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Haha yes it would be. It’s late.</p>
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<p>And we do the same against ugly people. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, nowadays (although probably not before), the United States is far more of a “looks-ist” society than a racist one. Regarding Chris Rock’s comments, I’m not black, but I’d gladly trade places with Shemar Moore or Jason Taylor. They, through their God-given handsomeness and height have surely enjoyed consistent advantages throughout life that I’ve never had and never will. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I suspect such a problem is far more salient with women. Even an ugly, short man can enjoy great success by dint of his intelligence and work ethic. But women, as we all know, are constantly judged by their appearance. That’s why women’s fashion, cosmetics, weight-loss, and plastic surgery comprise multi-billion dollar industries. Thin and exquisitely beautiful women can earn lavish incomes by working as models or actresses where people are effectively paying to look at them. Let’s be perfectly honest - Jessica Alba and Megan Fox are bad actresses, but they are nevertheless paid millions by the movie industry because they’re beautiful. </p>
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<p>I don’t know about that. I think that all average-looking men who aren’t truly self-deluded would have to admit that Brad Pitt and George Clooney are more handsome than they are. More importantly, I think most women understand painfully well that certain women (i.e. the aforementioned Megan Fox and Jessica Alba) are more beautiful than they are. In fact, plenty of women buy cosmetics, clothes, and even plastic surgery in a conscious attempt to look more like Megan Fox or Jessica Alba. The reverse is not true: Megan Fox and Jessica Alba are not trying to look like normal women. Hence, I think we all inherently understand that some people are more attractive than we are, even if we don’t enjoy admitting that fact to ourselves. </p>
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<p>Allow me to provide a few more examples. How about affirmative action in professional sports leagues for people who have no athletic talent? After all, it’s not my fault that I wasn’t born tall, strong, and fast. Yet I still want to play in the NFL. Or how about affirmative action on American Idol for people with no singing talent? After all, it’s not my fault that I wasn’t born with the natural ability to carry a tune.</p>
<p>Look, sakky, you don’t need to explain that to me. For the most part, I’m on your side. I agree that we are prejudiced more on looks than race nowadays. I think it’s disturbing that few people are willing to have an honest discussion about this, certainly not in mainstream and public discourse. There’s certainly no popular movement behind it as there are for other, politicized issues. It’s rarely acknowledged, even privately. It’s often in the back of my head when people protest some narrow unfairness or another, but I know I’m one of the few.</p>
<p>I have a friend in college who is ridiculously good-looking, and very liberal. He prattles on about the various ways that society ‘oppresses’ (in the passive form of the term) minorities and poor people. By all accounts he is an enlightened guy speaking justice to the world. But I can only look forward to the day when I can call him out, in public, on the fact that by virtue of his physical appearance, he has and is oppressing (in the passive form) the very real social stratum of looks-undesirables that exists across race and across class.</p>
<p>For some reason, and again I’m not sure why, physical appearance is just not in the category of disadvantages that people feel ought to be amended by society. I think the absence of any kind of politicization has something to do with it. I haven’t really given much thought, but I’m sure whatever the real reason is, it’s unsatisfactory. Maybe we’re just prejudiced about which of our prejudices we deem legitimate or not on an institutional scale.</p>
<p>I agree with your sentiment, but the way you go about your argument is counter-productive. Do you really need to talk about Jessica Alba and Brad Pitt to make your point? No, they obscure your point. My first reaction to your celebrity name-dropping was that given how few celebrities exist, the effects of looks-ism couldn’t be that broad. But then I remind myself, based on common sense, what a cumulative and pervasive impact physical appearance has on every single person’s life trajectory. Literally from the day you are born, your interactions and place in society are mediated by the way you look.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding the existence of these disadvantages, there are some serious obstacles to correcting for them, which you brush over. All of us can agree that Brad Pitt looks better than you or I, but that’s worlds away from producing an attractiveness rank in the vast gray middle. Even if there is a hierarchy of looks, there is no way we can determine that hierarchy. And besides, it’s clear that there is no one hierarchy; for all but the most attractive or most ugly, looks are irreducibly subjective.</p>
<p>So what is your actual response when I raise the stakes a few levels? Affirmative action for those not good at sports or music. Affirmative action for lazy people. Affirmative action for stupid people. Perhaps even anti-social or evil people – murderers and drug-dealers, if we get really deterministic. What about them? If you reject affirmative action for them, you are only drawing an artificial line one step beyond where most others have drawn their artificial lines.</p>
<p>My question is, do you accept those examples that you came up with? Affirmative action for non-talented singers on American Idol. In a deterministic world, we are all equal: equally determined to do what we do, to think what we think, to be who we are. If you’re not ready to make such an admission, and live your life by it – if that’s even possible – then would you agree that leaving ‘looks’ discrimination be, in spite of your misgivings, might be a good decision, if only because of the can of worms that it would otherwise open up?</p>
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<pre><code>It would not be far-fetched to say that I find it disturbing, at the very least. This new American plutocracy, as represented by these intellectually shallow and morally vacuous evaluators, has not served America well; it certainly has not served the world well. Do we really want a dynasty of the unearned?
