America Fell Out of Love with Affirmative Action | Hacker News Reader

America Fell Out of Love with Affirmative Action

thedailybeast.com

6 pointscroes4 comments

When you focus on equity over equality everyone loses. There's a lot more minority groups in this country today. Why do african Americans get special treatment in 2023 over say ukrainians, afghanis or syrians?

There's a lot of poor and uneducated minority groups, but the idea that reverse racism solves anything is just outdated.

I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s racial inequity in the US and we need to work on it. But being punitive is not going to help long run.

I remember a classmate of mine who was ranked maybe 30th in my class and was African American. Both parents were doctors who immigrated to the US from the Caribbean in the 70s, she got a car on her 15th birthday, tutors, and lots of advantages. She was accepted to a great college above 20+ other people. It’s impossible to know the exact reasons why but she said she thought her race helped her and her application coaches had her focus on that in her admission essays.

It’s bad that people were rejected based on their race for hundreds of years and I’m not sure how we fix that. Admitting rich kids based on their race is not nearly as bad as refusing people based on their race, but there has to be a better way.

My minority view is that the post-war Amendments are about slavery not diversity and that the only non-color blind provisions in it relate to remediating the effects of slavery, so it really should only apply to descendants of slaves. This was politically unacceptable for most of the time since the Civil War so the pretext of diversity was created, or it was treated as a commercial issue in the case of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

We got tied into knots trying to find away around it and it just hasn't worked as intended.

>Why do african Americans get special treatment in 2023 over say ukrainians, afghanis or syrians?

There are unique historical factors there in terms of the Constitution which I can elaborate on if anyone cares, but I think the article is right that this is where the public is now. I think people will say "oh what a shame" publicly and then not be bothered in private.

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