Affirmative Action (split from Are people already regretting their choice?)

[Loren Pechtel]

Gospel is absolutely right though. A lot of the anti-AA is about how unfair it is to Asians (until our colleges consist of nothing but Asians). Give some kid who managed impressive outcomes from nothing in the inner-city (but not as good as those from middle-upper class homes/neighborhoods) and you cry foul. You ignore potential, adversity, and intensity while being over fixated on race and standardized test scores.

The problem here is the idea that it helps those in the inner city is deception. The problem is it's treated as if it's a normal distribution, but it's not. AA makes it easy for those who would already have made it, doesn't help those it's supposed to help, but it makes the mean and median look right--pay no attention to the fact it's a bimodal distribution.

It isn't deception if it helps someone skip a rung or two and provides them a shot that would have otherwise gone to another well-to-do'er teen. We aren't trying to find a perfect distribution. These are all people, not statistics.

The thing is it doesn't. The ones that are supposed to be helped are far enough below that it does nothing for them. The real problem is way, way earlier than the university.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Gospel is absolutely right though. A lot of the anti-AA is about how unfair it is to Asians (until our colleges consist of nothing but Asians). Give some kid who managed impressive outcomes from nothing in the inner-city (but not as good as those from middle-upper class homes/neighborhoods) and you cry foul. You ignore potential, adversity, and intensity while being over fixated on race and standardized test scores.

The problem here is the idea that it helps those in the inner city is deception. The problem is it's treated as if it's a normal distribution, but it's not. AA makes it easy for those who would already have made it, doesn't help those it's supposed to help, but it makes the mean and median look right--pay no attention to the fact it's a bimodal distribution.

Cut the crap and admit the only consistent reason you're against affirmative action is because it benefits the negro. Everyone else who did or didn’t benefit is just background noise. That whole “it doesn’t help the people it’s supposed to help” line is telling. Who exactly do you think it’s supposed to help, Loren? Surely not the very people who have actually benefitted from it right?

The problem is that "the negro" isn't monolithic.

Here’s how I see affirmative action, and I know I’ve said it before:

It allowed institutions to appear fair while leaving racism intact instead of forcing a real change in how they moved. They could keep being racist without facing criminal consequences, while the policy itself acted like lip service. ITIS A DOCUMENTED FACT that it helped more white people, especially white women, than Black people.

Yes, it did. I don't see how this is relevant.

I think you do not understand my position. While I do not like AA I think it was the right thing to do. Keyword: was. It's already done all the good that it can, now we are left with only downsides. We aren't making any more progress because it's already basically at 100%.

The biggest advantage was to white women because they there is no problem of the inner cities. AA broke the back of discrimination, it does nothing about the absent fathers and the like.

If you ask me, racism in America should have been criminalized after the Civil War (would have been nice at it's founding but it is what it is)., the same way we criminalize assault, fraud, or theft now. Because when it came to Black people, there was never any mercy. Centuries of slavery, lynching, segregation, redlining, and state-sanctioned terror were egregious acts that destroyed lives and futures that should have received the proper response.

But how do you prove racism?

Instead of just writing civil laws where the worst a racist faces is paying a settlement, there should have been criminal penalties for deliberately denying someone their humanity because of their race. Not a fine. Not diversity workshops. Fucking Jail.

How do you prove it? We already have enough problem with pretending that disparate outcomes prove discrimination. Never mind that it's basically p-hacking, trying to find some way to justify continuing the hunt.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I wouldn't say Loren is of that mindset. They see the world in a much more reduced fashion and want equal opportunity for everyone, period, as far as he can observe it. Everything that happened before isn't relevant to how they think the world should be. Wipe the slate clean. I feel his take is a bit naïve and ignores self-perpetuating issues caused by policy choices made all through out the 20th century. But I don't think Loren is against anything because of race.

Problem here: I have never denied that there are self-perpetuating issues. It doesn't matter if they originated in discrimination, what matters is what is perpetuating them.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Every time Black people gain even a sliver of policy relief, the same script rolls out. Suddenly it’s not about fixing injustice, it’s about who benefited, “the wrong people,” “token success stories,” “cream-skimming,” or now, dressed up in math, “bimodal distributions.” Then, right on cue, comes the clean-slate talk: wipe it all away and start fresh.

And herein we see the problem. I'm looking for fixing the problem, not placing blame.

And I’m not pulling that out of thin air. Look at what Loren actually said: “it doesn’t help those it’s supposed to help.” Who are those people in his mind? Because the data says it did help a lot of Black and brown folks, just not every single one. When the standard shifts from “does it help?” to “does it perfectly fix every layer of inequality?” the answer will always be “no,” and that becomes a permanent excuse to roll it back.

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't. There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

So yeah, to me that sounds like a polite way of saying “I don’t want these policies at all.” Maybe Loren sincerely means “I prefer class‑based solutions,” but that hasn’t been how these arguments historically play out. That’s why I called it out, because that framing has been a reliable tell for something deeper. If it’s not about race, then I’d love to hear him say what exactly he thinks the solution should be other than just tearing it down.

