I am suggesting that someone might reasonably think that “yeah, let’s reduce racial discrimination in the US; we’ll start by getting rid of affirmative action” is a bit like “yeah, let’s reduce religious intolerance in Saudi Arabia; we’ll start by getting rid of discrimination against Muslims”.
Let me lay out my line of thinking.
I am assuming that since you… um, that’s going to be confusing so let’s invoke Alice instead—so, I’m assuming that Alice believes that race is a social construct with no underlying biological reality and would like this construct to go away—the ideal is an entirely colour-blind world.
Given that racial discrimination is bad, Alice would want to get rid of all forms of it, including affirmative action. What makes affirmative action special? The fact that the full force of the state is behind it. That’s a rather important point: the government explicitly discriminates by race and if you get in its way, you’re are likely to be steamrolled.
Wouldn’t you want to start by eliminating the discrimination which the state imposes?
Another issue is values (= optimisation criteria). If Alice’s goal is to end racial discrimination, Alice probably just want to eliminate it wherever you find it. But if Alice’s goals are more diverse and she is predominantly concerned about other things like, say, electability, or social justice, or money, or cultural domination, etc. etc. then she’ll be guided by these goals and ending racial discrimination becomes mostly instrumental. And in such a case it becomes just another social mechanism to tinker with and I start to suspect that Alice will tolerate racial discrimination if it furthers her other overarching goals.
the idea that if someone holds that “race” as generally understood is a biological unreality, then they should think there should be no discrimination on the basis of “race” as generally understood
I don’t hold that position, for race can clearly be a proxy for culture and people love to discriminate on the basis of culture.
My position is that if race has no biological underpinnings and is an arbitrary label, then it’s just one in a long line of such labels and I’m not sure what makes it special. Social labels are also amenable to change with the implication that proper social-engineering efforts can (and some people will say that they should) mold the race concept into whatever shape the engineers desire.
if it’s meant as more than a tautology
Robert’s specific meaning was, I think, that at this point in time you do not fix past racial discrimination (slavery and pre-Civil Rights era) by institutionalising a reverse form of racism. If you want to get to the point where race doesn’t matter, you need to stop making the race matter because it literally prevents you from getting to your goal. I don’t think he was making any claims about “the most effective way” or anything like that.
I’m assuming that Alice believes that race is a social construct with no underlying biological reality and would like this construct to go away—the ideal is an entirely colour-blind world.
That seems to me to be assuming more than is actually called for here, but never mind.
Given that racial discrimination is bad, Alice would want to get rid of all forms of it, including affirmative action.
If that means that Alice’s ideal world would have no racial discrimination anywhere ever (and, in particular, no affirmative action) then yes, I agree, she would. If it means that given any hypothetical world she would consider removing affirmative action from it an improvement then no, I don’t see any reason why that should be her position.
What makes affirmative action special? The fact that the full force of the state is behind it.
Affirmative action generally takes the form of preferential hiring or enrollment practices by employers and educators. It has “the full force of the state” behind it only in that it’s generally government departments and state-run universities that do it. It’s not like you’re going to have the US military mounting a shock-and-awe campaign against your house if you speak out against it.
It seems to me that there are other things that distinguish affirmative action from most other forms of racial discrimination.
It is generally limited in ways that they aren’t. That is: if I am a conventional racist running a company, I will simply never hire any black people. If I am in the same position and doing affirmative action, I probably have a quota: I will try to make 20% of my hires black people, or something like that.
It is explicitly aimed at adjusting for wrongs done elsewhere. The goal is not, so to speak, to maximize local justice, to do what you would consider the Right Thing if you look only at the immediate situation; it is to improve things overall, balancing unfairness in one place against opposite unfairness in another.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that this is a good idea nor that it is done well. Only that that’s the intention, so that “look, you’re being locally unfair” is a pointless criticism: the Affirmative Actor knows that, and if you want to convince them you need to persuade them either that the local unfairness is not successfully counterbalancing opposite unfairnesses elsewhere, or that the whole idea of balancing such things out is ill-conceived.
Its intended beneficiaries are, as a group, worse off in many ways than its intended victims.
Do these really make a difference? Good question. But you can’t possibly argue in good faith against affirmative action while pretending they aren’t there, which is what you seem to be doing so far.
