not sure if any of that applies to the OP because



obv

The “Bitcoin” at the end of the title was a nice touch.

Bolded is real ****ing pernicious and underlies just how totally the right wing has abandoned our shared reality of policies and procedures for ****ing Fantasy World.

What do you mean, not presently "eligible" for affirmative action? How would that even work?

What? I was talking about white men. Mainly the ones who are poor or who have bad parents. When a school makes allowances for them I don't think it is called "affirmative action". Did you think I meant something different?

Affirmative action is inverse racism.

Wouldn't the inverse of racism mean acting without prejudice?

bizzarro racism lol

No that's exactly it. You totally can have affirmative action for poor whites. Nothing prohibits it. They are 100% eligible.

In fact, many of the most prominent colleges in America have very strong affirmative action policies that favor an overwhelmingly white group of students: legacy admissions.

Lol, this ended up being a really interesting article.

The premises of affirmative action don't suppose its application to any particular group. The social context of the application is what supposes the characteristics of the groups to which it is applied.

The implications are similar to those of the observation that my racist, chauvinist, homophobic father proudly voted for Obama and reluctantly voted for Hillary.

It's natural that the notion of to what groups affirmative action should apply evolves as the society evolves. In fact, in US university admissions family economic resources has long been a focus of affirmative action policies (announced and formalized or otherwise) precisely because in the past it served as a reasonable proxy for hard to define and sometimes controversial racial delineations.

Semantics. The only reason not to call it affirmative action is to assist in making the term a racially tinged pejorative.

My scholarship was based in part on my being Appalachian. When I bring this up with (white) people that rant about affirmative action, they deflect that it isn't really affirmative action because of reasons that aren't hard to figure out.

Affirmative action, you see, helps the "wrong" people, and since I'm not, in their eyes, one of the "wrong" people, it can't be affirmative action.

This is the reasoning behind all (white) populist politics.

Are you sure about this? I understand why they might be opposed to it, but the biggest opponents of standardized testing I know are all teachers at poor schools (not that I agree with them 100%).

My fiance, for instance, teaches at a school in Hamtramck, Michigan. A very high portion of the students are recent immigrants from Yemen, and I'm sure it is not necessary to spell out the multitude of challenges that come along with that. She, and all her colleagues, rail against standardized testing.

This is because when people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds get a bit of a boost it's not going to make headlines - nobody finds that to be objectionable.

It's when race is the operating condition that it raises some eyebrows. Then we're forced to ask the question of what AA is actually intended to do, and i don't think that everyone necessarily is on the same page to that end.

Is it to address inequalities in test scores and grades associated with a persons circumstance? Most would agree with that. Is it for the discrimination that we expect they'll encounter at some point in their life but aren't quite sure to what extent and how to put a value on it? That's the harder question because it both requires an assessment of 'damages' that can't really be measured, and even if you could, it's not entirely clear that this would be an efficient way to compensate them for it.

I think a better option would be that, for peoples who are likely to experience discrimination in their life on the basis of their race or handicap or ugliness, or any other quality that people tend to veer away from for less than meritocratic reasons, that instead of lowering their standards to get into schools and putting them into environments that're prohibitively competitive for their skills/aptitudes, that we instead give preference to them for entry level government jobs.

Inverse not reverse.

Affirmative action as such does not suppose that the ambit of application is race, or particular races.

One can, and does, have affirmative action in university admissions directed at poor white kids from West Virginia or South Boston. Harvard, for example, has done exactly that (unofficially) for decades.

Harvard's favoritism (somewhat more official) for the children of wealthy alumni is not affirmative action because it is predicated on a different set of premises (the principal premise is that their parents are more likely to donate big $$$ if their kids get in).

Intent matters.