[gjhh244]

It absolutely is discrimination as not all whites are privileged. These days your skin color doesn't matter much, what really makes the difference is the wealth of your parents. A rich black guy is privileged compared to poor white guy.

Yes, MOST African Americans are poorer due to historical discrimination. But similarly some whites are also poorer due to historical reasons beyond their own control. The solution should be support to the poor to help them achieve better educational outcomes, regardless of their skin color.

Just raise taxes and build a system that helps all poor people achieve better educational outcomes instead of racist affirmative action. Scandinavian model provides a good example. Anything else is just nonsense and convenient to the rich elite.

Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.

[rahimnathwani]

"Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work."

This is assumes you want to treat each individual as an individual. But, to progressives, an individual is just an anonymous 'representative' of an ethnic group.

If you had a system as you described, progressives would calculate the acceptance rate for each ethnic group. If the rate for each group were not equal, they'd consider that prima facie evidence that exam-based admissions are structurally racist.

[WesternWind]

First, I commend you on wanting to do something about poverty. I also feel that policies that help all improverished folks and bring more people into the middle class are important and necessary.

That said, the idea that Black people only have issues because of historical discrimination does not reflect the data, and thus I feel affirmative action would still be needed to address those inequities.

That is to say both Black and White differences, and rich and poor differences need to be addressed in my view. You can't simply ignore one or the other.

There's a rich body of observational and experimental research into racial discrimination, which shows racial discrimination continues to exist in health care, hiring and careers, apartment rentals, punishment in schools, etc.

Black babies have worse health care outcomes with white doctors than black doctors. White babies show no difference. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/black-babies-s...

Black boys were watched more in an eye tracking study by teachers https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-black-b...

Black and Hispanic names are significantly less likely to get a response when inquiring about renting a property. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29516/w295...

People with Black names are less likely to be hired as per this meta analysis of studies https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870

Those are just a few examples.

We also know that household income affects exam results, FYI, so your exam solution would disadvantage poor folks. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and...

[ftyers]

> Also, it's possible to make college/university admissions very much anti-discriminatory simply by making them exam-based, and preventing those who check the exams from knowging who did the exam. This is how the system should work.

Think about that a bit more, and look at countries that do that and what their higher education system looks like. Consider for example Mexico what percentage of students by ethnicity get into UNAM, what the exams look like, where the exams are offered and where the exam preparation schools are, how much the prep schools cost, if there are ways around it that favour certain groups. Many countries do this, do they have a better or fairer representative sample of students in their higher education, or just students who have been competently trained to pass an exam? An exam is one potential way in which students can shine, but it's unlikely that the person ranked at position 1 is Pareto dominating the person at position 2 on literally every axis.