<p>Menloparkmom – You seem to have trouble distinguishing between under/overrepresentation and discrimination. One is not correlated with the other.
No… I was referring to the % of the population of Asians in Calif versus % of the Asian college population at UCB. Asians do not make up 45% of the Calif population. So how can one say with a straight face that Asians are discriminated against in college admissions at Berkeley?</p>
<p>"While it’s a pretty small sample, what do you notice? "
Overall, it looks like its harder for whites to be accepted than either Asians or URM’s
Hmmmmm…</p>
<p>It seems that some people still think that the “injustice” argument is a legitimate defense of affirmative action and that people who come to this country have to bear responsibility. I repeat: the argument is not legitimate; it has never garnered a majority of the Supreme Court’s votes.</p>
<p>I present two other quotations from Bakke that further prove how illegitimate the “injustice” rationale is, as follows:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Edit</p>
<p>Once more, it is amazing that after thirty years, people still misunderstand what Bakke said!</p>
<p>Top private schools also can not have their cake and eat it too. They can’t get bogged down with U.S. centric data and talk the talk about being a world university. They can’t admit double digit international students and not understand the implication. Does anyone really see that number staying static or going down in the next x number of years? </p>
<p>Outliers will always exist. If there are Ivy-seeking schools like these in Korea elsewhere in the world, please let me know. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/asia/27seoul.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/asia/27seoul.html</a></p>
<p>“It seems that some people still think that the “injustice” argument is a legitimate defense of affirmative action. I repeat: it is not; it has never garnered a majority of the Supreme Court”</p>
<p>HA!Oh really?? How about you read up on “Brown vrs the Board of Education”</p>
<p>[Brown</a> v. Board of Education - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education]Brown”>Brown v. Board of Education - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954),[1] was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, which overturned earlier rulings going back to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, by declaring that state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court’s unanimous (9–0) decision stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This victory paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement.[2]
…</p>
<p>Welcome to the new Oyez: devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work.</p>
<p><a href=“{{meta.fullTitle}}”>{{meta.fullTitle}};
<p>Facts of the Case: </p>
<p>Black children were denied admission to public schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to the races. The white and black schools approached equality in terms of buildings, curricula, qualifications, and teacher salaries. This case was decided together with Briggs v. Elliott and Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County.
Question: </p>
<p>Does the segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race deprive the minority children of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment?
Conclusion: </p>
<p>Yes. Despite the equalization of the schools by “objective” factors, intangible issues foster and maintain inequality. Racial segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on minority children because it is interpreted as a sign of inferiority. The long-held doctrine that separate facilities were permissible provided they were equal was rejected. Separate but equal is inherently unequal in the context of public education. The unanimous opinion sounded the death-knell for all forms of state-maintained racial separation.</p>
<p>Decisions</p>
<p>Decision: 9 votes for Brown, 0 vote(s) against
Legal provision: Equal Protection</p>
<p>menloparkmom - You missed the important “arguably” preceding my sentence, which modifies the first clause. The second clause, “certainly not [due] to different degrees of discrimination or racism,” I stand by–I think, as a reasonably-educated Asian person, I am somewhat qualified to judge whether I have experienced “real racial discrimination.” No one can experience the full oppression of multiple races (multiracial people are societally identified by appearance, or else they face different issues stemming from a racially ambiguous appearance). It is fallacious and fatal to activism to “rank” different types of oppression, whether it be comparing gender vs. race discrimination or Asian vs. Hispanic/Latin@ discrimination.</p>
<p>I agree, I haven’t lived in the US for 50+ years. But I assure you that I have “seen” AND “experienced” racial discrimination. For you to insinuate otherwise is not only idealistic but insulting.</p>
<p>Wrt UCB, that is my point exactly–you CANNOT say that Asians are discriminated against in college admissions at Berkeley, because by law they ARE not; racial affirmative action at the public universities is illegal in California, last I heard. Regardless, overrepresentation says nothing about discrimination or lack thereof.</p>
<p>Hunt - Thank you for compiling the data! Setting aside for the moment the problem of self-selection, I find it interesting that 17/17 of Asian students with non-STEM majors were admitted, while 8/17 of those identifying a math/science major were admitted yet the reverse trend is true for URMs (7/7 for STEM, 5/8 for non-STEM). This makes sense in a race-sensitive process, since there is an overabundance of Asian STEM students and an underabundance of URM STEM students; but it also raises the possibly of “balancing” race within academic fields as well as across the university, which may act as an indirect deflater on Asian admits. Speaking personally, I do believe that Asian students tend to gravitate toward STEM fields; but if they excel in those fields, then they should be admitted. I make the leap of guessing that perhaps some of the 7 rejected Asian STEM candidates were better-qualified than some of the 7 admitted URM STEM candidates.</p>
