a defeatist attitude seems to pervade throughout a family or even a neighborhood. 'Nobody makes it out of the projects' is an all to common theme. It those cases it appears to be easy to fall into the 'I'll get what I can' trap. People become at ease with a certain lifestyle and can maintain it with little effort (or at least familiar effort). Change is difficult -- change is stressful -- change means you must be willing leave friends and family behind.

I believe one of the most important things a parent can give their children is a positive attitude. One where the child knows it is possible to improve and that such improvements are worth risking. Spending $50,000 on a college education is a huge investment and risk. The child must have the vision to see long-term to know such investments will pay off in the long run.

 

Three. Black, Asian (referred to as yellow before, despite the fact some are whiter than whites), white.

What you mention is a list of ethnic groups.

 

The American Anthropoligical Association has a great statement about race. The last paragragh:

How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society. The "racial" worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.

It can be found here:

http://http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

Chev: The old view of three races; 'mongoloids, caucasoids, and negroids' is quite simplistic and outdated. It was primarily developed by biologists. However, in 1758 a naturalist by the name of Linnaeus differentiated four biological groups: Asians, American Indians, Europeans, and Africans (some biologists grouped the first two together to give the three mentioned earlier). Most researchers since Linnaeus have accepted these four and added the Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, and even others. Anthropologists, on the other hand, view race as a socio-political issue (at least the definition of race used by the average person). In these cases, race is further divided.

 

T2,

I agree with you that there a now considered to be more than 3 races. However, one that you mentioned - Middle Eastern - is not a race. Those who are Middle Eastern are white.

I was aware of five races - Caucasian (white), African (black), Asian (excluding the middle east who, as I said, are white), Native American (both north and south) and Pacific Islander. Other things that show up on census forms but technically are not races: Hispanic/Latino - these are considered a combination of Native American, Caucasian and Black.

 

Races are three and American Indians are in the Mongoloid race, although they can be noticeably different from proper Asians. And mixes are not races. Whoever classifies mixes as new races needs to revise his Mendel's.

As for inequalities, I wasn't talking about any matter of social status and I specifically said I didn't buy the crap that one race is better than another. However, ethnic and even racial groups exist and it's not a cultural thing that one person is black and the other is white.

 

Here's a couple of other questions to think about. Given that various areas have produced different races, is it possible that throughout human history there are even more races than we see today?

Secondly, with inter-racial marriages becoming more and more common, and people becoming ever more mobile and moving to different parts of the world, is it possible that racial issues will become less prominent in future generations, as more and more people will identify with more than one race?