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

[Toni]

Born to a nice black family with both parents educated, professional degrees? You can’t drive in a lot of places without being pulled over or worse

How do you post on here from 1965 I wonder? Is it like that Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock movie (not Speed)?

I’m guessing you never drive while black. Me either but I do listen to other people when they talk.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know where to put an article I'm going to gift, but since there is a lot of talk about racism in this thread, I'll put it here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/...e_code=1.f08.nODO.kYzAC4OJ5AYi&smid=url-share

Yuck! I can imagine them feeling they might be able to push this through the garbage in Washington.

But part of me says good--so nice of the assholes to out themselves. And god help them if someone filed an employment discrimination suit, they would be damned by their address.

 

[Toni]

I think that comparing the shortcomings of Harris and the shortcomings of Trump, who was her opponent, would have handily earned Harris the presidency if it were not for sexism and racism.

I disagree. There were strong headwinds against her - the inflation, the general anti-incumbent sentiment at play globally etc.

But a stronger candidate, even one non-white and female, could have won. Kamala just did not have it. To assume that it was "sexism and racism" is not warranted by evidence.

Trump had already had a disastrous first term that tanked the economy and severely worsened the COVID pandemic, particularly considering his looney pronouncements about treatments, dangers, etc. his outrageous behavior exposing hundreds of people to serve his vanity—for starters.

The economy actually did pretty well before the Pandemic. And I think Dems would most likely have lost 2020 without it and Trump's mishandling of it. But Biden mishandled the recovery, spending way too much (and wanting to spend trillions more!) and driving up the inflation. All because he listened to the Bernie/AOC wing of the party too much.
And it's not just me saying it. The left/progressives tend to agree that Biden was on their side.
Biden’s Democratic Party is to the left of Obama’s. Thank a progressive.
This overreach harmed the Biden administration. And Kamala Harris, one of the most left-wing Senators during her brief tenure, was not the right candidate to rectify the perception of veering too far to the left.

For any person who has been alive and awake, Trump’s public utterances should have tanked any political attempts he made, period. But again, he defeated a woman.

Well, I certainly did not vote for him. I voted for KH. But that does not mean that I have to be blind to her shortcomings.
Yes, both times Trump won his opponent was a woman. That's n=2, a very small sample size.
Furthermore, both these women were very flawed in their own ways, and in both cases they were imposed. DNC worked hard to discourage any heavy hitters (like Biden) from contesting the 2016 primaries so a repeat of 2008 would not happen. Even back in 2014, NY Times wrote about Planet Hillary.

And in 2024 we did not even have a primary, just a coronation. And Biden selected KH in 2020 because she had the right plumbing and skin color - most possible running mates were not even considered.

Sexism is alive and well in the USA, along with racism. I’m get that white men don’t see it that way. Which is why we need to quit reflexively electing white men.

That's very reductionist. But DNC should stop forcing female candidates because it's "their turn". The winning female candidate will have to emerge organically. Just like Obama did as first non-white president.

Biden did not mishandle the recovery! What rock have you been under? Under Biden, the economy rebounded faster and better than any other nation.

Inflation, while never welcome, was to be expected as wages rose. In my town, 10 years ago, factory jobs paid $8-10/hr. Post pandemic, they have risen to about double that, having been stagnant for decades prior. Unfortunately, I am neither joking nor exaggerating when I say that for years, for as long as I’ve lived in the town, the usual annual increase was $0.05–nickel an hour. They did their best to keep as many people under 30 hrs/week to avoided d paying any benefits and when they did pay benefits, they were lousy. A lot of people worked 2-3 jobs to pay bills, never mind getting ahead.

ALL candidates are flawed. None has ever been so flawed as Trump. May I remind you that Trump ran after being convicted of 34 felonies. He was facing anymore charges. Why do you think he ran again? To stay out of prison, because our Justice system lacked the balls to send a convicted felony to prison.

