The vast majority of progressives are opposed to discipline in schools and choice in education; upper middle class progressives, interestingly, are usually very good at disciplining their own children, and they DEFINITELY exercise choice in schooling. But something prevents them from thinking through the implications of their own personal behavior and choices. If there was some way to solve this problem it would be great, but they usually won't acknowledge the problem, and if they do, most aren't willing to do anything to solve it.
A lot of them are awful at disciplining their kids!!! Now dear darling, mommy said tables in restaurants aren't for walking on. We walk on the floor. Oh no! Dear darling, we don't throw food at the table. We eat at the table....yakkity yack. When that doesn't work, and bribery fails, they shove them off on someone else and or make excuses.
I've worked in those schools many times and it's not a few bad apples it's half the the class if not 2/3rds who are running around, talking, not doing the assignments. If children want to learn, they will learn even in a bad environment, if they don't they won't.
My town actually does this at the high school level and middle school with something called behavioral SPED. In fact, I was part of first class to be separated. In terms of actual education, the program is a joke. When I went through the program we were given a packet and a textbook, do the packets and then you would be given a test. Fail the test? Try again tomorrow. You could have left the program realistically after one semester but most preferred joking around to even doing the basic work, I know I sure did. Nowadays it's all done on computers and now it is much easier to cheat. At the end of the day, there is no respect for education or learning. These kids come from homes where the parents work menial jobs which require no education. These parents most likely don't impress on their children the value of an education nor do they provide intellectually stimulating materials for their kids. They don't read, they aren't watching PBS documentaries, and they are not going to the museum. Ask the kids why they don't take school seriously and they'll tell you they don't care, they see no point in it. They main difference is that as they get older they'll add a woke gloss to it. "I don't care about education and school, but that's because the teachers are all white and they only teach white people stuff."
You do understand that kids have a legal right to attend school, that expulsions can only last a year, and that special ed kids can't really be expelled?
Black education has improved since MLK's time. Even after the pandemic, they are back at 1990s level (not much of a decline) and 1990s are far ahead of what they were in 1970.
It's not a matter of what I believe, but what the law says. Pointing out the law to jackasses doesn't make me part of the problem. Nor does it mean I agree with the legal rights afforded students. It just means that unlike you, I'm not an ignorant jackass mouthing off without any comprehension of what federal rights are guaranteed students.
OOps if this shows up twice, blame my fingernail that's too long and hit some bad key.
I did work in one of those schools. If we'd been able to expel 5 out of 500 kids, who were determined to willfully disrupt the class, (I'm not talking about my kids with various mental problems that I was able to make accommodations for, including letting them pace up and down in the back of the room muttering to themselves) we would have been more effective teaching. I've seen one child take up twenty to forty percent of a teacher's time.
I found parents to be very helpful in low income schools. They want their kids to do well. I liked working there because they appreciated my efforts.
If the pandemic proved anything, it's that schools *were* teaching kids, and when you took that away they did badly. Poor white kids outperform rich black kids going to very nice schools with lots of non-chaos.
School administrators don't take action because they will get sued. And yes I think low income mostly black schools are chaotic in a way that disrupts learning. But don't pretend that any fix will improve outcomes much. Charters skim the very top kids off of these systems and get very little improvement, if any.
but Obama is not an ADOS. Extending AA to the children of Nigerian scholars defeated its purpose. The goal was never to craft a ruling class with different skin tones, but to take a foot off the necks of ADOS and try to boost them upward from the bottom rung they were trapped on.
Obama or Kamala or the children of West Indian aristocrats do not deserve any kind of AA (not that I have any animus toward them), but the program was specifically meant to help ADOS, and once it was changed and expanded it lost its central purpose and eventually lost its support.
Why do we fixate on representation on screen? Does the ancestry of an actor of the latest blockbuster have any material consequences for anybody? No. But millions of people still care about it anyway, because for them it is important to have people in power who look like them. I don't see that changing, ever. And as the elite looks less and less like the overall population, I predict increasing instability. I guess that's more "fair", but is it desirable?
I noticed the other day that one of the workers in my building- a young (probably mid 20s), Black male was reading an Agatha Christie book on his break. I was a little surprised, so we chatted and he mentioned that another resident had given it to him and he really liked it and was looking forward to reading more of her work. I understand that representation is important, but so is this- one of the true joys of fiction is to be taken to a different world- to imagine being someone totally different. It was a small thing but I was really happy to see it.
Ten years ago I wouldn't have thought anything special about that. Just like I wouldn't have thought anything special about me reading Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda, or Sun Tzu. Nowadays, even though I constantly remind myself that things like that shouldn't be extraordinary in the least, modern conditioning has me noticing it all the time.
And it's quite sad. We all share a basic common humanity on every level that matters, and I refuse to wear race-colored glasses just because someone somewhere claims I can't truly empathize unless I do. It's nonsense.
That's what I think is missing in the representation discussion. It's not "does this check off all the boxes" 90s kid-show style, but "does this expose you to people who act, think and feel differently, in a place with different mores." Which is what most token rep misses.
