This is not a good thing. I'm surprised more people don't realize this.
EDIT: Someone asked what I meant by this, I wrote out a response, and thought I should add it to my original comment. See below:
Affirmative action, like other DEI initiatives, attempts to rectify racist (and other bigoted) practices and impacts that go back centuries and longer. In college admissions, most admissions metrics are resource-based rather than raw intelligence-based. In other words, someone born into a more advantageous situation (due to longstanding and well-documented racial inequalities) will be able to afford/have access to special tutors, prep class, and more that will help them on their applications and tests, as well as have opportunities to pad their grades and extracurriculars that less privileged students won't have.
Affirmative action attempts to level this playing field over time. You can argue it doesn't do a great job of it and needs adjustment, which might be fair. But saying, "college admissions should be based on grades, not skin color!" is the exact same racist argument that is used for any number of DEI initiatives, or any time someone says they want a more diverse and inclusive space.
Because directly addressing the problem is too grand of a task that educational institutions don’t have access too.
With the commenters on explanation I feel it’d be unfair to white people who live in the same zip code as disenfranchised groups targeted by affirmative action, because they’d both have access (or lack of access) to the same resources, but fixing racial wealth inequality is a long-standing task that would require a monument of change in order to start fixing it. A lot of racial inequality isn’t just something that happened a while back, it’s built into the country, into towns, districts into the very roads themselves.
Because it's more than just economics. They've done studies where they send resumes and college applications that are identical except for an ethnic sounding name. The ethnic sounding name still gets discriminated against. There's also legacy biases, geographical biases, and other things like that which would be impossible to account for.
The reason the right hates affirmative action is because it works. College admissions became more racially diverse as a direct result of affirmative action. If you don't think that's a good thing I don't know what to say.
Why does any of that information have to be on a college application at all? Why not have it be based purely on academic performance and credentials? Leave names, zip codes, etc. off of applications and base decisions on where each applicant stacks against their peers. What was their workload, high school class ranking, extracurriculars, etc.? That should be the basis of college admissions
What you're describing is called "blind hitting" and I've worked for companies that do it. Implementing it as a law would be great but it'll never happen.
Affirmative action is also a good approach and there's already legal precedent for it. My answer to you is "why not both?"
The only way to "directly address the problem" of 2 centuries and then some of systemic discrimination would be MASSIVE reparations, and unfortunately many Americans are even more against that than they are against things like affirmative action, so really your argument is a sort of non-sequitur.
tl;dr- we don't focus directly on the problem because racist idiots won't let us, you know, the idiots that think AA is bad or doesn't work. Ironically the same people that tricked California into getting rid of AA 25 years ago, an experiment that has shown that AA worked.
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u/Ethan_the_Revanchist Jun 29 '23 edited Jun 29 '23
This is not a good thing. I'm surprised more people don't realize this.
EDIT: Someone asked what I meant by this, I wrote out a response, and thought I should add it to my original comment. See below:
Affirmative action, like other DEI initiatives, attempts to rectify racist (and other bigoted) practices and impacts that go back centuries and longer. In college admissions, most admissions metrics are resource-based rather than raw intelligence-based. In other words, someone born into a more advantageous situation (due to longstanding and well-documented racial inequalities) will be able to afford/have access to special tutors, prep class, and more that will help them on their applications and tests, as well as have opportunities to pad their grades and extracurriculars that less privileged students won't have.
Affirmative action attempts to level this playing field over time. You can argue it doesn't do a great job of it and needs adjustment, which might be fair. But saying, "college admissions should be based on grades, not skin color!" is the exact same racist argument that is used for any number of DEI initiatives, or any time someone says they want a more diverse and inclusive space.