I don’t hold that position
OK. It looked to me as if some position along those lines was the most likely justification for the inference you seemed to want to foist on Usul.
if race [...] is an arbitrary label, [...] I’m not sure what makes it special.
In regard to affirmative action? What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself claiming that race is an arbitrary label; I’m not sure Usul would either, but you’d have to ask him. But even if it were the fact of past and present discrimination on the basis of that arbitrary label would be a sufficient explanation (though not necessarily a justification) of the existence of affirmative action.
at this point in time you do not fix past racial discrimination [...] by institutionalising a reverse form of racism.
It’s too late to fix anything that happened in the past. It might not be too late to fix some of its residual effects. And it’s not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the “Civil Rights era” began. The stuff affirmative action advocates hope to counterbalance isn’t all decades ago—some of it is still happening now.
It is clearly true that if there is a path to a world where race simply doesn’t matter, then it needs to end up with race simply not mattering, and that will mean no affirmative action. But that doesn’t mean that the best available path to such a world begins with ending affirmative action.
(Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that in fact there is any way to get such a world, nor that it would be a good world if we did. The question is: if someone wants a colour-blind world but doesn’t agree that we should start by ending affirmative action, does that indicate hypocrisy?)
It is explicitly aimed at adjusting for wrongs done elsewhere … balancing unfairness in one place against opposite unfairness in another.
Oh, boy! Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? And you see the problems, as you say
I am not claiming that this is a good idea … Only that that’s the intention
How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing? Moreover, the whole concept of counterbalancing unfairness elsewhere by introducing new unfairness… let’s say it has deficiencies :-/
So the Affirmative Actor is an idiot. I can agree with that, but I am not sure that you want to come to that conclusion.
In general, I’m not pretending that reasons to support affirmative action do not exist. But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.
What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.
Yup. And the same is true about height. And conventional prettiness. And being disfigured in some way. And just being weird. And not coming from this village, but from that village over the ridge. So what’s special about race, again?
And it’s not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the “Civil Rights era” began.
As you know, I believe that blacks’ average IQ is lower that that of whites by about a standard deviation. That is quite sufficient for many (probably most) people to call me a racist and point to me as exhibit A that racism still exists and needs programs like affirmative action to combat it.
Of course there is a slight problem in that if my belief is true, affirmative action (and similar attempts at forced equalisation of outcomes) can never reach its goals and so will remain in place forever.
Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? [...] How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing?
Lots of things that are bad when considered in isolation are good in context because they help to fix other bad things. Chemotherapy drugs are basically poisons; but it happens that they poison your cancer even worse than they poison you and may make you healthier overall. Knocking a house down reduces the available places for people to live, and costs money, and makes noise and mess; but after you’ve done that, maybe you can build another better one on the same site. Buying insurance has negative expected (monetary) value, and the great majority of the time it loses you money; but by an astonishing coincidence the rare times when it helps you are correlated with the rare times when you find yourself in sudden need, and it turns out to be a good idea in many cases overall.
Anyway: the point here isn’t whether affirmative action is a good idea; it’s whether it’s something whose removal should be a high priority for anyone who ultimately wants an end to all racial discrimination. For the answer to be “no”, it is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person can consistently think affirmative action is beneficial overall. (I think they can, even if that turns out to be badly wrong.) It is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person who agrees with you that affirmative action is a bad idea can consistently think that dealing with other forms of racial discrimination is a higher priority. (I think they can.)
But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.
Fine. Again: the question is not whether affirmative action is, on balance, a good idea. The question is whether someone could reasonably consider it’s not such a bad idea as to be a good place to start if you want to reduce racial discrimination.
height [...] prettiness [...] being disfigured [...] not coming from this village [...] So what’s special about race, again?
The scale of the discrimination involved, the amount of harm it’s done, and the extent to which that harm has been visited consistently on the same people over and over again. (In reality, I think; but as usual it suffices if Usul reasonably thinks this is the case.)
If you’re shorter than average, you are likely to do a little worse than average in various ways. (It’s not clear how much that’s just plain prejudice and how much it’s that actually height genuinely correlates with things like intelligence and good health. And yes, one can make an analogy with race here.) Roughly and on average, one inch of height = $800/year of salary in the US, certainly not to be sneezed at. But being white rather than black = $14k/year of salary in the US. That corresponds to a difference of about six standard deviations in height.