I would say that representation is, if anything, a little underrated in certain socialist circles (at least the ones that I have seen).
It's not a coincidence that Tim Scott was leading the charge among the GOP for police reform. He had personally lived as a black man and been profiled for his race, despite being a conservative Republican firmly in the capitalist class. Representation is not exclusively an aesthetic preference--it has material consequences!
Cause we spend so much time on our screens. No one cares how many black accountants there are; they're invisible. But everyone can see how many black Oscar nominees there are.
I don't normally watch videos, but that was well worth it. Thank you.
I'm more cynical than you are. Our "chattering class" as you eloquently call them fixate on symbols because actual substantive change requires sacrifice. You put the loss of the child tax credit down to Joe Manchin, but he wasn't alone. If you look at everything else that made it into that bill, there was plenty that Democrats and Biden *could have* traded out to keep the child tax credit. But they didn't. Why? Because the child tax credit was not that important to any of them. The lower classes (of all ethnicities/races) are simply not that important to them.
The larger problem is that the child tax credit, while helping black families, helps *all* lower class families and it's really hard to run an id-pol campaign on things that help everybody, particularly if the one id-pol divide you really don't want people to notice is class.
"The larger problem is that the child tax credit, while helping black families, helps *all* lower class families and it's really hard to run an id-pol campaign on things that help everybody, particularly if the one id-pol divide you really don't want people to notice is class."
Nailed it. "Divide and conquer" only works if you divide. Otherwise, it's "unite and make concessions".
>If you look at everything else that made it into that bill, there was plenty that Democrats and Biden *could have* traded out to keep the child tax credit.
Is that conjecture or did GOP congressional reps actually say this?
Why would the GOP reps say anything? This was during a Democrat Congress with both the House and the Senate in Democrat hands. It was all Democrats all the time.
Oh sorry I thought you mean there were GOP reps willing to cross over for that (e.g. Romney). But anyway the question is about the relevant votes for the child allowance--who were they and what did they want to remove/change about the bill in exchange for their vote? I would be thrilled to see that made permanent so it would be great to know who would be a reliable vote for it.
I think we're after two separate thing here. If I'm remembering correctly, Manchin said he would only support a bill that spent so much, whatever was in it. Extending the Child Tax Credit would have cost X (I don't know the exact number). The other Democrats and Biden, if they had valued the child tax credit, could have taken out something else worth roughly X and then put the child tax credit in its place, as we do with all budgets. You have the money to go on vacation or replace the roof on your house, but not both, so you prioritize. If they had prioritized the child tax credit, it would have made it into the bill. I am not a fan of Manchin, but for anyone, including Freddie DeBoer, to lay the rollback of the child tax credit at his feet is disingenuous. It would have been in there if Democrats as a whole had prioritized it because they had control of the House, the Senate (narrowly), and the White House.
As for who can reliably vote for it on its own? That's a good question.
Elite colleges aren't frivolous country clubs (yet), so it makes sense why racial groups would want some of their own in these power-conferring institutions, even if the graduating classes are tiny.
But given that elite colleges have a marked tendency to admit wealthy non-ADOS black students to make up their black student population, how allied should poor American-born black people feel with them? Because a lot of social justice concepts get warped into becoming little more than intra-elite score-settling rivalries. So the understandable desire to redress past wrongs to black families whose not-too-distant ancestors were slaves gets turned into favouring rich African students because the the other rich African students at Princeton want more black friends, and this is sold as directly benefitting some working-class black family in Missouri. Meanwhile, the rich African Ivy Leaguers secretly (or not so secretly) disdain working-class black Americans as backwards, uncouth, and in desperate need of new leadership.
Interesting, and probablyin some ways preferable to prior iteration. How would thst work, if a person couldn't prove their ancestry, if their ancestry were mixed, etc.?
So, for instance, if I am 1/32 black, with ancestors that were enslaved before 1865, do I get the same treatment as someone whose entire family tree were former slaves and descendants of former slaves?
You'd get people who identify as African American to get ahead. People lie when there is an incentive to do so.
Then there's all of the mixed race people. Should we do a genetic test and make the awards on the basis of African DNA? Should rich people with African heritage be included?
The people I want to give opportunities to are those mired in poverty. I don't care what their DNA is all about. You've got multi-generational rednecks, who need help too.
What if you're descended from slaves, but also from slave owners?
Makes a lot more sense for schools to give preference to people who overcome hardship which is what I think the CA schools have been doing. I read they had 5% AA and that's pretty close to the 6% of population in the state. They were close on Hispanics as well.
It's a bit prejudicial to assume that all AAs are in need of preference.
Agreement from me. When you consider that much of the angst is about elite colleges, its amazing that the subject is generating so much time and space. For people like me who are unconnected to the elite world, and am old enough to remember blatant prejudice, I used to see Affirmative Action as a stand in for fighting discrimination. The more I'm reading about the subject, the more it seems like a battle cry amongst the elite.
