Multi-Billionaire Oprah Whines About Sexism & Income Inequality At DNC

[Toni]

Perhaps you’d like to explain the following:

1. Why you think YOU are more qualified to evaluate applicants to medical school than are the admissions counselors, who evaluate each individual applicant?

2. How does the mean relate to any individual’s qualifications? As far as you or any of us know, the applicants who are accepted with the lowest scores are white or Asian.

3. Demonstrate that GPA and MCAT scores are so predictive of success in medical school and in the medical profession that any other criteria is inconsequential to producing well trained, well qualified physicians who want to serve every population who needs physicians.

MCAT scores and GPAs are the basement—the threshold all successful applicants must cross in order to be considered. They are not the pinnacle. It is not a race to the top after that threshold has been crossed. They are not the entire criteria.

On what do you base your faith that your judgement is better than the actual professionals whose job it is to ascertain which applicants are the best fits for individual medical school programs?

My memory is that you've talked about places that simply trashed the resumes of black applicants. Yet you're basically approving of the same thing if the right ones are getting trashed.

Both your memory and your understanding of what I wrote are very much flawed.

 

[Toni]

Derec, AA removed giving preferential treatment to white males. It made it illegal to discriminate in the basis of sex, race, religion and national origins. Women, non-Christians and persons of color were finally allowed to apply for admissions and jobs previously denied them because of their race, gender, religion and national origins.

The rest is simply racist backlash because some people are too insecure to believe that white makes can actually compete without the centuries of preferential treatment they received.

Calling it racist backlash doesn't make it so.

My exhibit A on this: I was a lab assistant in the computer labs on campus. We had this one Hispanic outreach group that used the lab. They were very different than the regular students. The behavior of the teachers for it would have gotten them thrown out if it wasn't for the racial aspect. The students simply weren't college material--ended up being more work for us despite the class having its own assistants. (And the main one managed to corrupt a word processor document. It happened on occasion, during some slow time I worked out a recovery method that turned the corrupted structures into a few lines of crap at the top of an otherwise text file. Vastly beyond the expectations of the job and I only taught it to a few of the most technically competent people because it would be very easy to corrupt the whole floppy with an errant letter. Her document was of absolutely maximum length, the crap at the top pushed off an equivalent amount from the end--and she tried to get me fired over losing the lines from the end. I clearly did that because she wasn't white.)

I’m just going to let this post speak for itself.

 

[Toni]

By giving people previously excluded because of their race, gender or country of origin from the pool of applicants access to educational and career opportunities they would not have had prior to affirmative action.

This would be a good description of the original meaning of "Affirmative Action". However, what the term has quickly come to mean, and what it has meant ever since, is giving members of certain groups extra opportunities, and by extension reducing opportunities to members of other groups.

The intent was also to change people’s minds and perceptions of who belonged where. And to expand the pool of talent available to everyone.

If you discriminate against certain people in order to get more say blacks into a program that does not change perceptions of them belonging. If anything, it makes it worse. It underlines that that person did not get there by his or her own merit.

When it was first implemented it was probably the best solution. There used to be a social stigma from allowing blacks into higher positions etc. The heavy-handed approach broke that and that was a very good thing.

Social stigma????

Heavy handed approach???

 

[Toni]

Loren, I’m absolutely fed up with your insulting calling my viewpoint ‘fundamentalist faith. If you were not a mid, I’d have put you in ignore long ago. Knock it off. Until you learn to be more respectful and less insulting, I will not respond to anything you write.

It is galling that you choose such terminology on this particular site, especially since you are a moderator. It tells a lot more about you that you feel compelled to claim other people’s views are a matter of faith because you disagree —not because you present any superior arguments or ever, ever back your pov with data or studies. No, you assume that admissions directors and counselors have less knowledge abd understanding of who makes a good candidate for their programs and schools than you do, with absolutely zero demonstrated or even claimed expertise.

I’m done with you.

Look at your position. "Faith" is an accurate description, but I do not mean it in a religious context. You are completely ignoring whether your fundamental approach is right despite the support you provide for it clearly does not show that your approach would do any good.

Thank you for making my life easier.

 

[laughing dog]

If you account for SES, both your and Rhea’s experiences can easily be handwaved away as not discrimination.

And Toni and Rhea are handwaving explicit policies about awarding applicants points for being black as "not discrimination".
And are pretending that marked differences in average GPAs and MCAT scores are meaningless.

There you go again with a “whataboutism “.

I believe both realize such differences are not as important as you think.

Differences in SAT scores translate to differences in the rate at which people don't complete their degree.

After you explain why differences in SAT scores is relevant to a discussion in differences in MCAT scores and GPAs, please explain why your observation is relevant at all.

 

[Rhea]

Which is why Loren’s and Derec’s utterly unfactual and mertiless claims that discrimination is over are a fetid, steaming, pile of uninformed, privileged, horseshit.

The discrimination is not over. It is just reversed.
And your anecdote is from the 80s. That was 40 years ago, ffs!

You read all that and you saw only one anecdote?
And then you base your straw man on that?

No wonder you think discrimination is gone. When people tell you about it, you don’t have the memory to process what they said. It was right there in the post that it goes on and on for decades.

The first example I gave is when they said, explicitly, right out loud, “we won’t give you this job because you’re a woman and we don’t think women can do this work.” Already this was more than a decade after you and Loren had claimed new laws made discrimination go away. It hadn’t, and it kept going on for more decades after that. I gave several examples. They did not stop with the first one. They did not stop in the 80s. I said as much already.

Which is why your utterly unfactual and mertiless claims that discrimination is over are a fetid, steaming, pile of uninformed, privileged, horseshit.