this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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There's a lot of discussion around this topic, much of it good, but I feel like we're losing sight of the forest for the trees.
The aim of Affirmative Action, as a policy, was to improve the following metric: "wealth of black Americans compared to wealth of white Americans". (I'm using 'wealth' as a stand-in for all the good experiences we're trying to optimize for, and 'black' and 'white' as stand-ins for the various groups at play). I think most of us agree that this was the aim of AA.
We can, of course, debate on whether AA was successful in improving this metric or not. I'm willing to concede that it may indeed have improved this metric.
But I don't think that it's a useful metric in the first place. And I can't really articulate why. I'd welcome some responses to help me flesh out my thoughts.
I guess... it just seems racist to me to be comparing "oh, the Chinese group is making XYZ dollars but the Indian group is only making ABC dollars. Let's make sure the Chinese give some of their wealth to the Indians". That doesn't seem to be a productive way of thinking. Who cares how much money the Chinese make compared to the Indians, as long as no individual is being treated unfairly right now.
Like I said, I'd welcome responses to help flesh out my opinions.
There's plenty of discussion in here if you'd just read it instead of posting inviting someone to reply
My first sentence was:
As I indicate, I’ve read the discussion that was here at the time, and appreciate it. I’ve even responded to a couple of posts. In this comment, I was hoping to bring up a different angle.
If you don’t agree and/or don’t want to engage, that’s fine, but don’t assume that I’m just blindly soliciting responses without reading what people are saying.