l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Dr. Hanson轰种族配额Affirmative Action政策：奥巴马的孩子难道比来自旁遮普或柬
埔寨的移民的孩子更需要帮助吗？
Sometime in the first years of the new millennium, “global warming”
evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet
’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-
induced “climate change” could explain almost any weather extremity —
droughts or floods, temperatures too hot or too cold, hurricanes and
tornadoes — better than “global warming” could.
Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative action” into
“diversity” — a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions
of a liberal society affirming the illiberal granting of racial preferences.
In an increasingly multiracial society, it has grown hard to determine the
racial ancestry of millions of Americans. Is someone who is ostensibly one-
half Native American or African-American classified as a minority eligible
for special consideration in hiring or college admissions, while someone one
-quarter or one-eighth is not? How exactly does affirmative action
adjudicate our precise ethnic identities these days? These are not illiberal
questions — given, for example, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s
past claims of being Native American to gain advantage in her academic
career.
Aside from the increasing difficulty of determining the ancestry of
multiracial, multiethnic, and intermarried Americans, what exactly is the
justification for affirmative action’s ethnic preferences in hiring or
admissions — historical grievance, current underrepresentation due to
discrimination, or both?
Are the children of President Barack Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder
more in need of help than the offspring of immigrants from the Punjab or
Cambodia? If non-white ancestry is no longer an accurate indicator of
ongoing discrimination, can affirmative action be justified by a legacy of
historical bias or current ethnic underrepresentation?
Does a recent arrival from Oaxaca who fled the racism and poverty of Mexico
warrant special compensation upon arrival in the United States? And if so,
when? A day, a month, a year, or a decade after crossing the border? How
about a Chilean, Korean, or Iraqi immigrant? Should particular lines of
employment match the nation’s racial composition — jobs on the faculty,
but not jobs in the NBA, or in the Postal Service?
How do we fairly allocate compensation for collective sins against a bygone
generation? Slavery, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, racially
exclusionary immigration laws, the denial of U.S. admission to Jews fleeing
the Holocaust: All were reprehensible, but it is difficult to know the
degree to which these injustices still distort the career paths of
individual Americans, or who still alive is to blame.
In 2009, the University of California system changed its admissions policy
allegedly to curtail the number of Asian-Americans on its campuses. Such
anti-affirmative action arose not because UC was a racist institution, but
because, as an applicant group, Asian-Americans were outperforming most
other ethnic groups, in numbers disproportionate to the general population.
In other words, just as the Ivy League turned away qualified Jews in the
1920s and ’30s, so some UC administrators apparently thought that
engineering a campus “to look like America” was more important than simply
admitting those with the strongest academic achievement.
Affirmative action — fossilized for a half-century — also made few
allowances for class. Asian-Americans, for example, have higher per capita
incomes than Americans as a whole. Were affluent minority individuals
eligible for affirmative action?
Will the children of multimillionaire Tiger Woods — or of Jay-Z and Beyonc
é — qualify for special consideration on the theory that their racial
pedigrees or statistical underrepresentation in some fields will make their
lives more challenging than the lives of poor white children in rural
Pennsylvania or second-generation Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich.?
If ossified racial preferences don’t work in 21st-century multiracial
America, then the generalized idea of “diversity” — just picking and
choosing people without any rationale other than ensuring lots of different
races and ethnic groups — seems a more defensible reason for extending
preferences in lieu of using strictly meritocratic criteria.
Yet “diversity” no more alleviates the problem of bias than “climate
change” ends controversy over global warming. And we really do not mean “
diversity” in the widest sense of the word. No Ivy League law school is
worried that its faculty is disproportionately 90 percent liberal, or that
it lacks a contingent of fundamentalist Christians commensurate with their
numbers in the general population.
The idea of diversity, racial and otherwise, is deeply embedded in our
politics, but not consistently applied. President George H. W. Bush was not
especially lauded for appointing an African-American Supreme Court justice,
Clarence Thomas — apparently because Thomas was considered conservative.
Liberal attorney general Eric Holder was seen by the media as a genuinely
diverse appointment in a way that a conservative predecessor, Alberto
Gonzales, was not.
Like Prohibition, affirmative action and then diversity were originally
noble efforts that were doomed — largely by their own illiberal
contradiction of using present and future racial discrimination to atone for
past racial discrimination.
It is well past time to move on and to see people as just people.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover
Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from
Bloomsbury Books. | h****z
发帖数: 1996 | 2 "the more fortunate American blacks receive a disproportionate share of the
benefits going to blacks as a whole in the United States"
Tom Sowell on AA
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8108
planet
into
【在 l****z 的大作中提到】
: Dr. Hanson轰种族配额Affirmative Action政策：奥巴马的孩子难道比来自旁遮普或柬
: 埔寨的移民的孩子更需要帮助吗？
: Sometime in the first years of the new millennium, “global warming”
: evolved into “climate change.” Amid growing controversies over the planet
: ’s past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-
: induced “climate change” could explain almost any weather extremity —
: droughts or floods, temperatures too hot or too cold, hurricanes and
: tornadoes — better than “global warming” could.
: Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned “affirmative action” into
: “diversity” — a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions
| c****i
发帖数: 7933 | | m********a
发帖数: 1041 | 4 {{{How do we fairly allocate compensation for collective sins against a
bygone
generation? Slavery, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, racially
exclusionary immigration laws, the denial of U.S. admission to Jews fleeing
the Holocaust: All were reprehensible, but it is difficult to know the
degree to which these injustices still distort the career paths of
individual Americans, or who still alive is to blame.}}}+1 | m********a
发帖数: 1041 | 5 我是新來的,所以如果這篇文章重複了,請見諒.
2010年10月,WSJ:
Racial preferences spring from worthy intentions, but they have had
unintended consequences—including an academic mismatch in many cases
between minority students and the schools to which they are admitted. There'
s a better way to help the disadvantaged.
大意是指,進了比自己學業能力高許多學校的學生,未必能夠適應環境跟上進度, 反而更
失敗. | m********a
发帖数: 1041 | 6 對不起,是2012年10月的WSJ
我想了想, 感覺現在敢提出反對affirmative action的人很有勇氣.這是非常政治不正
確的.
就像教育系統在鼓吹"融合教育"
非要替本來已經被獨立出去的特殊教育需求學生爭取融回主流教育系統一樣.
好像這樣就是"不歧視"了, 好像這樣就是"有特殊教育需求"學生真正的需要.
問題是, 如果我生理年齡在高中畢業的程度, 但實際上加減乘除都不行.我會覺得自己
被分到大一普通數學課是在尊重我嗎? 我想要老師為了我一直停下來解釋給我聽,還是
把我當空氣, 期末再大筆一揮給我過呢?
想想還是自己不好, 幹嘛不曬黑一點, 說不定就自不用費混野雞大學了還有獎學金拿呢
!!! |
|