But the you go demonstrating that a woman must be 100 times more qualified and competent than a man to win.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Relax, they’re not being racist. Racism’s over, remember? That’s why AA was scrapped. This is just good old-fashioned classism (which, funny enough, AA was actually aimed at too). They’re all upper-class Americans, it’s just a wild statistical coincidence that so many upper-class Americans happen to be white. So naturally more white folks show up in these ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods. Right, Loren?

You're skipping a step here.

I've never said racism is "over". I said racism having a substantial effect on people is over. People get unfairly rejected for a variety of reasons, it's simply part of life. It only becomes a serious problem when most if not all choices are improperly restricted. Won't show us the house because I'm not Asian? Ok, plenty of other houses, you're just hurting your clients. Finding sporadic racism doesn't mean it's holding people back.

 

[Toni]

Relax, they’re not being racist. Racism’s over, remember? That’s why AA was scrapped. This is just good old-fashioned classism (which, funny enough, AA was actually aimed at too). They’re all upper-class Americans, it’s just a wild statistical coincidence that so many upper-class Americans happen to be white. So naturally more white folks show up in these ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods. Right, Loren?

You're skipping a step here.

I've never said racism is "over". I said racism having a substantial effect on people is over. People get unfairly rejected for a variety of reasons, it's simply part of life. It only becomes a serious problem when most if not all choices are improperly restricted. Won't show us the house because I'm not Asian? Ok, plenty of other houses, you're just hurting your clients. Finding sporadic racism doesn't mean it's holding people back.

Racism having a substantial effect on people and on our society is far from over. Just because YOU personally don't worry about whether or not your sons can drive to the movies and back or over to a friend's house to study without being pulled over and shot dead for having a cell phone that the police officer mistook for a weapon doesn't mean that racism is over.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

People are individuals. They are not the average of experiences people who had a similar skin color to them had "historically". There is no logical reason that in 2025, a rich black daughter of a V103 DJ living in Buckhead should get admissions points over a daughter of an Appalachian coal miner.

And this is the fundamental issue--the left has a big problem with seeing groups instead of individuals.

First, we need to end the idea that disparate outcomes means discrimination. Second, coddling breeds complacency. Reversing the damage of the misguided policies of the last 60 years will take time, but it is the only way forward.
There should be strong standards in K-12 that prepares students of all backgrounds for college. No "equitable grading", no "gify fifty".

Exactly. Whoever draws the line on such things gets accused of discrimination because they apparently are too harsh on grading minorities.

Elite colleges, public and private alike, are supposed to have challenging classes and a talented and prepared student body. If schools discriminate to admit students who are worse academically than others, then either they will fail more often, or the curriculum must be dumbed down to accommodate the new, politically correct, student body.

And we see an increased failure rate. Strangely, highly correlated with the SAT score differences.

How exactly would that work? And what would you do about black racists?
And if disparate outcomes still persist, despite "nuking racism", what would you do next?

What I want to know is how you're supposed to prove racism to a criminal standard unless someone messes up.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Relax, they’re not being racist. Racism’s over, remember? That’s why AA was scrapped. This is just good old-fashioned classism (which, funny enough, AA was actually aimed at too). They’re all upper-class Americans, it’s just a wild statistical coincidence that so many upper-class Americans happen to be white. So naturally more white folks show up in these ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods. Right, Loren?

You're skipping a step here.

I've never said racism is "over". I said racism having a substantial effect on people is over. People get unfairly rejected for a variety of reasons, it's simply part of life. It only becomes a serious problem when most if not all choices are improperly restricted. Won't show us the house because I'm not Asian? Ok, plenty of other houses, you're just hurting your clients. Finding sporadic racism doesn't mean it's holding people back.

Racism having a substantial effect on people and on our society is far from over. Just because YOU personally don't worry about whether or not your sons can drive to the movies and back or over to a friend's house to study without being pulled over and shot dead for having a cell phone that the police officer mistook for a weapon doesn't mean that racism is over.

1) We have vast amounts of "evidence" that fails to distinguish race from class. We have almost none that even tries and even less that adequately controls for it. When you have a pile of bad evidence and a paucity of good evidence that generally means it's false.