If you’re taller or shorter than average, your children probably will be too. The correlation from generation to generation is somewhere around 0.6, I think. So whatever advantages or disadvantages accrue to taller or shorter people will accumulate a bit down the generations. But I’m pretty sure the correlation between parents’ and children’s race is a lot higher than that. If you’re black, your parents and your parents’ parents and your parents’ parents’ parents will probably have had all the same disadvantages as you, for as far back as history goes.
if my belief is true, affirmative action [...] can never reach its goals
It depends. Are IQ differences influenced by differences in nutrition, access to education, lifelong stress… ? If so, fixing those factors might help fix the outcome.
Let me lay out my line of thinking.
I am assuming that since you… um, that’s going to be confusing so let’s invoke Alice instead—so, I’m assuming that Alice believes that race is a social construct with no underlying biological reality and would like this construct to go away—the ideal is an entirely colour-blind world.
Given that racial discrimination is bad, Alice would want to get rid of all forms of it, including affirmative action. What makes affirmative action special? The fact that the full force of the state is behind it. That’s a rather important point: the government explicitly discriminates by race and if you get in its way, you’re are likely to be steamrolled.
Wouldn’t you want to start by eliminating the discrimination which the state imposes?
Another issue is values (= optimisation criteria). If Alice’s goal is to end racial discrimination, Alice probably just want to eliminate it wherever you find it. But if Alice’s goals are more diverse and she is predominantly concerned about other things like, say, electability, or social justice, or money, or cultural domination, etc. etc. then she’ll be guided by these goals and ending racial discrimination becomes mostly instrumental. And in such a case it becomes just another social mechanism to tinker with and I start to suspect that Alice will tolerate racial discrimination if it furthers her other overarching goals.
I don’t hold that position, for race can clearly be a proxy for culture and people love to discriminate on the basis of culture.
My position is that if race has no biological underpinnings and is an arbitrary label, then it’s just one in a long line of such labels and I’m not sure what makes it special. Social labels are also amenable to change with the implication that proper social-engineering efforts can (and some people will say that they should) mold the race concept into whatever shape the engineers desire.
Robert’s specific meaning was, I think, that at this point in time you do not fix past racial discrimination (slavery and pre-Civil Rights era) by institutionalising a reverse form of racism. If you want to get to the point where race doesn’t matter, you need to stop making the race matter because it literally prevents you from getting to your goal. I don’t think he was making any claims about “the most effective way” or anything like that.
That seems to me to be assuming more than is actually called for here, but never mind.
If that means that Alice’s ideal world would have no racial discrimination anywhere ever (and, in particular, no affirmative action) then yes, I agree, she would. If it means that given any hypothetical world she would consider removing affirmative action from it an improvement then no, I don’t see any reason why that should be her position.
Affirmative action generally takes the form of preferential hiring or enrollment practices by employers and educators. It has “the full force of the state” behind it only in that it’s generally government departments and state-run universities that do it. It’s not like you’re going to have the US military mounting a shock-and-awe campaign against your house if you speak out against it.
It seems to me that there are other things that distinguish affirmative action from most other forms of racial discrimination.
It is generally limited in ways that they aren’t. That is: if I am a conventional racist running a company, I will simply never hire any black people. If I am in the same position and doing affirmative action, I probably have a quota: I will try to make 20% of my hires black people, or something like that.
It is explicitly aimed at adjusting for wrongs done elsewhere. The goal is not, so to speak, to maximize local justice, to do what you would consider the Right Thing if you look only at the immediate situation; it is to improve things overall, balancing unfairness in one place against opposite unfairness in another.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that this is a good idea nor that it is done well. Only that that’s the intention, so that “look, you’re being locally unfair” is a pointless criticism: the Affirmative Actor knows that, and if you want to convince them you need to persuade them either that the local unfairness is not successfully counterbalancing opposite unfairnesses elsewhere, or that the whole idea of balancing such things out is ill-conceived.
Its intended beneficiaries are, as a group, worse off in many ways than its intended victims.
Do these really make a difference? Good question. But you can’t possibly argue in good faith against affirmative action while pretending they aren’t there, which is what you seem to be doing so far.
OK. It looked to me as if some position along those lines was the most likely justification for the inference you seemed to want to foist on Usul.
In regard to affirmative action? What makes it special is the fact that people have been discriminating on the basis of race for years and years, and often still do.
