5 thoughts on “A Post-Affirmative-Action America”

  1. …scrapping systemic preferences enjoyed by the white majority.
    I assume these systematic preferences are things like the ability to accept delayed gratification, child birth inside of a marriage, the inculcation of a serious work ethic and a culture of a loving family support system that values education and achievement. So presumably some kind of forced acculturation.

    = Harrison Bergeron

  2. The one that still boggles my occured around 2000 where one of the musical organizations of Detroit (Detroit Symphony?) had -double-blind- testing for admittance. Everyone handed secret numbers, sequestered from the judges, no names on the forms, etc.

    Verdict: Racist.
    The idea that one group or another might not value, practice, attempt, or have the same opportunity to play the violin compared to another was irrelevant.
    (Amusingly, -also- a case where a ‘minority group’ coughAsianscough was creatively considered “white” when trying to say “You don’t have enough minorities.” Even at the same time including them as minorities when calculating “What percent of the pool is minority?”)

  3. Though she is undoubtedly not telling her whole concept, the points she makes (at the end of the article) about college admissions preferences for legacies, athletes, politicians’ kids, and celebrities’ kids are reasonable. Never mind her complaints about the racial percentage biases that result from them. Such preferences are, in themselves, very hard to justify. They mostly seem to be in place to benefit the schools’ endowments, not the talent of their student population. I’d be ecstatic to trade them away in exchange for scrapping the byzantine and unfair biases in admissions currently in vogue. (Except for one nagging concern. Such a trade assumes the other parties are trading in good faith. History makes that a difficult elephant to swallow.)

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