Interestingly, when Californians were asked about Affirmative Action most blacks and hispanics didn't care that much about it. Housing cost is the number one issue. No surprise there. The higher education system in CA is very good. They have some elite institutions, but also a very good strong community and state college system. It's about half the cost of Oregon, which for all the progressive talk, doesn't support education. Our local public school only goes four days a week.
If you knew anything about the achievement gap, you'd know that not only most AAs but most Hispanics need preference. Colleges could do nothing but accept kids with SAT scores of 1100+ and that would include
388490 whites
124582 Asians
34280 blacks
95157 Hispanics
ACT doesn't do percentiles by race, but if you figure approximately the same percentiles, it'd be:
520,900 whites (some of these are duplicates)
48,337 Asians (most of these are duplicates)
37,780 blacks
56, 270 Hispanics
For the elite colleges, assume a 1400/33%ile, and there's maybe 4K blacks and Hispanics total.
There are about 1.7 million kids leaving high school to go to in college each year. I've just listed approximately 1.3 million. If you just dropped the minimum to SAT/ACT of 1000, you'd blast through that number and *still* not be anywhere near the total number of black and Hispanic freshmen in college.
So yes, you should absolutely assume that the overwhelming majority of blacks and Hispanics need preferences--or more accurately, an appallingly low standard that is obviously not college ready--in order to get in.
American Descendent of Slavery- someone who can trace their ancestry to an enslaved person in America, as opposed to a recent African or Caribbean immigrant whose family had never been subjected to slavery in America.
This is such a great point and I'm still trying to figure out how and when what was meant as a specific program of remediation and redress for ADOS got hijacked into a massive racial-classification system.
Why do people like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris get AA? (And i'm not trying to pick on them, they're just the most famous examples at hand).
Once we replaced ADOS with either people with a similar skin tone or with people who could present a superficially similar narrative to theirs, the social and moral purpose of AA was lost and it was only a matter of time before it became an antisocial racket.
I agree that affirmative acton at elite and competitive colleges is a small piece of the puzzle. That said, why dispense with something good, because it doesn't solve the whole problem? I don't think it distracts the people who are working to help right the wrongs of the past.
I have three specific points to make.
1) As you said, we don't know how many of the beneficiaries of elite collegiate affirmative action are wealthy people of color and how many come from impoverished households, i.e., "true" beneficiaries." I say enough of the latter category to make it worthwhile.
2) Admission to the elite and competitive schools can bring tremendous social capital to those who enter with none. Having acquired that social capital, they can be role models and mentors for others. So a "true" affirmative action beneficiary can have ripple effects across their lifetime. That means that a Harvard or Penn degree is far more valuable than a degree from a non-competitive school for purposes of social equity.
3) Finally, there's a place in this discussion about elite private schools, all of whom have active scholarship and affirmative active action programs. Check out Prep for Prep below as an example of a terrific not for profit that targets "true" affirmative action. I was Chair of the Riverdale Country School for six years and I can attest from the inside that admission was a game changer in the lives of many students of color who needed full scholarships.
Dispense with it because it is indeed such a small piece of the puzzle, and yet has a massively outsized influence both among the elite progressive thinkers, *and more importantly*, among non-progressives. It is a huge symbol of injustice to many who might otherwise be persuaded to help. Like it or not, meritocratic thinking is extremely common in the US (and not just on the right!). By centering this issue, you hurt your cause with a large portion of the population in exchange for very little benefit.
Even if that were not the case, it seems obvious that the benefit derived is worth far less than the political capital it costs to gain. Opportunity cost of the political capital is large.
Impossible to quantify the cost of"political capital" or the long run benefit. So it comes down to judgment. And my judgment is in favor, because I can see the benefits, but I can't see the political capital loss.
And who is centering this issue? Not me.
Fighting poverty systematically is obviously way more important.
There's been two statewide ballot measures, (in CA and WA), dealing with AA in the last few years. Somebody's willing to expend political capital and lots of real money advancing the issue.
1) Loss of trust. Actually, at this point, that's probably a small loss. The right already has no trust for the progressives, and the moderate left doesn't have much trust left either.
2) If you want to reinstate affirmative action, there will be a large cost to doing so, given that it would require either packing the courts or a constitutional amendment.
So let me attempt to answer your question with socialist common sense: because being fixed on racial and identity politics is the only way that the economically privileged (whatever race or gender) can legitimate their claims to be concerned about social justice, when in fact, while they insist upon the importance (certainly to be granted) of their own concerns, they ignore, suppress or discount the realities of class politics, because not doing so threatens their class interests. And that’s also why political forces threatened by the rejuvenation of working class politics always strive to take these issues to the bank.
YES. Modern (neo) liberals will wear every color of the rainbow, promote every artisanal gender expression, and "intersectionality" their way into taking action (or at least being being Very Concerned) about every Oppressed Group out there. Bring up class, though? Crickets.
