Quote: (07-13-2012 05:58 PM)Samseau Wrote:
Mike, you also miss a point. Affirmative Action is how rich liberals keep out lower class white males from competing with their inferior white offspring.
Rich liberal's son: "Welcome to Harvard."
Poor white boy: "Son, your scores are competitive but we need to meet our black, Hispanic, Asian, and female quotas."
Since most conservatives are poor white males, it follows that affirmative action hurts conservatives the most.
Elite schools are in it for the money. They will always take rich offspring as their family will be more likely to donate back to the school.
Elite schools don't give a fuck, and that's why they don't care if white males are excluded; white, black, female, asian, indian, whatever, as long as it's poor it's all the same to them.
Affirmative Action is how liberal whites try to maintain an generational economic upper hand against conservative whites.
I think you are missing something critical. Affirmative action isn't an attempt for liberal whites to maintain the upper hand against conservative whites. What affirmative action
REALLY does is provide an excuse wealthy elites give to poor and middle class whites as to why they are not succeeding.
Samseau, this isn't about liberal or conservative AT ALL. I know wealthy liberal families and wealthy conservative families. Both have equal disdain toward poor/middle class whites. They don't give a fuck whether you are conservative or liberal.
If you're poor, that is bad enough for them.
That is the beauty of affirmative action. When some poor/middle class white doesn't get into a school they can say (just as you stated) "Son, your scores are competitive but we need to meet our black and Hispanic quotas". They will never say ""Son, your scores are competitive but
we need to meet our legacy and major donor quotas" even if those legacies scored LOWER than the blacks or Hispanics.
I have seen this at the prep school, elite university, and Ivy university level. Show me the lowest scoring black or Latino at an elite university who got in solely because of affirmative action. If you give me access to the admissions information, I guarantee you that I will find SEVERAL legacies and children of major donors or influential people that scored significantly lower than him.
Let me give an example. Like I said before, I went to an extremely selective prep school. Admission was based on one thing, standardized test scores. These were percentile based, so if you scored in the 99th percentile that means that you scored better than 99% of the people who took the test. At my school white and Asian women had to score the highest (there were more women that were applying). White men could score 2 points lower than white women. Blacks and Latinos could score 5 points lower than whites, and legacies could score
18 FUCKING POINTS lower than blacks.
Do you get what that means? The difference between the MINIMUM score for a white male and the MINIMUM score for a black person was 5 points, but the difference between the minimum for a non-legacy white and a legacy (who was almost always also white) was 23 points. Yet the poor, working class whites whose children didn't get in were complaining about the blacks and Latinos. None of them said shit about the legacies.
Keep in mind, this was for straight legacies, not major donors. We had folks who were children of major donors that had NO FUCKING BUSINESS at our school. One guy, who was actually a friend of mine, was both a legacy AND the son of a major donor. He was so unprepared for the rigor of the school he wound up transferring to a school that deals with kids that have slight learning disabilities.
Here is the REALLY fucked up part. Most blacks at the school scored as high or higher than the white minimum (I scored in the 99th percentile), yet some broke asshole who never had a chance (affirmative action or no) of getting into my school will point and say "You only got in because of affirmative action."
Athlone has mentioned how high he scored on the SATs (as good or better than the average student to his Ivy League university). Yet I GUARANTEE YOU he is always going to have to deal with some underachiever saying he only got in because of affirmative action. I know because I still have to deal with that shit now. What are we supposed to do about it? Not go to great schools? It is just shit that you have to deal with.
Here is a great example of how influence works in top universities. Keep in mind that this is a flagship STATE university. In theory, they should be LESS prone to this kind of influence than private universities.
University of Illinois clout scandal
I know almost every one of the high schools listed. Not a single one of them is even half black and Latino. In fact, I don't think any are even 20% black. They are majority white,
and more importantly, are either top private schools or public schools in upper income suburbs.