Yes, I saw this article this morning, too. Politically, it’ll turn out to be a wash: the kind of unconscious bias described here will be balanced by the more overtly “biased” 95% to 97% of blacks who will end up voting for him.
I do accept that this sort of thing, choosing “a white job candidate more often than a person with identical credentials who is black” does happen all the time. And it’s terrible, of course. But one proximate cause (outside of pure, undiagnosed racial animosity) is the system of racial preferences in university admissions. There’s an unconscious or conscious bias that black candidates haven’t performed on an absolutely level playing field. It’s deeply unfair to the black students who would have excelled without any sort of preferences. It taints them.
Clarence Thomas has talked about graduating from law school and interviewing for jobs at NY law firms. The firms refused to take his Yale Law degree seriously because they assumed he must have gotten in with lowered standards. Galling for someone who had worked himself up from a background of serious poverty (his father sold ice; he grew up speaking Gullah).
I think eliminating affirmative racial preferences in college admissions and job hiring would do something to silence the most insidious arguments of overt racists and change the cognitive biases of the “non-racists” described in this article.
My favorite bit of absurdity from the evidence produced for the University of Michigan AA case: one admissions counselor asks another, “are Cubans really Hispanic? I mean, don’t they vote Republican?”
Affirmative action doesn’t work terribly well–but thinking a black person is unqualified goes back way longer than the recent affirmative action business. If Thomas had been born thirty years earlier, people would have suspected his qualifications because he was black. When he went on the market, they had a different excuse. They could suspect his qualifications because of affirmative action. In my mind, those two situations are very similar and it isn’t because somehow affirmative action got in the way of his degree.
Now, Thomas getting put on the supreme court way before he was ready just because he was black–that is unfortunate race politics.
This is for the “Personal Politics” discussion DXL and I were having earlier.
Yes, I saw this article this morning, too. Politically, it’ll turn out to be a wash: the kind of unconscious bias described here will be balanced by the more overtly “biased” 95% to 97% of blacks who will end up voting for him.
I do accept that this sort of thing, choosing “a white job candidate more often than a person with identical credentials who is black” does happen all the time. And it’s terrible, of course. But one proximate cause (outside of pure, undiagnosed racial animosity) is the system of racial preferences in university admissions. There’s an unconscious or conscious bias that black candidates haven’t performed on an absolutely level playing field. It’s deeply unfair to the black students who would have excelled without any sort of preferences. It taints them.
Clarence Thomas has talked about graduating from law school and interviewing for jobs at NY law firms. The firms refused to take his Yale Law degree seriously because they assumed he must have gotten in with lowered standards. Galling for someone who had worked himself up from a background of serious poverty (his father sold ice; he grew up speaking Gullah).
I think eliminating affirmative racial preferences in college admissions and job hiring would do something to silence the most insidious arguments of overt racists and change the cognitive biases of the “non-racists” described in this article.
These reactions to affirmative action are a symptom, not a cause.
Oh, so those who are suspicious of affirmative action and institutionalized racial preferences are now branded racists?
My favorite bit of absurdity from the evidence produced for the University of Michigan AA case: one admissions counselor asks another, “are Cubans really Hispanic? I mean, don’t they vote Republican?”
Affirmative action doesn’t work terribly well–but thinking a black person is unqualified goes back way longer than the recent affirmative action business. If Thomas had been born thirty years earlier, people would have suspected his qualifications because he was black. When he went on the market, they had a different excuse. They could suspect his qualifications because of affirmative action. In my mind, those two situations are very similar and it isn’t because somehow affirmative action got in the way of his degree.
Now, Thomas getting put on the supreme court way before he was ready just because he was black–that is unfortunate race politics.