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<p>The big picture…</p>
<p>Running a college is a business. They do not care about being fair. They care about making money and promoting their name. Colleges admit applicants to fill various niches. Applicants who can fill a niche will get a boost in admissions, whether it be, an athlete, donor family, legacy, high sat scorer, musician, minority etc. </p>
<p>Life is not fair on various levels. I do not need to go into detail. Spending so much energy complaining about one group that may get an advantage in the admission game serves no good. Colleges will admit applicants based on the college’s need.</p>
<p>Their policies will not change. It will and always will be, what is best for the college, not what is best for the individual.</p>
<p>^ Yes, because policies sure haven’t changed in the past century for admission to America’s elite schools. Life is unfair and will always be unfair – and there’s no point in talking about it!</p>
<p>I don’t see how admitting people with a “weaker” app if you take out race would help the colleges, smileygerl. Even if they took out AA I’m sure they would be making the same amount of money.</p>
<p>Sakky,your analogy simply does not work.Irrespective of a debilitiating condition,a beautiful person will stay beautiful;poverty,at least in the US does not critically affect height.However in the admissions game,money makes all the difference.It pays for test prep,piano lessons,and all those trips some guys make to Zambia to help the poor.Affirmative action helps address this inequality.Its not that they are admitting an idiot;they are simply admitting a capable human being who could not pay for Kaplan courses and a personal tutor.</p>
<p>My application to Stanford had a section where you could yourself as a member of an underrepresented group. I wrote that whereas Stanford students seemed to be tall, blonde, tanned, and good looking, I was short, pale, and rather sickly in appearance, and was hoping that they might take that into consideration.</p>
<p>I had forgotten all about it, until I came across a quote from my application in a book by the Stanford dean of admissions, in a chapter on ethical dilemmas. She said she tended to discount the applications that made her laugh, and quoted that section of my application as an example.</p>
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<p>I was simply using them as examples that we all know. We all surely personally know some people in our own personal lives who could be said to probably be as physically attractive as Brad Pitt or Jessica Alba. But I obviously don’t know the ones that you know in your life, and you don’t know the ones in mine. But we all know who Brad Pitt and Jessica Alba are. They therefore serve as common proxies that we can all relate to. </p>
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<p>But we don’t need to construct the full hierarchy, at least, not to start. We could simply start on the margins. After all,that’s how race-based AA operates today, or at least, how it is supposed to operate. Nobody is arguing that every URM is admitted into a top college just because of AA. If you’re an URM with terrible grades, test scores, and EC’s, you’re not going to get into any top college. Where AA comes into play is when you’re close. We can argue over the exact definition of close, but the underlying philosophy is that if your qualifications are close enough to merit admission, AA will provide you with an extra boost on the margins. The same could be said to operate in reverse for “over-represented” races: whites and Asians whose qualifications are on the borderline of admission may be rejected because of their race. </p>
<p>And the same could be done with attractiveness. The 5% least attractive people could be provided with an admissions boost, and the 5% most attractive people could be accorded an admissions disadvantage. As we all agree, the ugliest guys are to going to suffer from disadvantages throughout their entire life that other guys will never have, so, from a pure fairness standpoint, why can’t he be provided a college admissions boost? That is, if fairness is indeed what we in society truly care about. {More on this point below.}</p>
<p>The natural counterargument is regarding second-order effects: that people would then deliberately try to make themselves look ugly in order to receive an admissions boost. But that happens now with race-based AA!. For example, in response to the Ivy League Numerus Clausus quotas that capped Jewish admissions, many Jews officially changed their stereotypical Jewish last names - Larry Summers’ father changed his family’s last name from Samuelson - and moved out of New York and other cities where Jews were known to congregate, all in an effort to appear more “Anglo”. Right now, there are people who have classified themselves as African-American, Hispanic, or Native American based on the fact that they may have had an ancestor who was of that race - reminiscent of the old hypodescent-oriented ‘one-drop rule’ of the Jim Crow era when having even a single drop of black blood meant that you were black yourself and hence subject to segregation laws. The spread of raced-based AA laws to Native Americans ‘coincided’ with burgeoning growth of the Native American population not because of natural growth, but because many people have ‘rediscovered’ their Native American past and have reclassified themselves as such. </p>
<p>Some people qualify for AA-race categories only on a technical basis. For example, people with Spanish ancestry - that is, not from Mexico or any other Central/South-American nation, but directly from Spain itself - technically qualify as “Hispanic”, defined to be anybody who can trace their ancestry to the old Spanish Empire of which Spain was the eponymous member. But why? Are Spanish people disadvantaged? Not only are they racially white, but for all of its recent economic woes, Spain is nevertheless still one of the richest countries in the world, being richer than most Asian nations and even Israel on a per-capita basis, and certainly nobody is proposing to provide AA to anybody of Asian or Israeli descent.</p>
