UPDATED–ah, I remember in 2005, when GOP head honcho Ken Mehlman apologized for utilizing racially charged campaigns.
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
Please share widely!
right here
and Republicans booed him in 1996.
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p>Powell clearly had merit, and when he was in charge of war in the Middle East, he didn’t screw it up.
shows just how superficial your thinking is.
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p>Urban and rural schools with predominantly non-white students don’t get the same resources as suburban schools. You think a kid who attends a public high school in the rural Mississippi delta is on an even playing field for college admissions versus a kid who got to go to a suburban school with well-stocked science labs and fully funded music programs?
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p>You would agree that kids who went to schools with good gymnasiums and Phys Ed programs would be healthier and stronger by and large, but it doesn’t occur to you that students who go to underfunded or overcrowded schools with outdated textbooks and old computers have had their educations disadvantaged by the people in power? This nation has been shortchanging minorities’ schools for decades (and the “fiscal conservatives” have always said, “don’t throw money at the schools”) but conservatives still think we should pretend as if those disadvantages don’t happen.
But I do think that guy is on an even playing field with a white kid from the same school.
We have a winner.
to address the inequalities that exist in public education, race based and/or class based?
Since schools are funded with property taxes, low income areas inherently get less money for school, pumping out students with a lower education.
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p>If you think being black and from a disparaged neighborhood sucks, affirmative action stacks the deck even more against whites from the same area.
directed at CMD, but feel free to answer it.
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p>Accepting your premise, what do you propose to remedy the (class based) inequality in public education?
Idon’t think I disagree with what JoeTS posted above, but here is mine:
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p>1. Abolish all affirmative action and racial prefences, under whatever guise, “diveristy a factor” or otherwise.
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p>2. If you feel the need to institutionalize a “golf handicap” then incorporate means or income testing. Does that mean that there will be finagling around the margin– kind of like tax planning? Probably. But that is a small price to pay to get the government out of the business of specifically disadvantaging people on account of their race.
in many cases, we are giving a lot of money to urban schools – not enough by any stretch of the imagination, but still many of these schools aren’t lacking in decent gyms and equipment. The problem is a lot of our attempts at making urban schools better have fallen flat because we aren’t addressing many of the problems urban schools have in teaching their kids – mainly, that most of learning is going to happen at home, but a lot of these kids are living in homes that are broken, or in situations of poverty, or with parents who are too busy working nights to help their kids out with homework (or even just making sure they’re doing it). I truly don’t think we can bridge the urban-suburban educational gap until we lengthen school hours during the day to include time for homework help, that includes on-the-spot tutors, as well as time for extracurricular activity and music and art classes, which have been proven to help students in a number of important ways. While that means we’ll need to spend more on our children, I really think it can be done in a way that won’t cost too much more… and the money will be returned several times over, when we’re putting more intelligent kids into the work force every year and improving every city and town in Massachusetts, no matter where people live.
didn’t you know? tony snow said so. 😉
This is one of those systemic causation things that’s always too difficult to explain easily. Doing affirmative action well and correctly requires excellent judgment, so it always messes up on the fringes. It’s still worth doing, even when inefficient, but it seems to always provide just enough anecdotes and causes of resentment to fuel negative speeches and ads.
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p>I wonder how it could be made an easier sell? Should proponents be attempting to make it personal so that we can all identify emotionally with its benefits?
People don’t want to hear the fact that certain people in America, especially straight White males, have had special rights and privileges granted to them over the last 400 years. Special voting rights, the right not to be forced into slavery, the right not to be raped, the right not to be lynched, the right to move into any neighborhood they wanted to without fearing for their lives, the right not to have their children blown up in churches, the right not to be ripped from their California homes and sent to Arkansas concentration camps, the right to the GI Bill – which built the US middle class, the right to have the sheriff enforce the laws rather then look the other way when you were assaulted, the right to an education, the right to sit in the front of the bus, the right to hold elected office, the right to a fair trial, the right to impartial sentencing, the right to not be forced into sterilization, the right to serve in the armed forces without prejudice, the right not to get beat up by cops because of sexual orientation, the right not to be infected with syphilis for government medical experiments, etc.
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p>People don’t want to hear that White skin is a privilege and an advantage in America. They want to pretend that racism, institutional or otherwise, doesn’t exist and that the civil rights movement made all things equal, therefore the government has atoned for slavery and the other statutory privileges extended to White people over the years.
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p>People on both sides here generally agree that Martin Luther King Jr is a hero and one of the greatest Americans to ever live. Here’s what he said on the matter in 1964’s Why We Can’t Wait:
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p>King also reminds us it’s not just minorities who are recipients of Affirmative Action:
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p>People don’t want to hear that one foundation our nation was built upon is what essentially amounts to Affirmative Action for straight White males for hundreds of years – Black people even got shafted out of much of the GI Bill.
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p>If you can’t get people to acknowledge the magnitude of such advantages and the incredibly long time it takes to heal the scars of the government-enforced racism and race based violence that was taking place 30-40 years ago, how can you get people to listen to ideas on how to create true equality and fairness?