2a) How many of those phone mistakes involved people who had been up to no good when confronted?? Very few people get shot by police without having acted in some fashion wrongfully first.

2b) Unfortunately, reality is stacked against blacks in is-it-a-weapon confusion. The lower the contrast the harder it is to discern what an object is. A black object in a dark hand can be quite hard to distinguish in low light conditions. Lots of guns are black. Lots of phones are black. We rarely cart around objects that will blend in with white hands.

 

[Toni]

Relax, they’re not being racist. Racism’s over, remember? That’s why AA was scrapped. This is just good old-fashioned classism (which, funny enough, AA was actually aimed at too). They’re all upper-class Americans, it’s just a wild statistical coincidence that so many upper-class Americans happen to be white. So naturally more white folks show up in these ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods. Right, Loren?

You're skipping a step here.

I've never said racism is "over". I said racism having a substantial effect on people is over. People get unfairly rejected for a variety of reasons, it's simply part of life. It only becomes a serious problem when most if not all choices are improperly restricted. Won't show us the house because I'm not Asian? Ok, plenty of other houses, you're just hurting your clients. Finding sporadic racism doesn't mean it's holding people back.

Racism having a substantial effect on people and on our society is far from over. Just because YOU personally don't worry about whether or not your sons can drive to the movies and back or over to a friend's house to study without being pulled over and shot dead for having a cell phone that the police officer mistook for a weapon doesn't mean that racism is over.

1) We have vast amounts of "evidence" that fails to distinguish race from class. We have almost none that even tries and even less that adequately controls for it. When you have a pile of bad evidence and a paucity of good evidence that generally means it's false.

2a) How many of those phone mistakes involved people who had been up to no good when confronted?? Very few people get shot by police without having acted in some fashion wrongfully first.

2b) Unfortunately, reality is stacked against blacks in is-it-a-weapon confusion. The lower the contrast the harder it is to discern what an object is. A black object in a dark hand can be quite hard to distinguish in low light conditions. Lots of guns are black. Lots of phones are black. We rarely cart around objects that will blend in with white hands.

We have vast amounts of evidence that you refuse to acknowledge.

You can keep on making as many excuses as you like—not being able to distinguish a cell phone from a hand gun of the hand holding it is black. I wish you were joking…

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can keep on making as many excuses as you like—not being able to distinguish a cell phone from a hand gun of the hand holding it is black. I wish you were joking…

Some years back there was some research that showed more mistakes when shooting at black people. Someone grabbed all the imagery from the research and made up a website that confronted you with a shoot/don't-shoot with a time limit. It was extremely hard to distinguish whether the black hand was holding the black wallet or the black snub-nose. I e-mailed the guy who made the website about it--he had noticed the same problem but had used the images as presented in the study.

The lower information density of darker images has been a longstanding problem for computer vision--lots of things that worked on white people didn't work so well on black people. And human eyes have the same problem.

 

[Toni]

You can keep on making as many excuses as you like—not being able to distinguish a cell phone from a hand gun of the hand holding it is black. I wish you were joking…

Some years back there was some research that showed more mistakes when shooting at black people. Someone grabbed all the imagery from the research and made up a website that confronted you with a shoot/don't-shoot with a time limit. It was extremely hard to distinguish whether the black hand was holding the black wallet or the black snub-nose. I e-mailed the guy who made the website about it--he had noticed the same problem but had used the images as presented in the study.

The lower information density of darker images has been a longstanding problem for computer vision--lots of things that worked on white people didn't work so well on black people. And human eyes have the same problem.

But it also begs the question: Is is more often assumed that something in a hand of a black person might be a weapon compared with something in the hand of a white person?

I very much understand that life and death decisions are made in an instant. But those decisions are not based only or even primarily on what we see or think we see. We see/don't see a lot of things based on what we THINK we might see or what we THINK we might know about someone.

More than one innocent black person was shot to death by someone who answered t he door and was startled to see a black person standing there. As it happens, the person ringing the door bell was either at the wrong address or was looking for help because of a car break down. I don't read of white people being shot dead for ringing the door bell of the wrong house......

