Yeah. And back in the "good ole days" blacks were restricted from going to college... to the point that institutions had to be built from scratch so that blacks could go to college. THAT is racism. Institutionalized, aimed at creating a self-perpetuating second class race racism. Not some finger on the scale admissions procedure that affects a small portion of those that apply to college.
Okay, that's a legitimate position to take. If you prefer to reserve the term "racism" for what America had prior to the civil rights revolution, when discrimination against black people was institutionalized and it was government policy to keep them as second class citizens, that's a perfectly valid terminological choice. But it isn't what J842P means by the word. Finger on the scale evidently satisfies what he means by "racism". Trying to refute him by using a different definition of the key term doesn't work. All you get that way is a failure to communicate.
Of course, maybe what you wrote wasn't an argument at all, but performance art meant to get people to feel like using your "back in the good ole days" definition of racism. The trouble is, you already posted your definition of "racism", and it wasn't restricted to actions aimed at creating a self-perpetuating second class race. What J842P was referring to satisfies the definition you posted.
This is what happens when you juxtaposition two grossly varying levels of policies based on race and try to use the same word to describe them. People become confused with such a wildly ignorant use of the English language.
But it isn't wildly ignorant for other people to use words their way instead of your way; it's just wildly disobedient. Now, if it were common knowledge that your definition matches normal usage and they're applying an idiosyncratic definition that they don't realize is nonstandard, and explain, then you'd have a case for calling them ignorant. But "racism" definitions are wildly variable and there doesn't seem to be even a majority opinion, let alone a consensus; besides which, J842P explained what he meant.
The thing to keep in mind is, words are always used by juxtaposing grossly varying items and using the same word to describe them. That's the whole point. Words are not for grouping like things; they're for grouping unlike things -- for pointing out some particular respect in which the unlike things are similar or identical. When someone objects to a speaker using the same word for two referents because the referents are grossly different, what it means is, he disapproves of the speaker caring about the respect in which the referents are similar.
I do want to note I goofed on the stats, White include Hispanic. I updated the table removing Hispanic whites from White and I added Asians, because apparently only Asians are harmed now, which is why so many conservatives are up in arms about AA... because of the Asians.
They're up in arms, by and large, because of the principle of the thing -- a so-called "no-discrimination" rule that protects others but excludes them outrages their sense of truth and their sense of fairness, whether anyone happens to be hurting them or not.
I understand that people with a tribal mentality tend to be unable to comprehend non-tribal thought, resulting in a hard-to-overcome impulse to interpret disagreement through a "Which enemy tribe is it that guy's goal to promote?" filter. But that's a failing of tribal thinkers, not a failing of the targets of their invective.
Asians have a higher racial enrollment than any other race in the US. An interesting look at it, when you look at the increase of college enrollment, relative to the population change over the same period of time (1980 to 2010), enrollment among whites increased verses population increase by nearly double of blacks, latinos, and asians.
How are you getting that? Your updated chart shows enrollment among latinos increased versus population increase by over double the increase of blacks, whites, and asians combined (3.6 vs .2 + 1 + .2).
Knowing this, it is hard to tell how AA is negatively affecting whites.
But it isn't hard to tell -- all it takes to tell how AA is negatively affecting whites is to remind yourself that when somebody inhibits Bob's opportunities and somebody else enhances Charlie's opportunities, the circumstance that Charlie's skin is the same color as Bob's skin doesn't do Bob a darn bit of good. Group averages of the sort you're posting are simply irrelevant to the issue of whether there are white people getting negatively affected by AA.
On top of that, when you focus on total college enrollment, you aren't merely treating white people as interchangeable parts. You're treating colleges as interchangeable parts. Getting bumped down to your safety school instead of getting into the school you were hoping to go to counts as being negatively affected, even though you still get to go to college. Those numbers you posted are what they are because total college enrollment is going up, and that's not because every school is growing but because some schools are growing very fast. The fastest growing school in America isn't Harvard, or Princeton, or MIT. It's the University of Alabama.
Odd, seeing that there have been many substantive responses.
Sorry, I meant substantive responses to my post.
I've asked for evidence that AA has harmed people. Instead we just get fed the "AA is racism" line. Where is the substance of that type of rebuttal?
But this isn't an affirmative action thread. It's a racism thread. Whether AA has or hasn't made the people of some given ethnicity worse off on average is off-topic. Whether it's racism is on-topic.
