Affirmative ActionFollow

You admittedly didn't read my post but are making claims about it's content. good one.

Your 1.3 acres and mule hoof are in the mail.

Just noticed that somehow when I read her post I missed the part where she said that her employer changed away from that system. I had read it as just being a previous employer. Regardless, the fact that it was a system that was in place somewhere should probably serve to show that there isn't a unifying policy in place, and that some of them may toe the line a bit. I think it's probably safe to say that employers probably vary to both sides of that position, some erring more on the side of hiring for race, some erring on the side of hiring for qualification. And of course, said employers could vary on that position from hire to hire, situation to situation. And I don't have a clue of what percentage of employers would handle it in any given way.

The question I'd wonder about is "does AA cause less-qualified minority employees to be hired ever?" And I think it's probably a given that it does.

Anyways, here's an example of the situation that I was alluding to:

Say that there are 6 candidates for the job. 5 are white, 1 is black. 5 are going to get an interview. All of the candidates score say, a 10 except for one white candidate (9) and the black candidate (8). The black candidate gets a 2 point bump, and gets into the interview. He's then beat out one better qualified candidate.

S'all just hypothetical...I don't know how the point system worked in reality.

Edited, Dec 8th 2011 1:32pm by Eske

If we're doing it that way, then after the first round of interviews, Tonya Harding has someone kneecap the early favorite.

Are we to the part we get to become amateur boxers yet?

"If coach woulda put me in fourth quarter we'd have won state. No doubt in my mind."

Yes, it does. Because that's exactly what it is designed to do. Any methodology which doesn't give some kind of point bump (or other equivalent advantage) to minorities simply for being a minority isn't an AA methodology.

Another way to look at it is to think about when AA doesn't have any effect at all. If there are ten applicants and 10 openings, then AA doesn't factor in, but it wasn't needed. If there are 5 openings and all 5 of the best applicants are minorities, then they get the jobs and AA didn't factor in (but again, wasn't needed). The only case in which AA changes the hiring/acceptance result is precisely when a better qualified white candidate is bumped from the list because a less qualified minority applicant received an extra couple points due to AA.

That's what AA does. That's what it's designed to do. It's somewhat bizarre that anyone is even arguing about this. AA is *not* about equal opportunity. It is about artificially putting more minorities into college, or more minorities into a given workforce. You're kidding yourself if you think it's about equality at all.

Irrelevant though. If the point bump for being a minority makes you the best applicant then you got the job ahead of a more qualified person because of your skin color. If it doesn't, then the AA policy didn't actually change the outcome at all. The point being that the *only* effect AA policies can have is to make less qualified minorities succeed ahead of more qualified non-minorities.

/shrug. When that's what you have to look at initially, you go with what you have. That can be true without involving race, so I'm not sure how relevant it is to AA. Certainly, I don't see how deliberately making someone look better on paper because of their race helps that situation.



To the degree this may be true, the correct solution is to eliminate the unfair/racial imbalances rather than create another imbalance on the assumption that it'll balance things out. The former actually fixes the problem. The latter just hides the symptoms and in all probability perpetuates the problem itself.

To illustrate how this perpetuates the problem: Imagine you are in a position to hire someone, and you want to hire the best person for the job. Let's also assume you know that there are AA policies in place which give extra points to minority applicants. You have before you two applicants who both have the same exact "score" (however that's derived, but which you know includes the racial weighting factor). One is black. One is white. Which one do you hire?

Edited, Dec 8th 2011 3:53pm by gbaji

That is not the point of AA. The intention of AA is to prevent employers from exclusively hiring people in certain areas (or not hiring them at all) purely based on their skin color, nationality or sex.

The reality, rather you agree with it or not, people are hired and positioned based on sex, skin color, age, looks, being family or friends, etc. AA is to combat that, but the biggest downfall for AA is the assumption that they are qualified people of those groups being discriminated against. As a result, you have less qualified people being hired.

That is the main reason why AA is not an effective overall solution. It doesn't address the problem of people of a certain sex, religion, height, look, skin color,etc. not being qualified for the job.

A better AA solution IMO (for everyone) is to have a government ran "Linked-In" type social network where applications are kept on file. When Joe applies for Wal-mart, he puts his application online, if he's not hired, he is told exactly why he wasn't selected. If he's hired then fired or promoted, same deal with an annual "report".

That way, an organization can be randomly audited for unfair treatment

I will give you that.

The only thing that somewhat degrades your comment is the fact that there are so many ways to gain assistance for school not based on merit, that you could argue that most of all administration is tied to some form of "AA".

For example, where you live, your parents, being a single parent, sports, being a certain age, alumni, etc. are all valid reasons for unequal treatment not based on any academic merit in an academic environment.

And it attempts to accomplish this by "artificially putting more minorities into college, or more minorities into a given workforce". You're looking at why it's being done. I'm looking at how it does it. The method really does matter here IMO.

Also, the goal isn't as clear as you made it out to be. AA policies do not do anything to prevent minority business owners from employing only their minority. It only acts to ensure a fair distribution of a select set of minorities are hired/accepted in white owned establishments. I guess my problem with it is that if we think it's wrong to base hiring/acceptance decisions based on skin color, nationality, or sex, then how does creating a program that bases hiring/acceptance decisions on skin color, nationality, or sex do anything but perpetuate the problem?



I agree. That's the problem with AA. The only case in which it "works" is when a qualified person is being discriminated against based on race/sex/whatever. But how do you measure this? How do you even know it's happening? Unfortunately, most of the time the justification for the need of AA programs is simply by looking at the statistical outcomes. Which gets us back to the same kind of failure to see other causes of those statistical differences that I spoke of earlier.


We've created this boogeyman of racism, absent any significant evidence other than statistics. And in our haste to tell people that the reason their group doesn't succeed as well as another is because of race, we also tell them that they're not as responsible for their own outcomes. Surely you can see how when this is done on a large scale it will actually affect the "true" outcomes of that group and possibly even cause the very statistical differences used to justify the whole mess in the first place?



Correct. It treats people as a generic member of their race, sex, etc. It does *exactly* what it's supposedly supposed to be fighting against. We want employers to treat each applicant as an individual and judge them on their own merits, right? But we create a system which forces employers to treat people differently based on the color of their skin. How does that make sense? IMO, it doesn't.



That's better, but not really a solution. No one's going to put "he's a darkie" down as the reason they didn't hire someone. Why not just stop trying to fiddle with the social statistics and let society deal with things naturally? Most employers aren't going to hire or fire people based on their race. And those that do will tend to fail to compete against those who are just hiring the best and firing the worst. Why do we need big government programs to "fix" a problem that should fix itself? Doubly so when the programs themselves may actually be perpetuating the problem.


Trust that most people aren't going to ***** someone because of their skin color. Move on. I honestly don't understand why those who argue the hardest that we need to end racism seem to work the hardest to institutionalize it into our social fabric. We can't end racism as long as we have racist government policies reminding us every single day of just how racist we all are. That just seems like the opposite direction to go.

Find an admin to set up a character cap per post, or we're all going to be crushed by their competing Tower of Babels-of-text posts.