Affirmative Action

[dazzleman]

I support race based affirmative action at present, but would support quotas if a critical mass cannot be met. I picked option one.

Brown v. Board of Education is fifty. The Civil Rights Act is forty. Before then, there were 350 years of brutal and ugly history, spanning from the first slaves brought to our shores, to Jim Crow's obnoxious prescence. Considering that the barriers to overcome that tragic legacy only fell within living memory, and racial discrimination still lives in the hearts and minds of many, I cannot expect the situation to be the same for people, regardless of race. That is why affirmative action is not yet obsolete.

It never fails to mystify me how some will insist on rigid, pure equality in one area, and ignore the broader inequalities it remedies. That shows a complete failure to see the forest for the trees. In order to treat some people equally, we must treat them differently. It doesn't work in any other fashion. We cannot let the spirit of equality give license to a long and sorry history of bigotry. We mustn't let our society's materialists forget that no matter how abject their poverty, the burden of being a minority is not one they will ever have to bear. Because of all of that, the work continues.

There should be equality of opportunity, within the confines of what the government can control, but nobody can guarantee equality of outcomes.  People don't possess equal amounts of ambition, intelligence, etc. and some will always do better than others.  We shouldn't discriminate in favor of or against people based on factors irrelevant to job performance.

Equality of outcome can only be assured at a subsistence level, if that.  The greater good is served by permitting economic inequality, with some type of safety net for those who are unable (but not unwilling) to take care of themselves.

[dazzleman]

I strongly support class-based AA because I feel that everyone deserves equal opportunity. People who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are at a fundamental disadvantage when it comes to getting a job as opposed to someone from a wealthy background. In addition, society will be better off with the poor getting more jobs than if the wealthy get those same jobs, because the poor need the good job more.

Ok, you seem a bit confused about how the frikkin world works. First off, the wealthy don't get jobs, not the ones the poor even try to get anyways - if they work at all they are high ranking executives or something that pays a lot(thus making them NOT POOR), they didn't get wealthy by doing low level work(unless they worked their way up the ranks, like most motivated people try to do). The main competition for the low economic class will be themselves and the low-middle class. So, by instituting a policy of class-based affirmative action, you'll only be making some people in the low class into low-middle class and low-middle class into low class(since they can't get a job), thus defeating the entire purpose of the whole frikkin idea. You'll merely shift who is in what class, not to mention I shudder to think of the bureacracy that would be needed to keep track of that information. And you neglect that those who are better qualified for a job getting that job is better for society - reason being they produce more than lesser qualified workers, and higher production can mean cheaper goods for all. Since this idea pretty much just shifts who is in a class around and it produces less than is optimal, this idea is BAD for society.

I think that a mild form of class-based affirmative action could be good in helping ambitious and intelligent people from lower class backgrounds, regardless of color, to work themselves up into better paying jobs.

One fact of human nature is that people tend to be more comfortable with people similar to themselves.  People making hiring decisions by definition are in higher-level positions, and will favor people for other higher level positions who are like them.  Sometimes it involves children of friends, friends of their children, people from their own social circle or alma mater, and the like.  This will usually produce a perpetuation of previously existing class roles, and make it harder for somebody from a lower economic background who lacks these connections to get into a higher level job.

The only problem with class-based affirmative action is that I really don't know how it would be implemented.  I think the effect of it would be fairly limited for the reasons mentioned by John Dibble.  You really can't take a person who is educated and has the temperment to have a blue collar job, and make that person a white collar professional.  The inclination toward higher level jobs already has to be there in order for it to succeed.  This is the same reason race-based affirmative action has failed.  It ends up helping those who need it the least, and has no impact whatsoever on the people who are failing because they never got an education during their formative years.  Affirmative action does nothing for people like that because they're not capable of meeting even the lower standards that affirmative action imposes for them to qualify for a particular job.