I was agreeing with you there up until you gave a straw man example. The intent of affirmative action is to provide, technically, a counter to existing, negative bias. In other words, it is a corrective to bias rather than bias in and of itself.I agree that it can be good or bad (bias is not inherently negative, whereas typically prejudice is).But the proper example is that there is bias in the environment BECAUSE given three students with equivalent ability, one will be less likely to be picked.Now: people of color tend to score lower on many standardized tests (not all), because of incremental societal bias. People of color are more likely to be in lesser quality schools. Americans tend to be biased against picking people of color for certain jobs – which also means students may miss out on more prestigious opportunities. Cumulatively, this can produce a significant disparity where none should exist, even though every bit of it is minor — because all the biases go the same direction.Affirmative action is a means to correct this. It may not be the best means. To me, if you want to correct the problem you need to go to the root cause, meaning to fix the biases at every step and provide truly equal opportunity wherever possible. Affirmative action is really an after-the-fact brute-force corrective to make up for a host of biases of varying sizes.However, I haven’t heard any proposals for anything better.The problem with the Supreme Court decision is that it undercuts the only tool really being used. If we have no means to make an assessment truly race-blind, then existing bias will rule. Since there IS known, existing bias, Roberts’ decision is either stunningly naive, ignorant, or racist. Possibly all three.
I was agreeing with you there up until you gave a straw man example. The intent of affirmative action is to provide, technically, a counter to existing, negative bias. In other words, it is a corrective to bias rather than bias in and of itself.I agree that it can be good or bad (bias is not inherently negative, whereas typically prejudice is).But the proper example is that there is bias in the environment BECAUSE given three students with equivalent ability, one will be less likely to be picked.Now: people of color tend to score lower on many standardized tests (not all), because of incremental societal bias. People of color are more likely to be in lesser quality schools. Americans tend to be biased against picking people of color for certain jobs – which also means students may miss out on more prestigious opportunities. Cumulatively, this can produce a significant disparity where none should exist, even though every bit of it is minor — because all the biases go the same direction.Affirmative action is a means to correct this. It may not be the best means. To me, if you want to correct the problem you need to go to the root cause, meaning to fix the biases at every step and provide truly equal opportunity wherever possible. Affirmative action is really an after-the-fact brute-force corrective to make up for a host of biases of varying sizes.However, I haven’t heard any proposals for anything better.The problem with the Supreme Court decision is that it undercuts the only tool really being used. If we have no means to make an assessment truly race-blind, then existing bias will rule. Since there IS known, existing bias, Roberts’ decision is either stunningly naive, ignorant, or racist. Possibly all three.