I don't want those policies any more. They have already done everything they can do.

If the complaint is that Affirmative Action doesn’t help the right people, why is the answer always to abolish it? Why not come up with a policy that actually improves it instead of throwing the whole thing away? If the real concern is outcomes, then fixing it should matter more than killing it.

AA helps those that don't need it.

At this point the problem is the cycle of poverty.

And as far as this class/data approach. A poor white kid and a poor Black kid do not enter the world with the same set of obstacles. Even middle‑class Black families still face redlining, over‑policing, and school funding disparities. Poverty fades if you earn money; racism follows you into every income bracket.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

Overpolicing? Cops go where they can bag criminals. It's obvious when you look at traffic tickets, but the same thing applies to all policing. And automated plate readers show the same disparities as live police. Yes, there is a small relationship between light levels and the ratio of traffic stops--but is that because of the occupants, or is it because of the car?

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

 

[ZiprHead]

The way I see it is like a game of football. Whites have been started on the 50 yard line for 300 hundred years, Black people, and other people of color, were not even allowed to possess the ball for most of that time and the 20 yard line when they were. Now, in the second half of the game, whites must start at the twenty yard line and the other team, the POC, are allowed to start at the 23 yard line and the whites are screaming "NO FAIR!"

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And I’m not pulling that out of thin air. Look at what Loren actually said: “it doesn’t help those it’s supposed to help.” Who are those people in his mind? Because the data says it did help a lot of Black and brown folks, just not every single one. When the standard shifts from “does it help?” to “does it perfectly fix every layer of inequality?” the answer will always be “no,” and that becomes a permanent excuse to roll it back.

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't.

AA doesn't help the inner-city. How could it? Who is saying it should? What the inner-cities need is revitalization... that those who live there would be able to be part of and not displaced.

There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

No it doesn't. Now you are just making stuff up to be able to criticize AA.

And as far as this class/data approach. A poor white kid and a poor Black kid do not enter the world with the same set of obstacles. Even middle‑class Black families still face redlining, over‑policing, and school funding disparities. Poverty fades if you earn money; racism follows you into every income bracket.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

And yet, here we get back to the blame thing. You want disparate outcomes to only matter when it is intentional. But what we should be doing is in noticing a cycle of repeated disparate outcomes happening over and over again, that the problem is systemic and needs tweaking and adjustment. If there is a consistent failing, we need to find out why and work on it.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Loren, is your inner-city school knowledge based solely on Lean on Me? The GOP in Columbus, OH is fucking over the cities, has been for 25 years. My local taxes (city and property) have jacked up because Columbus keeps cutting taxes for the wealthy (we are now a flat tax state).

 

[Gospel]

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't. There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

That 5 and 15 analogy is cute, but it’s built on a false premise. You’re pretending that discrimination is ‘mission accomplished,’ as if 400 years of it can be erased with one generation of AA. It hasn’t. The data still shows wealth gaps, education gaps, hiring gaps, and those gaps keep showing up no matter how you slice income.

And AA was never meant to be the entire cure for inner-city poverty. It’s a narrow policy for opening locked doors at the college and professional level. Blaming AA for not fixing poverty is like blaming a key for not building the house. If you want to fix the 5, you fund schools, housing, and opportunity starting at the beginning, not rip away the only policy that even helps the 15.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

Redlining wasn’t math. It was policy. They drew maps in the 1930s, stamped Black neighborhoods “hazardous,” and locked out loans no matter how solid the family was. Eighty years later, those same areas are still poor, NCRC shows 74% of them are low-income today. And don’t kid yourself that it’s over:

Recent Settlements for redlining:

• Ameris Bank – $9M, Jacksonville (2023)
• Washington Trust – $9M, Rhode Island (2023)
• Lakeland Bank – $13M, Newark metro (2022)
• Patriot Bank – $1.9 million settlement (2024)
• City National Bank – $31M (2023)
• Fairway Independent Mortgage – DOJ/CFPB (Birmingham, 2024)

Oi?

You’re repeating the same excuse the FHA used in the 1930s, that this was all just about “risk.” Except the federal redlining guidelines from that time spell out in black and white that the “risk” they were worried about was Black families living there. Stable Black neighborhoods were redlined and unstable white ones weren’t. That’s not neutral risk assessment. That’s discrimination written into policy, and the fact that DOJ is still nailing banks for doing the same thing just this past decade should tell you the pattern didn’t happen by accident.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Bruh follow the money: if your neighborhood’s wealth got strangled for 80 years, your property taxes are garbage. That’s why the EdTrust study found schools serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year, than white districts. $23 billion less. And Brookings backs that up. Meanwhile the rich districts build robotics labs and music studios while the city schools can’t even afford the books you mentioned Yes, books sometimes don’t get returned but that as an argument against the existence of systemic inequity, is a lazy stereotyped deflection that sounds like a racist dig because it implies the schools’ condition is the communities fault rather than the predictable result of decades of underfunding.