<p>Also, you might reconsider the procedure of counting “math/science” if one identified major is math/science… in such a scenario, I would be counted as a math/science major, while in reality CS is my secondary academic interest and my application fully supports my primary interest in English/the humanities.</p>
<p>With such a small sample size, the white and Asian are essentially equivalent in math/science. I’m fascinated by the fact that an equal number of Asian applicants identified a non-STEM major, and yet that group was admitted at a much higher rate. Especially at Yale, which has been trying to recruit STEM students.</p>
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</p>
<p>Espenshade’s model, oversimplified as it may be, didn’t produce a result of “only Whites and Asians end up at Harvard.” That’s a gross exaggeration of what would happen if admissions were either free of affirmative action or totally race-neutral.</p>
<p>To argue from that position is to create a straw man.</p>
<p>^^^ Brown v. Board of Education was a case of unequal facilities AT PRESENT TIME; it has nothing to do with historical injustices. Nor, regardless, would it ever be considered a legal precedent for an affirmative action case, since opponents of AA are certainly not seeking to re-segregate education.</p>
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</p>
<p>This strikes me as supporting the idea of “[p]referring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin,” which Justice Powell castigated as “discrimination for its own sake.”</p>
<p>Re 985</p>
<p>Brown was decided in 1954 and has nothing to do with affirmative action. In fact, the term “affirmative action” as understood in the United States did not even exist in 1954; it was coined by President Kennedy in 1961 when he used it in an [Executive</a> Order](<a href=“http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58863]Executive”>Executive Order 10925—Establishing the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity | The American Presidency Project).</p>
<p>Brown does not refute my claim that the Court has never supported the “injustice” argument as a defense for affirmative action.</p>
<p>
You are again conflating low-SES and URM. A low-SES Asian student admitted to an elite school will gain “access to the advantages that diplomas from those schools grant, and their kids are more likely to be able to succeed without any help.” In contrast, a high-SES URM will gain those same diploma advantages but their kids would have succeeded regardless, just like the high-SES Asian/white student in your previous hypothetical (Jane/Jill Smith and Chang, or somesuch). For the purposes of this discussion, “high-SES” includes the middle-class.</p>
<p>The distinction between giving “diploma advantages” to a low-SES URM and a low-SES Asian is that fewer such URMs than Asians would be admitted under race-neutral processes, because there is a significantly larger gap in achievement between URMs of different SES than between Asians of different SES. But this does not justify why the low-SES URM is more deserving of “diploma advantages” than the low-SES Asian (who, btw, is probably a U.S. citizen and thus deserves to be considered as such, not as a foreigner).</p>
<p>"Brown v. Board of Education was a case of unequal facilities AT PRESENT TIME.
"it has nothing to do with historical injustices. "
That is JUST about the most NAIVE, uneducated answer I have ever read on CC. How exactly do you think the UNEQUAL facilities[ my,my what a fancy name for elementary schools] came into being, Hmm?? Do you actually think that blacks weren’t discriminated against in this country, and especially in the deep south?? Do you actually think that blacks had the ability or freedom to CHOOSE where they could buy homes or where their children went to school? Have you never hear of the term “Red Lining”, when banks refused to offer blacks house loans, because they were black and used the guise of where they lived as justification? </p>
<p>Man, the degree of ignorance about the history and reasons for affirmative action by some on this thread is truly astonishing and sad…</p>
<p>'Brown was decided in 1954 and has nothing to do with affirmative action. In fact, the term “affirmative action” as understood in the United States did not even exist in 1954; it was coined by President Kennedy in 1961 when he used it in an Executive Order."</p>
<p>Yet another post that reflects a lack of HISTORICAL knowledge as well as understanding of the BIG PICTURE. </p>
<p>Affirmative Action was one of many SOLUTIONS, including busing and quotas that were instituted in this country AFTER and as a RESULT of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown, in an ATTEMPT to reverse the effects of decades of discrimination against black citizens. Prejudice did not and does not just vanish overnight .</p>
<p>^^You do realize that by “historical injustices,” I am using the conventional AA definition of “injustices that occurred in history that do not currently occur”? At the time of Brown, the blatant discrimination that you describe was ONGOING, therefore the legal precedent is irrelevant to rectifying “historical injustices” as I just defined it.</p>
<p>
Um, NO. Way to mischaracterize my position and rant against a straw man. This thread had succeeded in being remarkably civil for recent pages, but… I censor myself in the spirit of assumed misunderstanding.</p>
<p>fabrizio is correct in stating that Brown had nothing to do with affirmative action; you are correct in stating that affirmative action does relate to Brown. Since the “solution” came as a “result” of the Supreme Court ruling, that ruling obviously did not account for or relate to the “solution.” Relation does not go both ways, in historical context–affirmative action existed AFTER 1954. Therefore, any 1954 court opinion was made in the total absence of affirmative action policies [to my knowledge] and cannot be binding precedent with regard to such policies.</p>
<p>You do realize that by "historical injustices,"I am using the conventional AA definition of “injustices that occurred in history that do not currently occur”
No, I did not realize that you were using a narrow definition of “historical injustices”. How would I know that?