 

[Jarhyn]

And all the test prep in the world isn't going to make a lot of difference. It's not the all-encompassing bogeyman you make it out to be.

You would be surprised.

The interesting thing about the rest is that if people teach intensively on the

Relax, they’re not being racist. Racism’s over, remember? That’s why AA was scrapped. This is just good old-fashioned classism (which, funny enough, AA was actually aimed at too). They’re all upper-class Americans, it’s just a wild statistical coincidence that so many upper-class Americans happen to be white. So naturally more white folks show up in these ‘exclusive’ neighborhoods. Right, Loren?

You're skipping a step here.

I've never said racism is "over". I said racism having a substantial effect on people is over. People get unfairly rejected for a variety of reasons, it's simply part of life. It only becomes a serious problem when most if not all choices are improperly restricted. Won't show us the house because I'm not Asian? Ok, plenty of other houses, you're just hurting your clients. Finding sporadic racism doesn't mean it's holding people back.

Racism having a substantial effect on people and on our society is far from over. Just because YOU personally don't worry about whether or not your sons can drive to the movies and back or over to a friend's house to study without being pulled over and shot dead for having a cell phone that the police officer mistook for a weapon doesn't mean that racism is over.

My current husband has only been pulled over once in all the years I have known him. It was his first ticket ever. He got it for going 85 in a 75 in a rental car driving through Ohio at the end of the month.

My ex-wife, however, had been pulled over 3 times by the time we had divorced. One of these times was for not signalling from a turn lane at an intersection, one of them was for speeding 4 miles over while driving on an otherwise empty road at 1:00 AM while being DD for ME (and the officer kept trying to question whether she was sober); I can't remember the third. Something about a tail light, maybe?

It was all so excessively stupid.

With the officer who pulled her over on an empty road at 1:00 AM, I could tell, even drunk, that the cop was acting differently than in my previous experience: aggressively not wanting to believe my ex. He only backed down from wanting to think my ex was drunk when they noticed I as the passenger, a "white person", told the officer what was going on.

 

[Toni]

People are individuals. They are not the average of experiences people who had a similar skin color to them had "historically". There is no logical reason that in 2025, a rich black daughter of a V103 DJ living in Buckhead should get admissions points over a daughter of an Appalachian coal miner.

And this is the fundamental issue--the left has a big problem with seeing groups instead of individuals.

First, we need to end the idea that disparate outcomes means discrimination. Second, coddling breeds complacency. Reversing the damage of the misguided policies of the last 60 years will take time, but it is the only way forward.
There should be strong standards in K-12 that prepares students of all backgrounds for college. No "equitable grading", no "gify fifty".

Exactly. Whoever draws the line on such things gets accused of discrimination because they apparently are too harsh on grading minorities.

Elite colleges, public and private alike, are supposed to have challenging classes and a talented and prepared student body. If schools discriminate to admit students who are worse academically than others, then either they will fail more often, or the curriculum must be dumbed down to accommodate the new, politically correct, student body.

And we see an increased failure rate. Strangely, highly correlated with the SAT score differences.

How exactly would that work? And what would you do about black racists?
And if disparate outcomes still persist, despite "nuking racism", what would you do next?

What I want to know is how you're supposed to prove racism to a criminal standard unless someone messes up.

Racists see people as a group and not as individuals and they assign that group a lot of negative characteristics —or positive ones! and judge everyone in that group according to those characteristics that they, the racists, have assigned to them.

 

[Gospel]

You can keep on making as many excuses as you like—not being able to distinguish a cell phone from a hand gun of the hand holding it is black. I wish you were joking…

Some years back there was some research that showed more mistakes when shooting at black people. Someone grabbed all the imagery from the research and made up a website that confronted you with a shoot/don't-shoot with a time limit. It was extremely hard to distinguish whether the black hand was holding the black wallet or the black snub-nose. I e-mailed the guy who made the website about it--he had noticed the same problem but had used the images as presented in the study.

The lower information density of darker images has been a longstanding problem for computer vision--lots of things that worked on white people didn't work so well on black people. And human eyes have the same problem.