Overpolicing? Cops go where they can bag criminals. It's obvious when you look at traffic tickets, but the same thing applies to all policing. And automated plate readers show the same disparities as live police. Yes, there is a small relationship between light levels and the ratio of traffic stops--but is that because of the occupants, or is it because of the car?

You’re assuming that “cops go where the crime is,” but decades of research show it’s the other way around: wherever you flood with cops, you create the stats that justify even more cops. Automated plate readers don’t disprove that, they inherit the same bias because the cameras are placed where the departments decide to put them. Georgetown’s 2022 study shows they’re concentrated in Black neighborhoods. And the Stanford Open Policing Project looked at 100 million stops across every kind of car and even controlled for darkness so the officer couldn’t see who was driving. Black drivers still got stopped and searched more. That’s not the car bruh, it's high police presence (human or camera) topped off with racially bias execution.

Anyway, we should probably stop dragging this off-topic. I’ll concede that you’re right about one thing: poverty absolutely needs to be addressed, and affirmative action by itself doesn’t solve that.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The way I see it is like a game of football. Whites have been started on the 50 yard line for 300 hundred years, Black people, and other people of color, were not even allowed to possess the ball for most of that time and the 20 yard line when they were. Now, in the second half of the game, whites must start at the twenty yard line and the other team, the POC, are allowed to start at the 23 yard line and the whites are screaming "NO FAIR!"

1) Yes, that would not be fair. Should be everyone at the 20.

2) That's not what's happening anyway, the problem is the POC team is bimodal. We have the middle class ones that were already starting at the 20 yard line, and the cycle of poverty ones still way behind. We pretend equality when we start some on the 10 yard line and the rest still well behind. And we come along and see that group being started way ahead and complaining.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

AA doesn't help the inner-city. How could it? Who is saying it should? What the inner-cities need is revitalization... that those who live there would be able to be part of and not displaced.

But those people in the inner city are counted in figuring the proper quotas.

There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

No it doesn't. Now you are just making stuff up to be able to criticize AA.

Look at the admission scores.

And as far as this class/data approach. A poor white kid and a poor Black kid do not enter the world with the same set of obstacles. Even middle‑class Black families still face redlining, over‑policing, and school funding disparities. Poverty fades if you earn money; racism follows you into every income bracket.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

And yet, here we get back to the blame thing. You want disparate outcomes to only matter when it is intentional. But what we should be doing is in noticing a cycle of repeated disparate outcomes happening over and over again, that the problem is systemic and needs tweaking and adjustment. If there is a consistent failing, we need to find out why and work on it.

Yes, find the problem and work on it--but that's not what's happening. We deem all disparate results discrimination and fight against it with antidiscrimination tactics.

But what's discriminatory about bankers not liking underwater mortgages? When I saw the map I had the immediate thought that I had seen it before--sure, enough, appreciation by zip code. And the government guys couldn't see that? No, they were p-hacking.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Loren, is your inner-city school knowledge based solely on Lean on Me? The GOP in Columbus, OH is fucking over the cities, has been for 25 years. My local taxes (city and property) have jacked up because Columbus keeps cutting taxes for the wealthy (we are now a flat tax state).

Check the funding per student.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't. There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

That 5 and 15 analogy is cute, but it’s built on a false premise. You’re pretending that discrimination is ‘mission accomplished,’ as if 400 years of it can be erased with one generation of AA. It hasn’t. The data still shows wealth gaps, education gaps, hiring gaps, and those gaps keep showing up no matter how you slice income.

You're seeing the cycle of poverty. Might have been triggered by discrimination but that's not what perpetuates it. We see the same thing in redneck areas, that certainly isn't discrimination.

And AA was never meant to be the entire cure for inner-city poverty. It’s a narrow policy for opening locked doors at the college and professional level. Blaming AA for not fixing poverty is like blaming a key for not building the house. If you want to fix the 5, you fund schools, housing, and opportunity starting at the beginning, not rip away the only policy that even helps the 15.

But it's being based on population demographics--thus counting those inner cities.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

Redlining wasn’t math. It was policy. They drew maps in the 1930s, stamped Black neighborhoods “hazardous,” and locked out loans no matter how solid the family was. Eighty years later, those same areas are still poor, NCRC shows 74% of them are low-income today. And don’t kid yourself that it’s over:

Showing redlining judgments proves nothing--the discrimination warriors need to justify their jobs.

You can't prove the underwater bit because that's an educated guess, not something exact.

You’re repeating the same excuse the FHA used in the 1930s, that this was all just about “risk.” Except the federal redlining guidelines from that time spell out in black and white that the “risk” they were worried about was Black families living there. Stable Black neighborhoods were redlined and unstable white ones weren’t. That’s not neutral risk assessment. That’s discrimination written into policy, and the fact that DOJ is still nailing banks for doing the same thing just this past decade should tell you the pattern didn’t happen by accident.

It certainly was evil in the past.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Bruh follow the money: if your neighborhood’s wealth got strangled for 80 years, your property taxes are garbage. That’s why the EdTrust study found schools serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year, than white districts. $23 billion less. And Brookings backs that up. Meanwhile the rich districts build robotics labs and music studios while the city schools can’t even afford the books you mentioned Yes, books sometimes don’t get returned but that as an argument against the existence of systemic inequity, is a lazy stereotyped deflection that sounds like a racist dig because it implies the schools’ condition is the communities fault rather than the predictable result of decades of underfunding.

