<p>BERKELEY, CA (KGO) -- Affirmative rights advocates will file a lawsuit Tuesday challenging California's Proposition 209. Approved in 1996, it prohibits the UC system from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in student admissions.</p>
<p>Members of a group called 'To Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary," also known as "BAMN," launched the campaign Monday at Berkeley and UCLA.</p>
<p>BAMN says that because of Prop 209, the UC system is in a state of what it calls "permanent de facto segregation."</p>
<p>"We want a future of equality," said organizer Tania Kappner. "This is this generation's Brown v. Board of Education. To make integration real, we have to have affirmative action back here in California."</p>
<p>I still feel that if you want Affirmative action in school then it should be on an individuals financial situation and not on their race. It’s not fair if one individual who is considered a minority and is considered wealthy and has all the same resources that rich non-minority have, but is able to slide right in because their a minority status. Compared to someone who is not considered a minority, and is considered lower class.</p>
<p>Or just let things stay the way they are as if you let individuals who were considered unqualified then wont it make it harder for them to succeeded at a top school.</p>
<p>Honestly Affirmative action will never be back in the U.C’s again. </p>
<p>Let face it this lawsuit is a lawsuit against Asians. </p>
<p>If you want Affirmative action back you should split up the entire asian group then. </p>
<p>An Asian group that include way too many diversity’s and type of people that you would have to reclassify the entire “Asian Race” category on the application and thats opening a whole new can of worms. </p>
<p>Ex. O i can just apply as Vietnamese because it’s easier to get in or apply as Thai etc.</p>
<p>“To Fight for Equality by Any Means Necessary”</p>
<p>…Why don’t they act on their own words. I consider it equality when middle class or upper class black people don’t get an extra 200 points solely because they are black.</p>
<p>What a bunch of cry babies. Just an excuse for their poor performance. I don’t think it is fair that a black guy with a 3.5 is considered the same as a white guy with a 4.0. Where is the logic in that? I agree with the poster above who says it should be on financials/parent’s educational background. Face it, if you’re a minority, you got it made. A lot of scholarships are for minorities only because it is good PR. How would it look if it said whites only-hey, now, that is racist? Laugh out loud. </p>
<p>I think it is a joke. Let all the people get their cow bells out and start screaming like mad men. Personally, I believe it is not needed anymore. Back then, yes, it was good. But I don’t think it is relevant now! We have not had slavery for a long time. Let us move on.</p>
<p>I think diversity is good. I personally would not go to Berkeley if it was over 40% Asian. That is why I did not apply to Davis or Irvine. I myself do not want to feel like a minority. I can understand others too.</p>
<p>Future of equality? That would only work against these groups that are fighting for affirmative action. If they really want equality, let’s have admissions based solely on GPA and standardized test scores, so then only the best students get in.</p>
<p>I find many responses to this thread laughable, especially thebigsh0w’s responses. If any of you took the time to study sociology, sociopolitics, politics of race and gender, or conflict social theory, you would understand that a poor African American’s GPA is definitely worth more than a rich English American’s GPA. There are certain roadblocks and lack of privilege that an underprivileged person faces throughout his or her life that should be compensated for. Affirmative action is based on factual social science. The myth that we’re all equal and we all have a fair shot at everything is completely false. You guys should be aware of this, especially if you consider yourselves college-educated individuals.</p>
<p>I’m not going to argue about this subject as the thousands of scientific research studies done by PhDs and nobel laureates make the argument for themselves. If you want to argue, look up scientific fact-based studies instead of using your personal (and ignorant) anecdotal conclusion.</p>
<p>I, for one, am not afraid to admit that as a half-Japanese and half-German 5th generation American citizen I have come to where I now stand because I have been given a great deal of PRIVILEGE while growing up, both socially and financially. I would NOT have a 4.0/3.98 (+/- unweighted) GPA as a Math major from both a 4-year and a CCC (who has also finished prerequisites for Sociology, Political Science, Peace and Conflict Studies, Economics) if I had to, for example: work many hours a week to pay for my college education or support my other family members; faced significant discouraging racial-based roadblocked; felt my professors were basing judgement on me because of my skin tone or cultural dialect; psychologically internalized the absence of a parent missing in my childhood; etc. I absolutely DO NOT think my transcript is worth as much work as a transcript of someone with equal (or even lower) grades who DID face such barriers. And I am not afraid to admit this. And I will continue to fight for affirmative action because I recognize the PRIVILEGE I was given (and did not deserve) and I do not think it’s right that I had that privilege.</p>
<p>BUT, affirmative action should be administered INTELLIGENTLY. It should be based on a combination of race, ethnicity, socioeconomics, and personal experience.</p>
<p>It’s absurd to think that a 4.0 should be trumped by a 3.5 from a minority in an extremely difficult situation. BUT, the minority 3.5 should sure as hell triumph over a privileged 3.5. What else do any of you honestly expect from affirmative action beyond that?</p>