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<p>And how is that, exactly? Are there not rich blacks and Hispanics who can easily afford that test prep, piano lessons, and all those trips to Zambia of which you speak? Are there not poor whites and Asians who can’t afford any of that? </p>
<p>That’s the heart of the problem of AA as currently defined: it is based on ethnicity, conveniently ignoring the fact that plenty of people from supposedly disadvantaged ethnicities are actually extraordinarily privileged.</p>
<p>Don’t believe me? Pop quiz - according to the 2010 listing in Forbes Magazine, who’s the richest man in the world? If you answered Bill Gates, unfortunately you’re wrong. The answer is Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom, retail and finance magnate. Yet despite the fact that - forget about buying test prep and piano lessons - Slim is rich enough to buy entire universities, his descendants can nevertheless take advantage of AA as it is structured today because they’re Hispanic. How fair does that seem to you?</p>
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<p>But that’s the point - a beautiful, tall person will enjoy advantages throughout his entire life. People will find his ideas more convincing, be more friendly and helpful to him, he will surely enjoy greater success in a job involving social transactions such as sales, he will also surely develop greater self-confidence, just because he’s handsome. But he didn’t do anything to ‘earn’ that handsomeness He was just born with it.</p>
<p>The point is simply to explore the notion of unfairness regarding being born white and hence avoiding the societal discrimination that those who are born black or Hispanic might have to endure, and is supposedly to be compensated through AA. By the argument, those who are born handsome won’t have to endure the societal discrimination that those who are born ugly will have to endure, yet nobody seems interested in providing AA for them. I wonder why.</p>
<p>Like I said, I’m not black, but I wouldn’t mind looking like Shemar Moore or Tyson Beckford. I wouldn’t mind that one bit. In this society, I’ll gladly take being a handsome, tall, buff black guy over being an ugly, short, scrawny non-black guy anyday.</p>
<p>A lot of misinformation in your last post cormy.</p>
<p>Spanish hispanics do not get nearly the boost the Mexican and Puerto Rican hispanics get in admission</p>
<p>You are oversimplifying the idea of affirmative action. It’s not just check a box and get a boost. The ones who gain the most under the current affirmative action system had to actually overcome some difficulties. While they probably get more credit for their achievement despite their circumstances than do Asians or whites, they still were at a disadvantage. That’s what the colleges like - if you can succeed when the cards are against you, imagine what you can do when they’re playing in your favor. I doubt minorities from wealthy families that go to great schools get nearly the same boost as the Puerto Rican kid who works 30 hours a week so he feed his family. </p>
<p>When you think about it this way, it isn’t about “fairness” in the same way affirmative action for attractiveness would be. Just because you’re ugly doesn’t mean you can’t get a 4.0 and 2400 - in fact, I’m sure it happens a lot. But if you’re going to a crappy school where even the teachers can barely read, then I’m sure it would be much more difficult. And minorities who face those kind of circumstances gain the biggest advantage. </p>
<p>I’m not going to deny that the racial element is a large part of affirmative action, but I think you are really oversimplifying it. It’s not the same for everyone who has checked a certain. Mexican hispanics get a bigger boost the hispanics from Spain, and poor blacks benefit more than wealthy ones.</p>
<p>I apologize if I misunderstood what you were trying to say, but affirmative action is not so black and white.</p>
<p>The post you’re responding to is sakky’s, not mine.</p>
<p>I just have a few things to say about your post, but of course sakky can and should speak for himself.</p>
<p>Actually, it is as simple as checking a box. Or else, again, it would not be race-based. It would be socioeconomic-based. Or something else entirely. Haven’t we already been over this?</p>
<p>Someone born ugly or frail is not going to be elected class president, or play varsity football. Almost never. Your chances of being black and getting straight A’s is far higher. So you could say physical appearance disadvantages you far more.</p>
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<p>To sakky: Okay, why are you arguing so many specifics? I just want to know where you draw the line between disadvantages that society should amend, and the ones we shouldn’t? Again, would you favor AA for the unintelligent?</p>
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No, it really isn’t.</p>
<p>You get the AA advantage when you check the box. If you’re poor also, you get more. If you live in a bad neighborhood, even extra. If, on top of all this, you have faced unique personal struggles such as a relative getting killed in gang violence, and you can convey this in your essays, then your application is golden. But those previous three things are not AA. If you think otherwise, post your evidence. That’s the last empty post I’ll respond to.</p>
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<p>But they still get some boost. The question is, why exactly should Spanish people get any boost at all? After all, Italian people don’t belong to any AA-oriented ethnic category that provides them with a boost, despite the fact that Spain and Italy share numerous cultural traits. The fact that Spain established an empire in the Western Empire 500 years ago and Italy never did means that Spanish people deserve an AA boost over Italians? Why’s that? </p>