Whiter states are wealthier, your number is inherently corrupted.

And, yes, they can't afford it because they have to spend the money on other things. How long would that robotics lab last in the inner city??

Overpolicing? Cops go where they can bag criminals. It's obvious when you look at traffic tickets, but the same thing applies to all policing. And automated plate readers show the same disparities as live police. Yes, there is a small relationship between light levels and the ratio of traffic stops--but is that because of the occupants, or is it because of the car?

You’re assuming that “cops go where the crime is,” but decades of research show it’s the other way around: wherever you flood with cops, you create the stats that justify even more cops. Automated plate readers don’t disprove that, they inherit the same bias because the cameras are placed where the departments decide to put them. Georgetown’s 2022 study shows they’re concentrated in Black neighborhoods. And the Stanford Open Policing Project looked at 100 million stops across every kind of car and even controlled for darkness so the officer couldn’t see who was driving. Black drivers still got stopped and searched more. That’s not the car bruh, it's high police presence (human or camera) topped off with racially bias execution.

And if they still got stopped more in the dark then clearly it's not race.

And you have it wrong about the plate readers--doesn't matter where they're placed. The reality is they still show the same stop bias that the officers do. Disproportionate for the population around them.

Anyway, we should probably stop dragging this off-topic. I’ll concede that you’re right about one thing: poverty absolutely needs to be addressed, and affirmative action by itself doesn’t solve that.

I've never objected to addressing poverty, I have just objected to pretending antidiscrimination measures can fix it. I do not know how to break the cycle of poverty, I'm not aware of any real successes.

 

[ZiprHead]

The way I see it is like a game of football. Whites have been started on the 50 yard line for 300 hundred years, Black people, and other people of color, were not even allowed to possess the ball for most of that time and the 20 yard line when they were. Now, in the second half of the game, whites must start at the twenty yard line and the other team, the POC, are allowed to start at the 23 yard line and the whites are screaming "NO FAIR!"

1) Yes, that would not be fair. Should be everyone at the 20.

That ignores the 300 years of the other team starting on the 50.

2) That's not what's happening anyway, the problem is the POC team is bimodal. We have the middle class ones that were already starting at the 20 yard line, and the cycle of poverty ones still way behind. We pretend equality when we start some on the 10 yard line and the rest still well behind. And we come along and see that group being started way ahead and complaining.

Who's this "we", Kemosabe?

 

[Gospel]

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't. There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

That 5 and 15 analogy is cute, but it’s built on a false premise. You’re pretending that discrimination is ‘mission accomplished,’ as if 400 years of it can be erased with one generation of AA. It hasn’t. The data still shows wealth gaps, education gaps, hiring gaps, and those gaps keep showing up no matter how you slice income.

You're seeing the cycle of poverty. Might have been triggered by discrimination but that's not what perpetuates it. We see the same thing in redneck areas, that certainly isn't discrimination.

And AA was never meant to be the entire cure for inner-city poverty. It’s a narrow policy for opening locked doors at the college and professional level. Blaming AA for not fixing poverty is like blaming a key for not building the house. If you want to fix the 5, you fund schools, housing, and opportunity starting at the beginning, not rip away the only policy that even helps the 15.

But it's being based on population demographics--thus counting those inner cities.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

Redlining wasn’t math. It was policy. They drew maps in the 1930s, stamped Black neighborhoods “hazardous,” and locked out loans no matter how solid the family was. Eighty years later, those same areas are still poor, NCRC shows 74% of them are low-income today. And don’t kid yourself that it’s over:

Showing redlining judgments proves nothing--the discrimination warriors need to justify their jobs.

You can't prove the underwater bit because that's an educated guess, not something exact.

You’re repeating the same excuse the FHA used in the 1930s, that this was all just about “risk.” Except the federal redlining guidelines from that time spell out in black and white that the “risk” they were worried about was Black families living there. Stable Black neighborhoods were redlined and unstable white ones weren’t. That’s not neutral risk assessment. That’s discrimination written into policy, and the fact that DOJ is still nailing banks for doing the same thing just this past decade should tell you the pattern didn’t happen by accident.

It certainly was evil in the past.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Bruh follow the money: if your neighborhood’s wealth got strangled for 80 years, your property taxes are garbage. That’s why the EdTrust study found schools serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year, than white districts. $23 billion less. And Brookings backs that up. Meanwhile the rich districts build robotics labs and music studios while the city schools can’t even afford the books you mentioned Yes, books sometimes don’t get returned but that as an argument against the existence of systemic inequity, is a lazy stereotyped deflection that sounds like a racist dig because it implies the schools’ condition is the communities fault rather than the predictable result of decades of underfunding.

Whiter states are wealthier, your number is inherently corrupted.

And, yes, they can't afford it because they have to spend the money on other things. How long would that robotics lab last in the inner city??

