alt Hacker NewsThere were things like redlining, where blacks could only buy housing in certain areas. Those areas also tended to have worse schools, so the next generation of blacks was less well educated than whites of equivalent intelligence. That led to worse jobs, which led to worse financial outcomes, which led to living in worse parts of town, which led to the next generation having less education...
So, yes, there was pre-existing... "unfairness" may be too strong for some of it; it wasn't all unfairness. Some of it was the effects of past unfairness, even if the (deliberate) unfairness was no longer present. The pendulum was in fact bent, to at least some degree.
But I like the analogy, because you only apply the counterforce until the pendulum is straight. Then you stop. Things were bent enough that affirmative action may in fact have been necessary. But it should not be necessary forever. Even if it was the right thing to do, there comes a time when the right thing to do is to stop.
(Then you get into "is now the right time", and things get a whole lot murkier...)
Replies
Yes! Exactly. Affirmative action should naturally end itself if it works. The goal is to equalize opportunity and stop preferential treatment, not to hang on to preferential treatment.
Well said, it does need to stop eventually. Now might be the right time, even if we’re not all the way there, given all the problems and unintended consequences and all the backlash.
Even if an individual’s condition today reflects historical injustices to groups, that doesn’t justify discriminating between individuals today based on their group. To your redlining example: it’s true a black american who inherits a house may have lower home equity than a white american who inherits a house. But isn’t the white american who didn’t inherit anything worse off than both? You can’t lump white americans together based on a group generalization—that’s the very thing we decided is immoral.
The historical argument also doesn’t survive attempts to generalize its underlying principles to immigrants. Objectively, Black americans are extremely privileged by virtue of being americans. A redlined community in 1950s America was still better than my dad’s village in Bangladesh.
Finally, your argument demolishes how affirmative action is actually practiced. Its biggest beneficiaries are immigrants and their children, in particular hispanics. That produces a very unfair result under your logic, because latin america is solidly middle income, and was even more so in the 20th century. In 1990, Mexico’s GDP per capita was ten times higher than India’s and China’s. Yet colleges and corporations discriminate in favor of “hispanics” descended from Spanish conquistadores, and against “asians” whose parents grew up in third world villages.