It should also be noted that non-competitive colleges employ excellent professors in the general subjects. Fact is, it is very difficult for a Ph.D. graduate in history, English, political science, etc, from even a top grad school to get a job at any university. Most are happy to work anywhere. And anywhere is where they land (if they land in academia at all), and those "non-competitive" students are the beneficiaries. As Flannery O'Connor said, anyone can get a first-rate education at a third-rate college.
This is a good point but I feel like there’s two separate discussions that shouldn’t be lumped together under discussion.
1) Have a just economic and educational strategy that lifts people up to moderate affluence. This is plainly the bigger issue and should be a higher priority and more central to the discussion.
2) Have a representative elite where who gets to be something like a law clerk for a Supreme Court justice, who gets the opportunity to build connections in vc world at Stanford etc. and this is important on its own terms. I feel like this part of elite schools should be more or less done on an explicitly Kendiist framework of exactly proportional representation even if that were achieved by an explicit carve out for a small number of schools.
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything sinister about the assymetry though. There’s a really interesting part about focusing on 2 because it’s dramatic and zero sum whereas 1 is the kind of boring tax and transfer policies that just aren’t very interesting to read. Oh Democrats want more spending and Republicans want less just isn’t great at getting attention.
Just not sure about the factual claims made here. My sense is that there are a bunch of black students, including descendants of slaves, who go to places like NC State but would have to go to community college or for-profit places without affirmative action.
I'm sorry but it just is not credible to suggest that any student, of any race, has a choice between "kind of competitive four-year school and community college." Again, the vast majority of four-year colleges accept the large majority of students who apply. Community colleges by definition do not have admissions standards.
Isn't the affirmative action boost thought to be equivalent to like 300 SAT points at most places? That's a really big swing, it seems like it could easily have that effect.
That's not what I'm disputing. Your explicit claim is that Black students face the choice of "one of the top 40 most selective state schools out of 1700 nationwide or else community college." I'm saying that's an absurd false choice; that's simply not the reality out there.
NC State has a 50% acceptance rate and 25/75 SAT range of 1270/1440. It's probably reasonable to assume that in the absence of affirmative action, an NC State black admit might otherwise attend, say, East Carolina State.
15% of the kids admitted and submitted scores to NC State have 23 ACT, and they are almost certainly black or Hispanic. 20% of the kids who submit scores to East Carolina State have scores below 1000, ditto. 90% and 80% of the admitted freshman class had scores over 1000, most of whom are white and Asian. In the absence of affirmative action, it's likely that both colleges could fill their entire freshmen class with kids getting over 1100 and blacks and Hispanics would be going several more steps down the ladder--in colleges that were mostly black and Hispanic.
Colleges would have long ago set some sort of SAT minimum except they can't, because all the blacks and Hispanics with scores above 1100 (or the equivalent ACT) are picked up by the top 50 schools. This means that the bulk of blacks and Hispanics at schools below that tier are getting 1050 or lower--much lower.
So if the rest of the colleges weren't allowed to use race to admit kids, then they would be forced to take all the whites and Hispanics with scores from 1100-1400, which is half of all tested whites (probably more on the ACT) and 70% of all Asians (less on the ACT) and no blacks or Hispanics at all would get into college.
That's why they are going to grades, so they can pretend that theses kids are being accepted on equal level. And the move to grades is ENTIRELY about affirmative action, ,as a strategy to allow different treatment by race.
So it's just not true that affirmative action doesn't impact all colleges, nor is it true that in a purely competitive situation using actual demonstrated ability would leave the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics out of colleges until the colleges had run out of 1100 scorers.
The whole setup is a lie. The whole setup that pretends that kids with 800 SAT scores are capable of what we would consider college level work is invented because of affirmative action.
Totally agree. This practice has just continued because of inertia. It sort of worked -- for the edication establishment, anyway. The SC has forced us to analyze and talk about it, like you are here. For my money, I would direct my attention to K-12 to make sure all kids are prepared for college, work, citizenship, and a rich community life.
Totally agree. This practice has just continued because of inertia. It sort of worked -- for the education establishment, anyway. The SC has forced us to analyze and talk about it, like you are here. For my money, I would direct my attention to K-12 to make sure all kids are prepared for college, work, citizenship, and a rich community life.
The vast majority of progressives are opposed to discipline in schools and choice in education; upper middle class progressives, interestingly, are usually very good at disciplining their own children, and they DEFINITELY exercise choice in schooling. But something prevents them from thinking through the implications of their own personal behavior and choices. If there was some way to solve this problem it would be great, but they usually won't acknowledge the problem, and if they do, most aren't willing to do anything to solve it.
A lot of them are awful at disciplining their kids!!! Now dear darling, mommy said tables in restaurants aren't for walking on. We walk on the floor. Oh no! Dear darling, we don't throw food at the table. We eat at the table....yakkity yack. When that doesn't work, and bribery fails, they shove them off on someone else and or make excuses.
I've worked in those schools many times and it's not a few bad apples it's half the the class if not 2/3rds who are running around, talking, not doing the assignments. If children want to learn, they will learn even in a bad environment, if they don't they won't.