Overpolicing? Cops go where they can bag criminals. It's obvious when you look at traffic tickets, but the same thing applies to all policing. And automated plate readers show the same disparities as live police. Yes, there is a small relationship between light levels and the ratio of traffic stops--but is that because of the occupants, or is it because of the car?

You’re assuming that “cops go where the crime is,” but decades of research show it’s the other way around: wherever you flood with cops, you create the stats that justify even more cops. Automated plate readers don’t disprove that, they inherit the same bias because the cameras are placed where the departments decide to put them. Georgetown’s 2022 study shows they’re concentrated in Black neighborhoods. And the Stanford Open Policing Project looked at 100 million stops across every kind of car and even controlled for darkness so the officer couldn’t see who was driving. Black drivers still got stopped and searched more. That’s not the car bruh, it's high police presence (human or camera) topped off with racially bias execution.

And if they still got stopped more in the dark then clearly it's not race.

And you have it wrong about the plate readers--doesn't matter where they're placed. The reality is they still show the same stop bias that the officers do. Disproportionate for the population around them.

Anyway, we should probably stop dragging this off-topic. I’ll concede that you’re right about one thing: poverty absolutely needs to be addressed, and affirmative action by itself doesn’t solve that.

I've never objected to addressing poverty, I have just objected to pretending antidiscrimination measures can fix it. I do not know how to break the cycle of poverty, I'm not aware of any real successes.

Loren, the pattern you keep repeating is “yeah, racism started it, but now it’s just poverty reproducing itself.” That sounds tidy, but it doesn’t match the evidence. The system that caused the poverty is still running right now.

It wasn’t just discrimination 80 years ago that “triggered” this. NCRC’s own analysis shows that the same neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s are still poor today because banks kept doing it long after the maps. That’s why the DOJ has been slapping banks with multimillion‑dollar settlements as recently as 2022, 2023, and 2024, City National, Ameris, Washington Trust, Lakeland, Fairway Independent Mortgage. These aren’t just statistics; those cases uncovered direct patterns of modern day redlining.

You say “throwing money doesn’t work,” but the research says the opposite when that funding is sustained. Jackson, Johnson & Persico (2016) showed that a 10% sustained funding increase for low‑income districts raises graduation rates and lifetime earnings for kids who grow up there. And because school budgets come from property taxes, starving neighborhoods end up with starved schools by design. That EdTrust study found districts serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year. That’s $23 billion nationwide. You can’t hand‑wave that away by pointing to a couple of missing books.

Again, the “cops just go where the crime is” line ignores how those crime maps are made. When you flood a neighborhood with 10x more patrols, you find 10x more minor violations, and those stats justify even more patrols. It’s a loop. Stanford’s Open Policing Project analyzed 100 million traffic stops across every type of car, even controlling for darkness so the officer couldn’t see the driver. Black drivers are still searched 20% more often and found with less. Georgetown Law showed the same thing with license plate readers: they’re placed where departments choose to put them, which is overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods. Tech doesn’t erase bias; it inherits it.

So no, this isn’t just a cycle running on autopilot now. The cycle is actively maintained by how housing, schooling, and policing work today. If you pull racism out of that equation, the numbers don’t make sense unless you believe black people are inferior.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

The intended function was breaking the cycle of discrimination. Mission accomplished. The problem is that discrimination wasn't the whole problem. Now it's supposed to help the inner cities--but it doesn't. There's a big inequality between the middle class and the inner cities. AA pretends that one at 5 and one at 15 is equal to two at 10.

That 5 and 15 analogy is cute, but it’s built on a false premise. You’re pretending that discrimination is ‘mission accomplished,’ as if 400 years of it can be erased with one generation of AA. It hasn’t. The data still shows wealth gaps, education gaps, hiring gaps, and those gaps keep showing up no matter how you slice income.

And AA was never meant to be the entire cure for inner-city poverty. It’s a narrow policy for opening locked doors at the college and professional level. Blaming AA for not fixing poverty is like blaming a key for not building the house. If you want to fix the 5, you fund schools, housing, and opportunity starting at the beginning, not rip away the only policy that even helps the 15.

And here we disagree.

Redlining? I keep using that example--big flap about it quite some time ago around here. But was it redlining or p-hacking?

Did the color of your skin make any difference on whether you would be approved? No.
Did the location of the house make any difference? No, for 80/20 mortgages, yes for low-down mortgages.

Why did multiple institutions "discriminate" in exactly the same fashion? And only in that fashion? Or, a much simpler answer: figure that perhaps bankers do not like underwater mortgages? Of course everyone does it because it's the rational choice. By eyeball a perfect match for the "redlining", I didn't sit there with a calculator.

Redlining wasn’t math. It was policy. They drew maps in the 1930s, stamped Black neighborhoods “hazardous,” and locked out loans no matter how solid the family was. Eighty years later, those same areas are still poor, NCRC shows 74% of them are low-income today. And don’t kid yourself that it’s over:

Recent Settlements for redlining:

• Ameris Bank – $9M, Jacksonville (2023)
• Washington Trust – $9M, Rhode Island (2023)
• Lakeland Bank – $13M, Newark metro (2022)
• Patriot Bank – $1.9 million settlement (2024)
• City National Bank – $31M (2023)
• Fairway Independent Mortgage – DOJ/CFPB (Birmingham, 2024)

Oi?

