Race-Based Rationing Is Real–and Dangerous
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Just as employment discrimination has exceptions (is permitted) in the case of bona fide job requirements (eg. it is permissible to hire an actress to play a historical character with a requirement that the actress be able to visually match the race of the historical individual), so too would we need exceptions for bona fide medical relevance. For instance, it makes no sense to give people-of-color preference in screening for sickle cell anemia, but it does make sense to give preference to people whose ancestors are from a group known to carry the gene.
Maybe in the future my race will ebb and flow with whatever absurd nonsense the “woke elite” is yelling about. Who are you to call me a liar, you bigot.
While race is arbitrary, ethnicity and nationality are not. Bangladeshis have a definable culture and we make efforts to enforce cultural norms within the community. The “self-identification” trend is bizarre in that context as well—you have young south Asians “celebrating their racial identity” by acting indistinguishably from white Americans. Ok kids.
Now you make the same mistake as all those other race baiters by referring to "white Americans" as a group which acts in a specific way. Would that be white Americans from Portland, Oregon, white Americans from Ketchikan, Alaska, white Americans from San Mateo, California or white Americans from the Ozarks?
I'm of Dutch heritage but I live in Sweden. The Netherlands is about 350km north to south, give or take a bit. There is a marked difference in culture between someone from Groningen (the northern-most province) and Limburg (the southern-most), so much so that I (who come from Utrecht, somewhere in the middle) was told in a carnival-parade that "I do not speak to 'Hollanders' (people from anywhere but the southern-most provinces)" by an older woman in Limburg. She was as "white" as I am but she clearly felt we did not have much in common. All that because she heard by my accent that I'm not from Limburg. She would not have said that to an Asian-looking man who spoke Limburgs - and all that within a span of 350 km north to south.
But in the context of this comparison I think the imprecision is forgivable. Different subgroups of white Americans share traits that make them all quite different from Muslims. For example individualism, informality, and absence of hierarchy. My wife is from Oregon and I’m from Bangladesh. We’ve been married 10 years and I only recently got comfortable with calling her parents by their first names. Meanwhile, she still calls my parents “Mr. __ and Mrs. __” because there’s literally no English equivalent to the polite title you’d use in Bangla to address your in laws.
Use a transliterated version of the Bangla term, it's what my children do when they refer to my parents. In Swedish they'd be "farfar" and "farmor" but they call them "opa" and "oma", these being the Swedish and Dutch words for "grandfather" and "grandmother". The Swedish is more precise since it indicates from which side those grandparents come - handy for genealogists since it can be built up ("farmormor's farfarsmor" is "father's mother's mother's father's father's mother").
Anyway, I was going to remark on the the difference between a Bosnian muslim, A Turkish Sufi (who I consider to be a muslim), a Saudi Hanbiliyya, Iranian Shia and Syrian Ahmadiyya (still a muslim) but never mind. We all refer to people in groups when expedient, usually with benign intent.
Race is a flavor of tribe, racism is a flavor of tribalism.
> For whatever reason that word is not fashionable for mainstream media/politics.
“Tribalism” is super fashionable in mainstream (including mainstream media) commentary on society and politics, what are you talking about?
This seems out of whack - shouldn’t a person with multiple co-morbidities get priority for a treatment? Is the gender important here, too?
Obesity, asthma, hypertension is worth 1 pt each. Man have 2 pts, Diabetes 3 pts. "Non-White or Hispanic" gives 7 points.
So a White person with obesity, diabetes, asthma and hypertension will still be denied treatment, when it will be given to a Non-White person of the same gender and age with no comorbidity at all.
There are two entities that can eliminate this ... mainstream media and politicians but neither will because both profit from it.
Based on this sentence alone it might be hard to tell if the policy is inspired by the far-left or the far-right. Is it about excluding white people from treatment, or proclaiming the superiority of the white race? Is the political spectrum actually a circle? Or could this actually be reasonable in a way that I don't see?
I don't think affirmative action is a "far-left" policy in general, but rather a policy that enjoys broad popular support, at least when it comes to things like employment and education rather than immediate lifesaving treatment.
I think most people rather support the idea of a needs based system, not one that requires a color chart to determine who gets what.
Most of beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women.
Seems reliable lol
I prefer to ask people if they support racial discrimination. Very few say yes, outside of progressives of course.
A majority of every minority group opposes expressly considering race in hiring and education. The prevalence of these policies is the result of its popularity among the white social liberals who increasingly run the country’s businesses and institutions.
Those studies claim that 27% and 24% of the surveyed population, respectively, favors affirmative action. I guess that falls short of "broad popular support" as I was saying, but it it's also far from what I think of as "far left", both because if the correlation with leftism were perfect, that's still the top quartile of the population, and because there's more to leftism than affirmative action, so the correlation isn't perfect. Other polls come up with numbers like 62% https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/565628-62-... and 45% (8 years ago) https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/poll_public_support_for_af....
I think a big part of what's going on here is that people don't think deeply so they can be easily influenced by how questions are phrased.
I agree that minority groups aren't the ones promoting affirmative action, but rather US elites, who are overwhelmingly white. I don't think it's a particularly liberal policy, though it's not something liberalism has defined itself by opposition to, and Millian consequentialist liberalism is a common framework for justifying it; but a lot of the constituency for affirmative action is illiberal "progressives".
But one quibble. “Affirmative action,” as used by Kennedy and Nixon, originally meant the government taking “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination in government hiring: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/learn-origins-term-af...; see also https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/execu.... So it wasn’t sufficient not to have officially discriminatory hiring policies, but you had to take affirmative steps to root out discrimination in the hiring process. Even today, affirmative action can refer to measures like broadening the recruiting pipelines. Recruiting at HBCUs might be considered a sort of affirmative action policy.
What the polls consistently show is that minorities support “affirmative action” in the abstract, but don’t support using race as an express consideration with respect to individual decisions. I don’t think its fair to say they’re not “thinking deeply” about the question. I think that instead the questions are referring to somewhat different substantive policies, and you’re seeing the result of people who agree with the general ends of “affirmative action” drawing lines between specific means they support and ones they don’t.
I would say though that prioritising a 20 year old BIPOC person over a 64 year old would be quite a disadvantage to the older person...