I hope you can step back and understand how your statement could be misunderstood using a different, broader definition of “historical injustices” like those that led to Brown vrs the board of Education.</p>
<p>
Fine, maybe I misinterpreted the exact goal, but the means of achieving the goal remains the same. Establishing a consistent African-American/Hispanic population for the future to a point where there is little to no disparity between academic qualifications at top schools is something that affirmative action cannot possibly do. How could something that effectively holds races at different standards help progression towards the goal of having a balanced population without different standards? The real problem lies in cultural differences in emphasis on education; tell me how affirmative action does anything but exasperate that problem.</p>
<p>I agree; affirmative action seems good for the short run in terms of bringing up URM representation. But if it turns into a crutch (given its existence for a few decades now, it arguably already has) how could it be beneficial for the future of racial equality?</p>
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</p>
<p>I repeat yet again: the “injustice” argument is unconstitutional. You can invoke it as much as you want, but it is not a valid rationale for affirmative action. I produce once more four quotations from Bakke:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Nothing in the Constitution supports the notion that individuals may be asked to suffer otherwise impermissible burdens in order to enhance the societal standing of their ethnic groups.</p></li>
<li><p>[T]here is a measure of inequity in forcing innocent persons in respondent’s position to bear the burdens of redressing grievances not of their making.</p></li>
<li><p>We have never approved a classification that aids persons perceived as members of relatively victimized groups at the expense of other innocent individuals in the absence of judicial, legislative, or administrative findings of constitutional or statutory violations.</p></li>
<li><p>Hence, the purpose of helping certain groups whom the faculty of the Davis Medical School perceived as victims of “societal discrimination” does not justify a classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons like respondent, who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered. To hold otherwise would be to convert a remedy heretofore reserved for violations of legal rights into a privilege that all institutions throughout the Nation could grant at their pleasure to whatever groups are perceived as victims of societal discrimination. That is a step we have never approved.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>Thanks for proving my point. If it was a “solution” instituted after Brown, then Brown cannot possibly provide evidence that the Supreme Court ever approved the “injustice” argument in favor of affirmative action.</p>
<p>You are right about one thing, though. Prejudice does not vanish overnight. But, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. By contrast, the idea of using racial classifications to get people to stop making judgments based on racial classifications makes no sense.</p>
<p>Therefore, any 1954 court opinion was made in the total absence of affirmative action policies [to my knowledge] and cannot be binding precedent with regard to such policies. "
Excuse me? Brown "acknowledged "that there was illegal discrimination, and that- the acknowledgement of illegal discrimination on the basis of race- became the legal justification or precedent for the AA solutions that followed.
Fabrizio stated that “Brown was decided in 1954 and has nothing to do with affirmative action”
That is like saying diapers have nothing to do with babies.</p>
<p>Brown was largely an attempt to bring states with a system of de jure segregation of public schools by race in line with other states that didn’t have de jure segregation by race in the public school system. </p>
<p>Cases following Brown then had to go to work on various forms of de facto segregation in public school systems, including forms of segregation that occurred in some school districts where no state law had ever required segregation by race.</p>
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</p>
<p>Chief Justice Warren’s Brown decision occurred seven years before the first use of the phrase “affirmative action.” The phrase does not show up anywhere in the Court’s opinion for the simple aforementioned reason: the phrase had yet to exist!</p>
<p>To argue that Brown provides evidence that the Supreme Court has accepted an “injustice” argument in favor of affirmative action is to, in essence, “retcon” history.</p>