<p>A 3.5 could definitely triumph over a 4.0 but it wouldn’t really do so in terms of Affirmative Action. If the person with the 3.5 faced SEVERE downfalls it wouldn’t be considered affirmative action at that point, probably… That applicant would probably have discussed his/her very serious situation in his/her personal statement. So yeah, a 3.5 compared to a 4.0 would definitely be beyond affirmative action.</p>
<p>It’s easy to picture a person with such qualities but it’s another thing to actually find those with such character. I hope to be surrounded by intelligent minds like that, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not exactly expecting this to come at me from all angles.</p>
<p>Yeah, definitely… Most applicants won’t feel the effect of affirmative action at all. Those applicants who are particularly privileged and have found themselves doing well (in terms of their transcript) but who kinda just felt like HS was easy and they never really tried hard would probably be affected. Those who really felt they didn’t deserve to get in but still did get in would probably be affected. But if you are hard working, you won’t and shouldn’t be affected. The point is it should be based on exactly how hard you worked as a person and the way they achieve that is by adjusting your numbers by privilege.</p>
<p>Someone like our 3.5/4.0 example would definitely be a statistical outlier and would definitely gain acceptance with or without affirmative action. :)</p>
<p>mikei, as someone who has taken many sociology, political science, and race and gender classes, I see and understand your point. However, it’s not about the color of someone’s skin, but their upbringing. If they’re wealthy, being black should not add one shred of glamour to their application. To think that a 4.0 white student who works long hours to support his family, gets denied in place of a 3.5 black student who’s parents are wealthy, just doesn’t make sense. (same goes for any minority, obviously)</p>
<p>@mikei I grew up in a slummy area, my parents owned apartments and worked their asses off. I had to basically take care of myself as my parents were overworked and never had time for much of anything. I was in GATE classes, 70% of my peers were poor mexicans. I felt like the competition(relatively speaking it was elementary school) was a lot more fierce at the slum full of mexicans and lower class whites then I did in the upper middle class area I’m in now. If a kid is bright, they will be picked out of the group and given at least some chance. It might take a few generations, but as it stands, we already have a clear shift in the classes where the poorest are turning out to be the least intelligent and those who have a bit more in their heads tend to find themselves a quartile higher up on the social scale than their descendants at the expense of the less capable.</p>
<p>BTW, there IS some degree of affirmative action already, public schools in tier1 area get graded a bit more harshly then say a tier3 school. if the SEVERE racial inequality some are speaking of is so bad, then that system of giving preference to those in poorer areas should help out a bit, shouldn’t it?</p>
<p>Given that I understood your post correctly:</p>
<p>Your logic states that poor individuals are less intelligent than wealthy individuals. This is a scientifically disproven fact.</p>
<p>The premise of your argument is that gifted students will be “picked out” of low-income institutions and given additional help. This assumes that the student must be naturally gifted. This can be entirely compensated-for in education. Intelligence is not a fixed trait and those students are statistical outliers.</p>
<p>Those low-income students that you think are so unintelligent are simply undereducated because local property taxes support K-12 schools.</p>
<p>Class mobility is at an all time low point. And who says that is SHOULD take “generations” to get out of the “slums”? That doesn’t sound like equality to me.</p>
<p>I absolutely do not believe low-income people are that way because they are “naturally unintelligent.” In fact, natural intelligence is only very slightly related to school performance (source: studies in Outliers by Malcom Gladwell).</p>
<p>You are arguing on a scientifically disproven base; the academic fields of education, sociology and psychology have moved beyond this “natural intelligence” fad as various studies have shown that the old-fashioned, traditional concept of “intelligence” is only a very small piece of the pie.</p>
<p>But you didn’t know that, did you? Your argument also implicitly states that you believe, or events in your life express, that you are “naturally intelligent” or “gifted.” However, you based your argument on misinformation and out-dated politically-tainted information. Your argument is an example of a gifted person mis-analyzing a situation. Furthermore, I would say that you conclusions (poor people are poor because they are unintelligent and intelligent poor people will be cherry-picked) are arrived at through a very shallow analysis. If you presented this argument in an academic setting, you would surely be shot down and you would certainly receive a very low grade. This example shows a lack of correlation between your IQ intelligence and your performance in school. Furthermore, any correlation between high IQ and job performance, social performance and higher educational performance has been proved false in a variety of studies. (Read up on Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond.)</p>
<p>My immediate family is involved with class and education research at Stanford University. We fight hard to reverse the great deal of misinformation (read: ignorance) revolving around the subject of underprivileged peoples and school performance. Sorry if I seemed too rough, I was being blunt because being blunt is sometimes a very effective way to get a message across. There were various conclusions in your argument that I found inherently racist; this is very disturbing to me.</p>
<p>Yeah I almost responded to xelink’s post but it was so laughably misguided I said why bother lol. Anyone with half of a brain and minor exposure to research on the subject would recognize his post as ludicrous.</p>
).</p>