Affirmative Action Bake Sales

[mississippichem]

Why can't our educational system just be completely meritocratic? I don't see why governments feel the urge to try and encourage certain ethnic groups to go to college. Yeah sure I would like to see college enrollment go up in the American Black and Hispanic communities. But in my opinion, its not the government's responsibility to try and increase the percentage of minorities in universities to some arbitrary value. Isn't that what discrimination is?

During the 1950's many local governments wanted to make sure that 0% of the students enrolled in certain schools were black. Now let's say they wanted to make sure that n% of students enrolled in universities were black.

This is the kind of policy that ensures we will never have true racial harmony. The government should get its hand out of the manipulating demographics game. It even feels wrong. I couldn't imagine sitting down at my desk and saying:

 

Oh, today were going to try and increase the number of African Americans at Harvard to 7%. This means we will have to not enroll some whites, or Asians, Hispanics...

 

What about whites that come from low income backgrounds? They aren't eligible for minority scholarships, nor do they get the protection of affirmative action. It all seems to stem from this imaginary "sense of right". That urge comes directly from our discriminatory nature. No one would dare say, "you're a Mexican, so we're going to admit you because you damn sure need the extra help." That's what affirmative action is in effect saying to minorities.

If we live in a truly integrated society, as we claim to (at least on the books) then will minorities not become proportionally represented in the educated class naturally over time?

[lemur]

If we live in a truly integrated society, as we claim to (at least on the books) then will minorities not become proportionally represented in the educated class naturally over time?

It's nice to think so, but there's a good chance that the class divisions that have evolved along lines of racial identity will persist if occupational integration does not occur at all levels. The fact is that people tend to learn various cultural competencies from their parents and others they are exposed to. Middle-class kids tend to get socialized into forms of culture that make them more comfortable and self-confident in middle-class forms of education and work, especially higher education. Working-class culture tends to emphasize not trying to be "better than you are," which leads people to self-segregate and avoid investing in educational achievement that is viewed as a waste of time and money and diversion from the inevitable task of securing employment in some type of service job or other working-class business.

 

If you have any desire to disrupt the reproduction of racialized class stratification, you have to either change class relations, change the relationship between class and racial identity, or both. Otherwise culture tends to reproduce itself and only change in superficial ways. What exactly would you expect to occur as time passes? Would you expect middle-class kids to grow up to become working class and vice versa? Would you expect class division to decrease on its own so that more professionals start cleaning their own offices and dwellings, providing their own food service, and engaging in their fair share of public infrastructure maintenance? If people aren't doing those things today, why would they suddenly start tomorrow or the next day?