You’re repeating the same excuse the FHA used in the 1930s, that this was all just about “risk.” Except the federal redlining guidelines from that time spell out in black and white that the “risk” they were worried about was Black families living there. Stable Black neighborhoods were redlined and unstable white ones weren’t. That’s not neutral risk assessment. That’s discrimination written into policy, and the fact that DOJ is still nailing banks for doing the same thing just this past decade should tell you the pattern didn’t happen by accident.

School funding? Standard villian.

1) Throwing money at failing schools does nothing.

2) There are substantial disparities between states, but school funding is mostly determined at the state level. It's the inner city schools spend more on security and the like. They don't have school books because they keep not being returned etc.

Bruh follow the money: if your neighborhood’s wealth got strangled for 80 years, your property taxes are garbage. That’s why the EdTrust study found schools serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year, than white districts. $23 billion less. And Brookings backs that up. Meanwhile the rich districts build robotics labs and music studios while the city schools can’t even afford the books you mentioned Yes, books sometimes don’t get returned but that as an argument against the existence of systemic inequity, is a lazy stereotyped deflection that sounds like a racist dig because it implies the schools’ condition is the communities fault rather than the predictable result of decades of underfunding.

Overpolicing? Cops go where they can bag criminals. It's obvious when you look at traffic tickets, but the same thing applies to all policing. And automated plate readers show the same disparities as live police. Yes, there is a small relationship between light levels and the ratio of traffic stops--but is that because of the occupants, or is it because of the car?

You’re assuming that “cops go where the crime is,” but decades of research show it’s the other way around: wherever you flood with cops, you create the stats that justify even more cops. Automated plate readers don’t disprove that, they inherit the same bias because the cameras are placed where the departments decide to put them. Georgetown’s 2022 study shows they’re concentrated in Black neighborhoods. And the Stanford Open Policing Project looked at 100 million stops across every kind of car and even controlled for darkness so the officer couldn’t see who was driving. Black drivers still got stopped and searched more. That’s not the car bruh, it's high police presence (human or camera) topped off with racially bias execution.

Anyway, we should probably stop dragging this off-topic. I’ll concede that you’re right about one thing: poverty absolutely needs to be addressed, and affirmative action by itself doesn’t solve that.

Please do not get in the way of some good old-fashioned race-baiting from Gospel; we hardly get any on these pages, and it’s a good example of why we generally are in disfavor.

Who are the “we” in “why we generally are in disfavor”?

I almost got into this tangly mess. I even began writing about it.

For once in my life I deleted what I began writing, and it's probably going to be the best decision I've made in quite a while.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Loren, the pattern you keep repeating is “yeah, racism started it, but now it’s just poverty reproducing itself.” That sounds tidy, but it doesn’t match the evidence. The system that caused the poverty is still running right now.

It wasn’t just discrimination 80 years ago that “triggered” this. NCRC’s own analysis shows that the same neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s are still poor today because banks kept doing it long after the maps. That’s why the DOJ has been slapping banks with multimillion‑dollar settlements as recently as 2022, 2023, and 2024, City National, Ameris, Washington Trust, Lakeland, Fairway Independent Mortgage. These aren’t just statistics; those cases uncovered direct patterns of modern day redlining.

The problem here is that you assuming it's discrimination. The pattern I saw locally made an awful lot more sense as bankers not liking underwater mortgages. We know banks don't like underwater mortgages, is it some stunning discrimination that it shows up in what they write???

The same problem permeates basically all "evidence" of discrimination--it's always not looking at pretty obvious possible confounders. If I can see a pattern simply from "hey, that map looks familiar" the government certainly can see and test the hypothesis.

You say “throwing money doesn’t work,” but the research says the opposite when that funding is sustained. Jackson, Johnson & Persico (2016) showed that a 10% sustained funding increase for low‑income districts raises graduation rates and lifetime earnings for kids who grow up there. And because school budgets come from property taxes, starving neighborhoods end up with starved schools by design. That EdTrust study found districts serving Black and brown kids get $2,200 less per student, every single year. That’s $23 billion nationwide. You can’t hand‑wave that away by pointing to a couple of missing books.

I'll see what I can find about that study. What you are missing is education funding is mostly at the state level. You'll still see a substantial disparity because of course a place like New York will spend a lot more per student than the garbage in the deep south.

Again, the “cops just go where the crime is” line ignores how those crime maps are made. When you flood a neighborhood with 10x more patrols, you find 10x more minor violations, and those stats justify even more patrols. It’s a loop. Stanford’s Open Policing Project analyzed 100 million traffic stops across every type of car, even controlling for darkness so the officer couldn’t see the driver. Black drivers are still searched 20% more often and found with less. Georgetown Law showed the same thing with license plate readers: they’re placed where departments choose to put them, which is overwhelmingly Black neighborhoods. Tech doesn’t erase bias; it inherits it.