My town actually does this at the high school level and middle school with something called behavioral SPED. In fact, I was part of first class to be separated. In terms of actual education, the program is a joke. When I went through the program we were given a packet and a textbook, do the packets and then you would be given a test. Fail the test? Try again tomorrow. You could have left the program realistically after one semester but most preferred joking around to even doing the basic work, I know I sure did. Nowadays it's all done on computers and now it is much easier to cheat. At the end of the day, there is no respect for education or learning. These kids come from homes where the parents work menial jobs which require no education. These parents most likely don't impress on their children the value of an education nor do they provide intellectually stimulating materials for their kids. They don't read, they aren't watching PBS documentaries, and they are not going to the museum. Ask the kids why they don't take school seriously and they'll tell you they don't care, they see no point in it. They main difference is that as they get older they'll add a woke gloss to it. "I don't care about education and school, but that's because the teachers are all white and they only teach white people stuff."
You do understand that kids have a legal right to attend school, that expulsions can only last a year, and that special ed kids can't really be expelled?
Black education has improved since MLK's time. Even after the pandemic, they are back at 1990s level (not much of a decline) and 1990s are far ahead of what they were in 1970.
It's not a matter of what I believe, but what the law says. Pointing out the law to jackasses doesn't make me part of the problem. Nor does it mean I agree with the legal rights afforded students. It just means that unlike you, I'm not an ignorant jackass mouthing off without any comprehension of what federal rights are guaranteed students.
OOps if this shows up twice, blame my fingernail that's too long and hit some bad key.
I did work in one of those schools. If we'd been able to expel 5 out of 500 kids, who were determined to willfully disrupt the class, (I'm not talking about my kids with various mental problems that I was able to make accommodations for, including letting them pace up and down in the back of the room muttering to themselves) we would have been more effective teaching. I've seen one child take up twenty to forty percent of a teacher's time.
I found parents to be very helpful in low income schools. They want their kids to do well. I liked working there because they appreciated my efforts.
If the pandemic proved anything, it's that schools *were* teaching kids, and when you took that away they did badly. Poor white kids outperform rich black kids going to very nice schools with lots of non-chaos.
School administrators don't take action because they will get sued. And yes I think low income mostly black schools are chaotic in a way that disrupts learning. But don't pretend that any fix will improve outcomes much. Charters skim the very top kids off of these systems and get very little improvement, if any.
but Obama is not an ADOS. Extending AA to the children of Nigerian scholars defeated its purpose. The goal was never to craft a ruling class with different skin tones, but to take a foot off the necks of ADOS and try to boost them upward from the bottom rung they were trapped on.
Obama or Kamala or the children of West Indian aristocrats do not deserve any kind of AA (not that I have any animus toward them), but the program was specifically meant to help ADOS, and once it was changed and expanded it lost its central purpose and eventually lost its support.
Why do we fixate on representation on screen? Does the ancestry of an actor of the latest blockbuster have any material consequences for anybody? No. But millions of people still care about it anyway, because for them it is important to have people in power who look like them. I don't see that changing, ever. And as the elite looks less and less like the overall population, I predict increasing instability. I guess that's more "fair", but is it desirable?
I noticed the other day that one of the workers in my building- a young (probably mid 20s), Black male was reading an Agatha Christie book on his break. I was a little surprised, so we chatted and he mentioned that another resident had given it to him and he really liked it and was looking forward to reading more of her work. I understand that representation is important, but so is this- one of the true joys of fiction is to be taken to a different world- to imagine being someone totally different. It was a small thing but I was really happy to see it.
I agree, and then some.
Ten years ago I wouldn't have thought anything special about that. Just like I wouldn't have thought anything special about me reading Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda, or Sun Tzu. Nowadays, even though I constantly remind myself that things like that shouldn't be extraordinary in the least, modern conditioning has me noticing it all the time.
And it's quite sad. We all share a basic common humanity on every level that matters, and I refuse to wear race-colored glasses just because someone somewhere claims I can't truly empathize unless I do. It's nonsense.
That's what I think is missing in the representation discussion. It's not "does this check off all the boxes" 90s kid-show style, but "does this expose you to people who act, think and feel differently, in a place with different mores." Which is what most token rep misses.
Do people really care about that? Or is that what the people at the top assume people really care about?
I would say that representation is, if anything, a little underrated in certain socialist circles (at least the ones that I have seen).
It's not a coincidence that Tim Scott was leading the charge among the GOP for police reform. He had personally lived as a black man and been profiled for his race, despite being a conservative Republican firmly in the capitalist class. Representation is not exclusively an aesthetic preference--it has material consequences!
Cause we spend so much time on our screens. No one cares how many black accountants there are; they're invisible. But everyone can see how many black Oscar nominees there are.
I don't normally watch videos, but that was well worth it. Thank you.