But it also begs the question: Is is more often assumed that something in a hand of a black person might be a weapon compared with something in the hand of a white person?

I very much understand that life and death decisions are made in an instant. But those decisions are not based only or even primarily on what we see or think we see. We see/don't see a lot of things based on what we THINK we might see or what we THINK we might know about someone.

More than one innocent black person was shot to death by someone who answered t he door and was startled to see a black person standing there. As it happens, the person ringing the door bell was either at the wrong address or was looking for help because of a car break down. I don't read of white people being shot dead for ringing the door bell of the wrong house......

Or shot dead through your own window because the cops came for a wellness check and were startled by you existing inside your own house. Or gunned down after answering the door with a legally owned firearm in your hand, because somehow, in America, being armed is a surprise. Or lying face down, handcuffed, and still shot because an officer ‘thought’ you were reaching. Or shot at while sitting hand cuffed in a police vehicle because an acorn fell from a tree.

But nah, lets make it about the persons criminal history because we all know that having a criminal background means the death penalty without a trial.

 

[Gospel]

We rarely cart around objects that will blend in with white hands.

It’s easier to spot a dark object in a white hand than in a dark hand, where it can be indistinguishable from the hand itself. You’d think this would mean white people should actually be more likely to be mistakenly shot for holding a dark object, since it stands out more. But the expectation that a Black person is more likely to be a threat overrides that visual logic. And the data proves it: in practice, the disparity runs the other way. Which tells us the real driver isn’t about what blends in with hands, it’s about bias in how people interpret what they’re seeing.

 

[southernhybrid]

First of all, one of my close black male friends, known as JD told us that he never had a bad experience when being pulled over by a cop. Okay. He believes if you act very respectful and put your hands on the steering wheel, they won't treat you badly, but I'm not so sure. Maybe JD has just been lucky. He's a veteran and has lived in quite a few states. He's in his early 60s now, so chances are he will be okay.

Here is one example. Several years ago, we were on our way to eat at Captain Dees, the only fast food restaurant we like because they have veggies, and lots of seafood choices, we saw a cop trying to pull over a car of young black males, but the driver didn't stop right away. Instead he drove into the parking lot of Captain Dees, where his mother worked as a manager. The cops started searching the car and were about to pat down the guys, but the mom ran out and told them she had a degree in law enforcement and it was unconstitutional to search them for being stopped with a "broken tail light". She's a smart woman who knows her rights. Why not simply tell the driver that the tail light was broken and it should be fixed asap, instead of harassing them?

So, anyway, they left the guys alone after mom came to the rescue, but they told her they had been told by their boss that whenever they pull over a bunch of young black males, they should search the car and the occupants. One of the cops was black, btw. We knew and cared about the mother of the driver so we asked her what happened and she told us. Obviously, she was quite upset and we did out best to give her some emotional support. That was about five years ago so I have no idea if it's still happening. I hope that the mother of the driver helped by telling off the police for doing something they had no right to do. Sometimes it takes a strong woman to stand up to asshole men.

I have a black neighbor in Georgia who used to be a cop but now works as a security guard making more money. I might ask him if he thought the local police department was very racist if I get a chance.

I also feel like women are stopped far more often then men. I've only had 3 tickets in my life, two were for barely going over the speed limit while on the way home from work and one for what is called coming to a rolling stop instead of a complete stop at a stop sign. I was stopped for that another time but was just given a warning. I've been stopped at least one more time for no apparent reason when I was living in Florida. Is it because women don't seem as scary as men? Are we easier targets or what?

 

[Elixir]

He believes if you act very respectful and put your hands on the steering wheel, they won't treat you badly, but I'm not so sure.