But what the cops will be measuring is the results per cop, not the results overall. The relationship between patrols and violations is unquestionably not linear.

And if they're stopped 20% more even when the cops can't see them clearly race isn't the cause and you just shot yourself in the foot.
(And I'm not surprised at stopped with less--there's a big confounder here. Search upon stop vs search upon arrest for prior action. And when you see a suburban car in the hood around a drug area you have a high likelyhood of finding drugs if you stop them as they are leaving. And that is going to be disproportionately white.)

And you missed the point about plate readers--it's in comparison to the cars in the area.

So no, this isn’t just a cycle running on autopilot now. The cycle is actively maintained by how housing, schooling, and policing work today. If you pull racism out of that equation, the numbers don’t make sense unless you believe black people are inferior.

No, you keep pretending reality is just discrimination.

 

[Gospel]

The problem here is that you assuming it's discrimination.

Ok look, I’m going to set aside the rest of your argument, not because there’s nothing to say, but because it’s dragging us away from the actual topic of this thread, which is about Trump voters and regret (I see now there has been a split). I’m also not going to keep debating the utility or future of affirmative action itself. That’s not the point I was making. My focus was, and still is, on how Trump voters perceive it, and what that says about their motivations.

Loren, you’re right that economic hardship plays a big role in what’s happening across working-class America. Especially in rural white areas, decades of wage stagnation, declining public services, and deindustrialization have created real pain. That’s not up for debate.

But here’s where we part ways: the people experiencing that pain aren’t directing their anger at the corporations or politicians who caused it, they’re aiming it at "those other people". They’re not voting for better wages, unions, or economic reform. They’re voting for a billionaire who inherited his fortune, dodged taxes, outsources labor, and brags about it.

They’re not mad at AA because they’ve done a deep policy analysis and found it flawed, they’re mad because they believe it helps Black people. Never mind that white women have benefited more from AA than any other group. If it looks like it's helping “those people,” it becomes a target. It’s scapegoating, simple, effective, and always politically useful.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of this misdirection, Trump included, keep handing out tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting regulations, killing unions, and privatizing everything in sight. Those policies are objectively harmful to rural working-class communities. But as long as those communities are told they’re “owning the libs” or “protecting traditional values,” they’ll keep swallowing poison if it means someone else suffers more. And they keep swallowing that poison because it looks just like the homebrew they’ve been drinking for generations, familiar, racist, and passed down like tradition.

So yes, wealth inequality is the soil this all grows out of. But racism, resentment, and culture war politics are the fertilizer. Ignoring that doesn’t make your argument more objective, it just makes it incomplete.

 

[robnisch]

Were Black World War II Veterans Excluded from GI Bill Benefits?

After fighting wars abroad, Black former servicemen faced segregation, violence, and discrimination at home.

www.snopes.com

My dad used the GI bill to buy a house and get his GED. However, all the doctors and dentists I went to as a child get their education because of the GI bill.
Systematic restrictions of Blacks put them a step back from my father's peers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

But here’s where we part ways: the people experiencing that pain aren’t directing their anger at the corporations or politicians who caused it, they’re aiming it at "those other people". They’re not voting for better wages, unions, or economic reform. They’re voting for a billionaire who inherited his fortune, dodged taxes, outsources labor, and brags about it.

You think I disagree with any of that??

They’re not mad at AA because they’ve done a deep policy analysis and found it flawed, they’re mad because they believe it helps Black people. Never mind that white women have benefited more from AA than any other group. If it looks like it's helping “those people,” it becomes a target. It’s scapegoating, simple, effective, and always politically useful.

But here we differ in the order. You are right that it's not a proper analysis, but you have cause and effect backwards here. It's not that they are opposed to blacks, it's that they are opposed to the recipients of unjustified handouts.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of this misdirection, Trump included, keep handing out tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting regulations, killing unions, and privatizing everything in sight. Those policies are objectively harmful to rural working-class communities. But as long as those communities are told they’re “owning the libs” or “protecting traditional values,” they’ll keep swallowing poison if it means someone else suffers more. And they keep swallowing that poison because it looks just like the homebrew they’ve been drinking for generations, familiar, racist, and passed down like tradition.

That I'll agree with.

So yes, wealth inequality is the soil this all grows out of. But racism, resentment, and culture war politics are the fertilizer. Ignoring that doesn’t make your argument more objective, it just makes it incomplete.

I see no reason to think that racism is a cause as opposed to an effect. Virtually every study that claims "racism" is questionable, it fails to control for socioeconomic conditions. When faced with a huge pile of questionable data and no solid data reality usually is the hypothesis is false. There are unquestionably some KKK types--it's just that to have any large effect the discrimination would have to be so widespread that nobody would take advantage of the imbalance.

 

[Toni]

But here’s where we part ways: the people experiencing that pain aren’t directing their anger at the corporations or politicians who caused it, they’re aiming it at "those other people". They’re not voting for better wages, unions, or economic reform. They’re voting for a billionaire who inherited his fortune, dodged taxes, outsources labor, and brags about it.