I'm more cynical than you are. Our "chattering class" as you eloquently call them fixate on symbols because actual substantive change requires sacrifice. You put the loss of the child tax credit down to Joe Manchin, but he wasn't alone. If you look at everything else that made it into that bill, there was plenty that Democrats and Biden *could have* traded out to keep the child tax credit. But they didn't. Why? Because the child tax credit was not that important to any of them. The lower classes (of all ethnicities/races) are simply not that important to them.
The larger problem is that the child tax credit, while helping black families, helps *all* lower class families and it's really hard to run an id-pol campaign on things that help everybody, particularly if the one id-pol divide you really don't want people to notice is class.
"The larger problem is that the child tax credit, while helping black families, helps *all* lower class families and it's really hard to run an id-pol campaign on things that help everybody, particularly if the one id-pol divide you really don't want people to notice is class."
Nailed it. "Divide and conquer" only works if you divide. Otherwise, it's "unite and make concessions".
>If you look at everything else that made it into that bill, there was plenty that Democrats and Biden *could have* traded out to keep the child tax credit.
Is that conjecture or did GOP congressional reps actually say this?
Why would the GOP reps say anything? This was during a Democrat Congress with both the House and the Senate in Democrat hands. It was all Democrats all the time.
Oh sorry I thought you mean there were GOP reps willing to cross over for that (e.g. Romney). But anyway the question is about the relevant votes for the child allowance--who were they and what did they want to remove/change about the bill in exchange for their vote? I would be thrilled to see that made permanent so it would be great to know who would be a reliable vote for it.
I think we're after two separate thing here. If I'm remembering correctly, Manchin said he would only support a bill that spent so much, whatever was in it. Extending the Child Tax Credit would have cost X (I don't know the exact number). The other Democrats and Biden, if they had valued the child tax credit, could have taken out something else worth roughly X and then put the child tax credit in its place, as we do with all budgets. You have the money to go on vacation or replace the roof on your house, but not both, so you prioritize. If they had prioritized the child tax credit, it would have made it into the bill. I am not a fan of Manchin, but for anyone, including Freddie DeBoer, to lay the rollback of the child tax credit at his feet is disingenuous. It would have been in there if Democrats as a whole had prioritized it because they had control of the House, the Senate (narrowly), and the White House.
As for who can reliably vote for it on its own? That's a good question.
Elite colleges aren't frivolous country clubs (yet), so it makes sense why racial groups would want some of their own in these power-conferring institutions, even if the graduating classes are tiny.
But given that elite colleges have a marked tendency to admit wealthy non-ADOS black students to make up their black student population, how allied should poor American-born black people feel with them? Because a lot of social justice concepts get warped into becoming little more than intra-elite score-settling rivalries. So the understandable desire to redress past wrongs to black families whose not-too-distant ancestors were slaves gets turned into favouring rich African students because the the other rich African students at Princeton want more black friends, and this is sold as directly benefitting some working-class black family in Missouri. Meanwhile, the rich African Ivy Leaguers secretly (or not so secretly) disdain working-class black Americans as backwards, uncouth, and in desperate need of new leadership.
What does ADOS mean?..never mind. Figured it ouy.
Interesting, and probablyin some ways preferable to prior iteration. How would thst work, if a person couldn't prove their ancestry, if their ancestry were mixed, etc.?
So, for instance, if I am 1/32 black, with ancestors that were enslaved before 1865, do I get the same treatment as someone whose entire family tree were former slaves and descendants of former slaves?
Not trying to be a jerk, here.
You'd get people who identify as African American to get ahead. People lie when there is an incentive to do so.
Then there's all of the mixed race people. Should we do a genetic test and make the awards on the basis of African DNA? Should rich people with African heritage be included?
The people I want to give opportunities to are those mired in poverty. I don't care what their DNA is all about. You've got multi-generational rednecks, who need help too.
What if you're descended from slaves, but also from slave owners?
Makes a lot more sense for schools to give preference to people who overcome hardship which is what I think the CA schools have been doing. I read they had 5% AA and that's pretty close to the 6% of population in the state. They were close on Hispanics as well.
It's a bit prejudicial to assume that all AAs are in need of preference.
Agreement from me. When you consider that much of the angst is about elite colleges, its amazing that the subject is generating so much time and space. For people like me who are unconnected to the elite world, and am old enough to remember blatant prejudice, I used to see Affirmative Action as a stand in for fighting discrimination. The more I'm reading about the subject, the more it seems like a battle cry amongst the elite.
Interestingly, when Californians were asked about Affirmative Action most blacks and hispanics didn't care that much about it. Housing cost is the number one issue. No surprise there. The higher education system in CA is very good. They have some elite institutions, but also a very good strong community and state college system. It's about half the cost of Oregon, which for all the progressive talk, doesn't support education. Our local public school only goes four days a week.