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<p>Well, actually, under the current regime, it is exactly that, and that’s why it is controversial. See below. </p>
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<p>Exactly. Why does a white or (especially) an Asian who had to survive similar adverse circumstances not provided the credit that a black, Hispanic or native American would? </p>
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<p>I’m sure that some “economic”-based AA occurs as well, and such would not be politically controversial. For example, I’m sure that some poor whites from Appalachia are provided some (modest) AA-boost. </p>
<p>The controversy is regarding *race-*based affirmative action, for as I said, not all blacks and Hispanics are poor. The richest man in the world is a Mexican; why should his descendants receive any AA boost whatsoever? Yet they would according to the method that AA is currently run. </p>
<p>But I’ll leave the question up to the audience. If you believe that Carlos Slim’s descendants should deserve an AA-boost, then by all means, explain why you think so. Otherwise, you have to agree that their boost should be removed. </p>
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<p>Interestingly, I used to live in neighborhoods full of rather crappy schools (yes, I basically lived in the ghetto), yet I nevertheless met some ‘superstars’ of those schools who who earned nearly perfect grades and test scores. Yet, perhaps not so coincidentally, the high-achievers were mostly Asian - being poor immigrants from Vietnam, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so forth who could not afford to live in any better neighborhood, despite the fact that the vast majority of the students at those schools were black or Hispanic. In fact, I remember meeting the valedictorian of one of these low-end schools, who “coincidentally” happened to be the lone Asian student in the senior class. But, for the purposes of race-based AA, their accomplishments are discounted because they’re Asian. (Granted, they did receive some boost anyway because they’re poor, but we’re not talking about that part of AA). They are living proof that you can succeed academically even amidst a poor school environment. </p>
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<p>Ironic that you would use the term “not so black and white”, when in fact, it is indeed highly “black and white”.</p>
<p>But if you still disagree with me, then allow me to make a modest proposal. From this point on, all college applications must receive all semblance of race. Applications cannot ask you what race you belong to. The names of applicants will be redacted so that adcom officers cannot tell what race the applicant belongs to (i.e. as it stands now, if you have the last name of “Wu” or “Singh”, it’s not that hard to figure out what your race is), and all applicants will instead be identified by an anonymous number. However, applications are still allowed to mention what school you belonged to, the income of your parents, and other circumstances of poverty that you may have endured. In that way, we will have entirely removed the ability to provide race-based AA, but still allow for income-based AA. </p>
<p>Now, whether you actually agree with that proposal is irrelevant. What matters is that we all agree that that’s not how admissions are run today. In other words, adcoms are clearly using race to determine admissions decisions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be asking you race-based questions.</p>
<p>Thank you, sakky, for having the patience that I never will.</p>
<p>You’re an amazing asset to the community for that very reason.</p>
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<p>Where AA becomes truly controversial is when rich blacks who suffered no adverse circumstances are nevertheless admitted over an equally qualified white or (especially) Asian who is poor and suffered through adverse circumstances. Yet that happens repeatedly.</p>
<p>…preferences primarily benefit minority applicants from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. At the same time, because admissions are a zero-sum game, preferences hurt poor whites and even many Asians (who meet admissions standards in disproportionate numbers)…why should the under-qualified son of a black doctor displace the qualified daughter of a Vietnamese boat refugee?</p>
<p>[The</a> Case Against Affirmative Action](<a href=“http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1996/sepoct/articles/against.html]The”>http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/1996/sepoct/articles/against.html)</p>
<p>What I find personally most disturbing is that AA works its way all the way up the ladder. Not just undergrad, but grad school, scholarships, fellowships, special programs, employment, making tenure or partner somewhere. I have a friend who graduated and is in a PhD program in the sciences. AA still plagues him, and he’s worried about his chances landing a spot at a top university as just another Asian in a science field. By his accounts, it seems the magnitude of AA is still obscenely large among people who have already been in school for 20+ years.</p>
<p>Oh, I didn’t mean to sound callous. The underprivileged Asian girl who can’t afford college after getting rejected by AA from all the need-blind Ivies – that’s definitely tragic, especially when done in the name of racial justice. I just meant that, usually, it’s like… undergraduate – big deal, not the end of the world. But one would hope that when it comes time for doing research crucial to industry and our understanding of the world, the people in charge would stop playing these political games. Apparently not.</p>
<p>I wonder if anyone’s done a comparative study on, say, socioeconomic disadvantage vs. race-based AA. In other words, is checking the box more powerful than where you come from? Is race more important than your individual? I think the results would be interesting and give much perspective.</p>