You think I disagree with any of that??

They’re not mad at AA because they’ve done a deep policy analysis and found it flawed, they’re mad because they believe it helps Black people. Never mind that white women have benefited more from AA than any other group. If it looks like it's helping “those people,” it becomes a target. It’s scapegoating, simple, effective, and always politically useful.

But here we differ in the order. You are right that it's not a proper analysis, but you have cause and effect backwards here. It's not that they are opposed to blacks, it's that they are opposed to the recipients of unjustified handouts.

Meanwhile, the real beneficiaries of this misdirection, Trump included, keep handing out tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting regulations, killing unions, and privatizing everything in sight. Those policies are objectively harmful to rural working-class communities. But as long as those communities are told they’re “owning the libs” or “protecting traditional values,” they’ll keep swallowing poison if it means someone else suffers more. And they keep swallowing that poison because it looks just like the homebrew they’ve been drinking for generations, familiar, racist, and passed down like tradition.

That I'll agree with.

So yes, wealth inequality is the soil this all grows out of. But racism, resentment, and culture war politics are the fertilizer. Ignoring that doesn’t make your argument more objective, it just makes it incomplete.

I see no reason to think that racism is a cause as opposed to an effect. Virtually every study that claims "racism" is questionable, it fails to control for socioeconomic conditions. When faced with a huge pile of questionable data and no solid data reality usually is the hypothesis is false. There are unquestionably some KKK types--it's just that to have any large effect the discrimination would have to be so widespread that nobody would take advantage of the imbalance.

You always fail to consider the role that race plays in socioeconomic status.

Or the role that racism plays in assumptions about socioeconomic status.

Or that redlining has ever or still exists.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

But here’s where we part ways: the people experiencing that pain aren’t directing their anger at the corporations or politicians who caused it, they’re aiming it at "those other people". They’re not voting for better wages, unions, or economic reform. They’re voting for a billionaire who inherited his fortune, dodged taxes, outsources labor, and brags about it.

You think I disagree with any of that??

They’re not mad at AA because they’ve done a deep policy analysis and found it flawed, they’re mad because they believe it helps Black people. Never mind that white women have benefited more from AA than any other group. If it looks like it's helping “those people,” it becomes a target. It’s scapegoating, simple, effective, and always politically useful.

But here we differ in the order. You are right that it's not a proper analysis, but you have cause and effect backwards here. It's not that they are opposed to blacks, it's that they are opposed to the recipients of unjustified handouts.

Naw. Its blacks. In the last 10 years or so, there has been so much gnashing of teeth if a black person stars in a role that used to be a white person... or a woman takes a male's role... or goodness help us, anyone is gay. Anything... and the alt-right throws a fit... (remember Bud Light commercial?) or when Trump is elected, anti-Semites march in Virginia.

It is all over the place. I never really understood how bad things were until around 2004 when talking to a drilling crew for a project. The stuff that they said I thought was lost to the 1960s. The racism was real, but how widespread? People like Gospel were trying to tell us. Us white people were like, dude, it isn't that bad. Then the right-wing reacted to a black man running the White House. Looks like the Gospels were right.

They weren't against AA because of "hand outs", they were against AA because it was helping people they thought were lower than them. And they were telling us this the entire time with their anti-PC run, when they got upset that certain words were being dumped into the ash heap.

So yes, wealth inequality is the soil this all grows out of. But racism, resentment, and culture war politics are the fertilizer. Ignoring that doesn’t make your argument more objective, it just makes it incomplete.

I see no reason to think that racism is a cause as opposed to an effect.

What in life has but one cause? You keep binary'ing the heck out of this, when there is nuance, self-perpetuation, tunnel blindness, and too many degrees of separation from people who are living it, all meddling in the system and experience.

Virtually every study that claims "racism" is questionable, it fails to control for socioeconomic conditions.

...in part caused by racism and systemic racism.

 

[Gospel]

You think I disagree with any of that??

If you don’t, then we’re already halfway to agreement. The difference is I’m pointing out where that misdirected anger comes from , it’s not a natural byproduct, it’s been actively cultivated for generations. That’s where racism and resentment merge into a political tool.

But here we differ in the order. You are right that it’s not a proper analysis, but you have cause and effect backwards here. It’s not that they are opposed to blacks, it’s that they are opposed to the recipients of unjustified handouts.

The “unjustified handouts” framing *is* the racism, it’s the product of a decades-long narrative that programs people to believe Black advancement must be unearned. Swap the race in those scenarios and watch the opposition vanish. That’s why the order matters, cause and effect here are tangled on purpose.

That I’ll agree with.

Glad we’re on the same page there. The challenge is recognizing that this agreement undercuts the idea that racism is just a secondary effect.

I see no reason to think that racism is a cause as opposed to an effect.

And I see no way it could only be an effect when laws, policies, and propaganda have been designed explicitly along racial lines, from redlining maps to voter suppression to the wording of political ads. You don’t get that level of precision from a mere side effect.