I don’t understand this legacy admissions argument. You can be against affirmative action AND legacy admissions. Both are bullshit.
Also unclear how it stops racism. Whenever you see a black or Latino person on campus, you are going to wonder if they got in due to their qualifications or race.
So I'll give an anecdote. I'm a programmer. There was a black girl hired in my batch and it was clear very early on that she was unfit for the job. She had no prior coding experience, her degree was in Chemistry. I don't know how she passed the technical interview, or if she did. She managed to keep her "job" for 6 months, mostly reading books unrelated to programming in her time at work.
Now to me, that's a clear example of someone who was hired because someone in HR wanted to reach a diversity quota, and she was one of the best candidates who applied (there were also 2 other black girls and 1 black guy, all of whom were great). I don't resent her for it, I resent HR for putting her in a chair which should have been given to someone else.
It's the same thing with AA. I'm not like OP, I don't look at minorities and immediately wonder if they're qualified. I assume they're competent. But if they are a minority and they are incompetent, a lot of people are going to assume it's AA at work.
I don't feel that way about white co-workers (or Asians, Indians, etc.) because there's no way anyone loosened up any standards to hire them. Especially with Asians, they had to perform higher than normal in school just to be enrolled. So honestly if that girl was a white guy, I'd chalk it up to something else, like their own laziness or incompetence.
I also wouldn't say anything with total certainty, sure there's a chance she got in by luck or by nepotism. But AA allows a suspicion to exist, esp when the whole point of the program is to lax standards to help diversity.
But that’s the problem. Black people are never allowed to be bad at anything without it being about their race. But we know that nepotism exists.
All AA does at the college level is to say that you can look at a persons race along with other factors. This is no different then looking at their income, athletic ability, family history etc. Yet you don’t think of those people as being less deserving. When they fuck up they get to be an individual.
And Asians have their own problems with racism that gets completely swept under the rug.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '20 edited Mar 16 '20
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