Your comment reminds me of lots of things we know but don’t always remember. It also states a pessimistic view about the possibility of progress.
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p>Any ideas on how to overcome the empathy deficit and the strong pull of denial?
…no idea. Many have outlined the so-called “assault on reason” in american discourse, and I doubt I can add much to what the Gores and Susan Jacobys et al have said.
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p>As long as so many people want to believe the simple, sound bite explanations such as the example comparing Affirmative Action to a golf handicap instead of engaging the complex problem critically, there’s not much we can do. The only tools we have is education and talking to our friends and neighbors who have open minds and showing them today’s issues aren’t as simple as some would like to sell them as.
I think (or is it hope?) that these referendums will be seen for what they are, and will fall flat on the public. Many of the more recent anti-gay amendments and referendums actually worked against the interests of Republican candidates in some states. People are catching up with the old republican dirty trick book and its becoming less and less effective. My hopes is that it will be seen for what it is and will actually drive up voter turnout for people who see it for what it is – racism and an attempt to manipulate the elections.
Heck, it passed in Michigan a few years ago, where something like 60% of Democrats supported it.
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p>This is just another case of the GOP being ahead of the Dems. Ballot initiatives help to drive out the base, so put on a ballot initiative that will bring out your base.
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p>My recommendation: state provided health insurance for all pregnant women and children under 1 year old. Who doesn’t believe that every mother and child deserve quality health care? So, put it on the ballot. Don’t worry about funding it — that’s the lege’s job. Just get it on the ballot. The Dem base will support it, you’ll get plenty of indie and GOP women to support it, and I’d bet a fair number of younger men who are still forming their own families to support it.
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p>I tend not to like government by initiative. But, I do appreciate GOTV by initiative.
I would be for getting rid of affirmative action in college admissions but only if the schools simultaneously got rid of legacy admissions as well. Chicago has never had any legacy admissions since we were founded as a meritocratic institution unlike the east coast schools that shunned plenty of men (and women) of merit for centuries.
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p>Also I oppose minority preference contracts since at least here in Chicago, it quickly becomes another way to curry political favor and have contracts come not from merit but by political expediency. When it comes to things like roads, schools, and infrastructure the job should be done by companies with proven track records not politically connected companies whether it be a Bechtel or a minority owned company. Preferential contracting in all forms should end.
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p>In terms of hiring I oppose mandatory policies but support letting companies make their staff more diverse, and most major companies actively recruit for qualified minorities since it makes their company look socially responsible and engaged.
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p>Also the best way to make affirmative action obsolete is to actually fund education and innovation in minority neighborhoods and dare I say it school choice as well.
I once got a job based largely on the school from which I graduated. Not only had my boss attended but at least two of my co-workers did, too. These kinds of “special cultures” are everywhere. The request to find people who “fit in” is too often a request to get another white person from a particular niche in our culture. The inertial and cumulative effect is segregation.
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p>I just don’t see how one breaks that up without external pressure. And by pressure, I really mean pressure.
you never ever ever see conservatives railing against legacy admissions in higher education. (How would their future Presidents get into Yale?)
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p>So it’s not about merit with them.
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p>Even with academia, lots of conservative students with substandard academic skills get propped up by the generosity of wealthy people like Richard Mellon Scaife and massive corporations like ExxonMobil and RJR. They can’t write papers with enough scholarly value to earn a position at a real university, so they go to fake academic institutes, like the Discovery Institute, the Pacific Research Center, the Heartland Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute–which offered $10,000 bribes to scientists who would deny global warming. The conservative “scholars” write position papers to curry favor with their billionaire benefactors, and they are rewarded with easy incomes.
I was thinking the same thing: George W. Bush – America’s first Affirmative Action President!
Don’t the Republicans put up ballot measures like this for every Presidential election? And then the Democrats complain about how this brings out the racist/bigot vote.
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p>And then the Republicans start with insanely stupid attack ads and repeat them until people start believing them. The Democrat says that these things are too ridiculous to respond to and vacillates between talking about really boring issues and making half-hearted attempts to refute the attack.
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p>And then there’s the debate where everything that the Republican candidate says goes unchallenged because the Democrat refuses to flat-out call B.S. And then suddenly a slam-dunk election becomes a tie.
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p>When are the Democrats ever going start doing this first and start playing the offense with the stances that most of the country actually supports?
that could have been one reason Claire McCaskill narrowly won the U.S. Senate seat in Missouri.
I oppose all ballot initiatives since we live in a Republic and not a democracy and by all counts historically direct democracy has lead to more abuses than reform. Just look at anti Brown v Board initiatives after the landmark ruling, anti gay marriage rulings, Gov. Schwarzenneger being a fact instead of a punchline, proposition 2 1/2 here in MA, anti immigrant propositions in CA, the list goes on. People will consistently vote in a selfish manner against the interests of people different from them, poorer than them, browner than them, etc. They take their prejudices and their self interest into the booths every time.
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p>That said Id support using them to GOTV but only in swing states and only when the GOP has put on on there first.