For the avoidance of doubt, I am not myself claiming that race is an arbitrary label; I’m not sure Usul would either, but you’d have to ask him. But even if it were the fact of past and present discrimination on the basis of that arbitrary label would be a sufficient explanation (though not necessarily a justification) of the existence of affirmative action.
It’s too late to fix anything that happened in the past. It might not be too late to fix some of its residual effects. And it’s not as if racism (of the usual anti-black sort) stopped when the “Civil Rights era” began. The stuff affirmative action advocates hope to counterbalance isn’t all decades ago—some of it is still happening now.
It is clearly true that if there is a path to a world where race simply doesn’t matter, then it needs to end up with race simply not mattering, and that will mean no affirmative action. But that doesn’t mean that the best available path to such a world begins with ending affirmative action.
(Again, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not claiming that in fact there is any way to get such a world, nor that it would be a good world if we did. The question is: if someone wants a colour-blind world but doesn’t agree that we should start by ending affirmative action, does that indicate hypocrisy?)
Oh, boy! Why in the world would anyone think this is a good justification for anything? And you see the problems, as you say
How intending to do something which is a bad idea is a good thing? Moreover, the whole concept of counterbalancing unfairness elsewhere by introducing new unfairness… let’s say it has deficiencies :-/
So the Affirmative Actor is an idiot. I can agree with that, but I am not sure that you want to come to that conclusion.
In general, I’m not pretending that reasons to support affirmative action do not exist. But I shortcut to the balance and I find the balance wanting.
Yup. And the same is true about height. And conventional prettiness. And being disfigured in some way. And just being weird. And not coming from this village, but from that village over the ridge. So what’s special about race, again?
As you know, I believe that blacks’ average IQ is lower that that of whites by about a standard deviation. That is quite sufficient for many (probably most) people to call me a racist and point to me as exhibit A that racism still exists and needs programs like affirmative action to combat it.
Of course there is a slight problem in that if my belief is true, affirmative action (and similar attempts at forced equalisation of outcomes) can never reach its goals and so will remain in place forever.
Lots of things that are bad when considered in isolation are good in context because they help to fix other bad things. Chemotherapy drugs are basically poisons; but it happens that they poison your cancer even worse than they poison you and may make you healthier overall. Knocking a house down reduces the available places for people to live, and costs money, and makes noise and mess; but after you’ve done that, maybe you can build another better one on the same site. Buying insurance has negative expected (monetary) value, and the great majority of the time it loses you money; but by an astonishing coincidence the rare times when it helps you are correlated with the rare times when you find yourself in sudden need, and it turns out to be a good idea in many cases overall.
Anyway: the point here isn’t whether affirmative action is a good idea; it’s whether it’s something whose removal should be a high priority for anyone who ultimately wants an end to all racial discrimination. For the answer to be “no”, it is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person can consistently think affirmative action is beneficial overall. (I think they can, even if that turns out to be badly wrong.) It is sufficient (but not necessary) that such a person who agrees with you that affirmative action is a bad idea can consistently think that dealing with other forms of racial discrimination is a higher priority. (I think they can.)
Fine. Again: the question is not whether affirmative action is, on balance, a good idea. The question is whether someone could reasonably consider it’s not such a bad idea as to be a good place to start if you want to reduce racial discrimination.
The scale of the discrimination involved, the amount of harm it’s done, and the extent to which that harm has been visited consistently on the same people over and over again. (In reality, I think; but as usual it suffices if Usul reasonably thinks this is the case.)
If you’re shorter than average, you are likely to do a little worse than average in various ways. (It’s not clear how much that’s just plain prejudice and how much it’s that actually height genuinely correlates with things like intelligence and good health. And yes, one can make an analogy with race here.) Roughly and on average, one inch of height = $800/year of salary in the US, certainly not to be sneezed at. But being white rather than black = $14k/year of salary in the US. That corresponds to a difference of about six standard deviations in height.
If you’re taller or shorter than average, your children probably will be too. The correlation from generation to generation is somewhere around 0.6, I think. So whatever advantages or disadvantages accrue to taller or shorter people will accumulate a bit down the generations. But I’m pretty sure the correlation between parents’ and children’s race is a lot higher than that. If you’re black, your parents and your parents’ parents and your parents’ parents’ parents will probably have had all the same disadvantages as you, for as far back as history goes.
It depends. Are IQ differences influenced by differences in nutrition, access to education, lifelong stress… ? If so, fixing those factors might help fix the outcome.