Im sure that if I was black I’d follow that advice. If I get pulled over for something I actually did I’ll give the cop all the deference I can muster. But I can get away with being white, so last time I got pulled over at the gate to my own private road for going 7 over, I was pissed. The real reason was that I was driving an old ratty looking CRV. The young State Patrol cop didn’t see my hands, and put his hand on his gun.
“Gonna shoot me?” I asked.
“Don’t you know how to act when you get pulled over?”
“I don’t GET pulled over!!” I snapped at him in a tone of accusation.
Immediately I thought he was going to go cowboy on me, but then he got a grip on himself, asked for my insurance card,which I didn’t have. I asked if he would like to follow me to the house, and offered to disable the automatic closing of the gate.
I think he realized at that point that he wasn’t going to get any satisfaction no matter what happened next, so he admonished me to slow down, to keep the insurance card in the car, and have a nice day.
If I had been black, it would have been different. Perhaps even if I was not barely off the highway where he had jurisdiction, he’d have exerted his authority more forcefully, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t why he took my back-talk.

 

[southernhybrid]

I'm not sayin that a cop gave Mr. Sohy a hard time because he's one of those scary Arabic guys, but.....

About 5 or s years ago, we got stopped on the way to go shopping. He was doing 45 in a 35 zone, not realizing the speed limit had just dropped. The cop pulled us over and he seemed kind of rude, despite Mr. Sohy acing very polite and putting his hands on the steering wheel. While the cop took his license to check it our, Mr. Sohy realized he had forgotten to give him his insurance card, so he took it out and started to walk towards the cop car. He had never been told to stay in the car. The cop started shouting "get back in the car....get back in the car..." so of course he did. After getting the ticket in broad daylight, I did wonder what was so scary about two old people barely driving over the speed limit in a middle size sedan and all I could think was despite me being petite and whiter than white, my dearly beloved is whitish. I say that because a friend of ours said we were in a mixed race marriage several years ago, and a black neighbor once thought he was a light skinned black guy. Ever since I've told him, "You're not white, you're whitish". So maybe even being whitish can cause a cop to be afraid. Who knows. If you're so easily frightened, why are you doing that type of work?

Not that it has anything to do with cops, but I could tell you a story about how my in-laws were nearly targeted when they moved into a condo where all the residents were Jewish. They didn't want any Arabs moving in, but my in-laws can easily pass for Jewish. The bigoted Jews were very embarrassed when they found out that the new residents weren't Jewish. They were the Arabs that they wanted to keep out. Not that my in-laws didn't hold some of their own prejudice toward other minorities.....I don't get it. We're all humans. I just wish we could be more like dogs. Dogs never judge others by the color of their fur, the shape of their noses, eyes etc.

 

[laughing dog]

I always respectful with my hands on the steering wheel when pulled over. I’m white, but why take chances?

 

[ZiprHead]

I haven't been pulled over by a cop in probably thirty years or more. Kinda' surprised I haven't gotten pulled over since I got the BMW. I drive it pretty hard. I don't usually speed much but that says nothing about how quickly I get up to the limit. And taking a hard 90 degree right turn at twenty miles an hour can be scary for my passengers. Don't try that in your minivan.

Now I need to go knock on some wood.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can keep on making as many excuses as you like—not being able to distinguish a cell phone from a hand gun of the hand holding it is black. I wish you were joking…

Some years back there was some research that showed more mistakes when shooting at black people. Someone grabbed all the imagery from the research and made up a website that confronted you with a shoot/don't-shoot with a time limit. It was extremely hard to distinguish whether the black hand was holding the black wallet or the black snub-nose. I e-mailed the guy who made the website about it--he had noticed the same problem but had used the images as presented in the study.

The lower information density of darker images has been a longstanding problem for computer vision--lots of things that worked on white people didn't work so well on black people. And human eyes have the same problem.

But it also begs the question: Is is more often assumed that something in a hand of a black person might be a weapon compared with something in the hand of a white person?

Since the researchers resorted to using bad images to "prove" their claim I doubt it's a real problem.

More than one innocent black person was shot to death by someone who answered t he door and was startled to see a black person standing there. As it happens, the person ringing the door bell was either at the wrong address or was looking for help because of a car break down. I don't read of white people being shot dead for ringing the door bell of the wrong house......

Yeah, a steady diet of Faux can make people paranoid like that. The bad times of old are coming back. I seem to recall a white delivery person being shot, though.