If you knew anything about the achievement gap, you'd know that not only most AAs but most Hispanics need preference. Colleges could do nothing but accept kids with SAT scores of 1100+ and that would include
388490 whites
124582 Asians
34280 blacks
95157 Hispanics
ACT doesn't do percentiles by race, but if you figure approximately the same percentiles, it'd be:
520,900 whites (some of these are duplicates)
48,337 Asians (most of these are duplicates)
37,780 blacks
56, 270 Hispanics
For the elite colleges, assume a 1400/33%ile, and there's maybe 4K blacks and Hispanics total.
There are about 1.7 million kids leaving high school to go to in college each year. I've just listed approximately 1.3 million. If you just dropped the minimum to SAT/ACT of 1000, you'd blast through that number and *still* not be anywhere near the total number of black and Hispanic freshmen in college.
So yes, you should absolutely assume that the overwhelming majority of blacks and Hispanics need preferences--or more accurately, an appallingly low standard that is obviously not college ready--in order to get in.
American Descendent of Slavery- someone who can trace their ancestry to an enslaved person in America, as opposed to a recent African or Caribbean immigrant whose family had never been subjected to slavery in America.
This is such a great point and I'm still trying to figure out how and when what was meant as a specific program of remediation and redress for ADOS got hijacked into a massive racial-classification system.
Why do people like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris get AA? (And i'm not trying to pick on them, they're just the most famous examples at hand).
Once we replaced ADOS with either people with a similar skin tone or with people who could present a superficially similar narrative to theirs, the social and moral purpose of AA was lost and it was only a matter of time before it became an antisocial racket.
I agree that affirmative acton at elite and competitive colleges is a small piece of the puzzle. That said, why dispense with something good, because it doesn't solve the whole problem? I don't think it distracts the people who are working to help right the wrongs of the past.
I have three specific points to make.
1) As you said, we don't know how many of the beneficiaries of elite collegiate affirmative action are wealthy people of color and how many come from impoverished households, i.e., "true" beneficiaries." I say enough of the latter category to make it worthwhile.
2) Admission to the elite and competitive schools can bring tremendous social capital to those who enter with none. Having acquired that social capital, they can be role models and mentors for others. So a "true" affirmative action beneficiary can have ripple effects across their lifetime. That means that a Harvard or Penn degree is far more valuable than a degree from a non-competitive school for purposes of social equity.
3) Finally, there's a place in this discussion about elite private schools, all of whom have active scholarship and affirmative active action programs. Check out Prep for Prep below as an example of a terrific not for profit that targets "true" affirmative action. I was Chair of the Riverdale Country School for six years and I can attest from the inside that admission was a game changer in the lives of many students of color who needed full scholarships.
https://www.prepforprep.org/about/about-prep
Dispense with it because it is indeed such a small piece of the puzzle, and yet has a massively outsized influence both among the elite progressive thinkers, *and more importantly*, among non-progressives. It is a huge symbol of injustice to many who might otherwise be persuaded to help. Like it or not, meritocratic thinking is extremely common in the US (and not just on the right!). By centering this issue, you hurt your cause with a large portion of the population in exchange for very little benefit.
Even if that were not the case, it seems obvious that the benefit derived is worth far less than the political capital it costs to gain. Opportunity cost of the political capital is large.
Impossible to quantify the cost of"political capital" or the long run benefit. So it comes down to judgment. And my judgment is in favor, because I can see the benefits, but I can't see the political capital loss.
And who is centering this issue? Not me.
Fighting poverty systematically is obviously way more important.
There's been two statewide ballot measures, (in CA and WA), dealing with AA in the last few years. Somebody's willing to expend political capital and lots of real money advancing the issue.
The political capital loss is twofold:
1) Loss of trust. Actually, at this point, that's probably a small loss. The right already has no trust for the progressives, and the moderate left doesn't have much trust left either.
2) If you want to reinstate affirmative action, there will be a large cost to doing so, given that it would require either packing the courts or a constitutional amendment.
As others have pointed out the value in AA lies in its divisiveness.
Thanks, Freddie. By the way, this is an argument that’s been being made by Black socialists not only recently, but for a long time.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/history-affirmative-action-exposes-its-reactionary-weaknesses
So let me attempt to answer your question with socialist common sense: because being fixed on racial and identity politics is the only way that the economically privileged (whatever race or gender) can legitimate their claims to be concerned about social justice, when in fact, while they insist upon the importance (certainly to be granted) of their own concerns, they ignore, suppress or discount the realities of class politics, because not doing so threatens their class interests. And that’s also why political forces threatened by the rejuvenation of working class politics always strive to take these issues to the bank.
YES. Modern (neo) liberals will wear every color of the rainbow, promote every artisanal gender expression, and "intersectionality" their way into taking action (or at least being being Very Concerned) about every Oppressed Group out there. Bring up class, though? Crickets.
It should also be noted that non-competitive colleges employ excellent professors in the general subjects. Fact is, it is very difficult for a Ph.D. graduate in history, English, political science, etc, from even a top grad school to get a job at any university. Most are happy to work anywhere. And anywhere is where they land (if they land in academia at all), and those "non-competitive" students are the beneficiaries. As Flannery O'Connor said, anyone can get a first-rate education at a third-rate college.
"As Flannery O'Connor said, anyone can get a first-rate education at a third-rate college."
Did not Frank Zappa teach the masses thusly? "Go to college if you want to get laid.
Go to the library if you want to get an education."
Education isn't the point, it's getting a piece of paper that lets you into the club.
No lie, and I have more and better paper than most cats
Damn! I got those two mixed up!
This is a good point but I feel like there’s two separate discussions that shouldn’t be lumped together under discussion.
1) Have a just economic and educational strategy that lifts people up to moderate affluence. This is plainly the bigger issue and should be a higher priority and more central to the discussion.
2) Have a representative elite where who gets to be something like a law clerk for a Supreme Court justice, who gets the opportunity to build connections in vc world at Stanford etc. and this is important on its own terms. I feel like this part of elite schools should be more or less done on an explicitly Kendiist framework of exactly proportional representation even if that were achieved by an explicit carve out for a small number of schools.
I don’t necessarily think there’s anything sinister about the assymetry though. There’s a really interesting part about focusing on 2 because it’s dramatic and zero sum whereas 1 is the kind of boring tax and transfer policies that just aren’t very interesting to read. Oh Democrats want more spending and Republicans want less just isn’t great at getting attention.
Just not sure about the factual claims made here. My sense is that there are a bunch of black students, including descendants of slaves, who go to places like NC State but would have to go to community college or for-profit places without affirmative action.
I'm sorry but it just is not credible to suggest that any student, of any race, has a choice between "kind of competitive four-year school and community college." Again, the vast majority of four-year colleges accept the large majority of students who apply. Community colleges by definition do not have admissions standards.
Isn't the affirmative action boost thought to be equivalent to like 300 SAT points at most places? That's a really big swing, it seems like it could easily have that effect.
That's not what I'm disputing. Your explicit claim is that Black students face the choice of "one of the top 40 most selective state schools out of 1700 nationwide or else community college." I'm saying that's an absurd false choice; that's simply not the reality out there.
NC State has a 50% acceptance rate and 25/75 SAT range of 1270/1440. It's probably reasonable to assume that in the absence of affirmative action, an NC State black admit might otherwise attend, say, East Carolina State.
15% of the kids admitted and submitted scores to NC State have 23 ACT, and they are almost certainly black or Hispanic. 20% of the kids who submit scores to East Carolina State have scores below 1000, ditto. 90% and 80% of the admitted freshman class had scores over 1000, most of whom are white and Asian. In the absence of affirmative action, it's likely that both colleges could fill their entire freshmen class with kids getting over 1100 and blacks and Hispanics would be going several more steps down the ladder--in colleges that were mostly black and Hispanic.
ER, your comments consistently intrigue me, so I subscribed to your Substack.
Can you clarify what you mean in the first sentence?
Yeah fair enough, probably the wrong example.
It is totally credible if you assume that there is a baseline ability level you need for college and barely 20% of blacks and maybe 25% of Hispanics meet that baseline ability (of, say, 1100 SAT scores) https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf
Colleges would have long ago set some sort of SAT minimum except they can't, because all the blacks and Hispanics with scores above 1100 (or the equivalent ACT) are picked up by the top 50 schools. This means that the bulk of blacks and Hispanics at schools below that tier are getting 1050 or lower--much lower.
So if the rest of the colleges weren't allowed to use race to admit kids, then they would be forced to take all the whites and Hispanics with scores from 1100-1400, which is half of all tested whites (probably more on the ACT) and 70% of all Asians (less on the ACT) and no blacks or Hispanics at all would get into college.
That's why they are going to grades, so they can pretend that theses kids are being accepted on equal level. And the move to grades is ENTIRELY about affirmative action, ,as a strategy to allow different treatment by race.
So it's just not true that affirmative action doesn't impact all colleges, nor is it true that in a purely competitive situation using actual demonstrated ability would leave the vast majority of blacks and Hispanics out of colleges until the colleges had run out of 1100 scorers.
The whole setup is a lie. The whole setup that pretends that kids with 800 SAT scores are capable of what we would consider college level work is invented because of affirmative action.
The real problem with Affirmative Action at elite colleges, but everywhere else, especially business and government.
Totally agree. This practice has just continued because of inertia. It sort of worked -- for the edication establishment, anyway. The SC has forced us to analyze and talk about it, like you are here. For my money, I would direct my attention to K-12 to make sure all kids are prepared for college, work, citizenship, and a rich community life.
Totally agree. This practice has just continued because of inertia. It sort of worked -- for the education establishment, anyway. The SC has forced us to analyze and talk about it, like you are here. For my money, I would direct my attention to K-12 to make sure all kids are prepared for college, work, citizenship, and a rich community life.
But you see, having people of color(ed) in prominent positions will empower those who aren't. It trickles down...somehow.
Oh wow, your new home! I like that you have so much more space......all your books. Congratulations.
For what it's worth I really enjoy the audio. Obviously love the writing but your audio delivery is very good and is a nice way to mix things up.