Sirpopopop said:
<snipped>
Feel free to crucify me if you want.
I'm not going to crucify you, as your goals seem laudable enough; it just seems that what you propose would end up as a vain attempt at social engineering. For the record, I did not mean to imply that once a school's student body consisted of representative percentages of minority students that "their job is done." On the contrary, I feel that as many minority students as are qualified should be accepted to any and all institutions-- if that's 30%, then so be it. That's not the issue at all. My main concern was with the seeming urge on the part of some people to read racism/exclusion into every situation, particularly when such charges are not borne out by the numbers, as in this case. I hope you understand...
As regards your plan:
Expecting schools to
A) ensure that the composition of their student body not only roughly matches, but
far exceeds the respective racial percentages of society at large; and
B) ensure that a goodly portion of the minority students accepted were somehow "tied to their mainstream culture," as you say, is quite a tall order, and would require a significant increase in funding and human resources (e.g., more extensive interviewing of minority candidates would have to take place in order to ascertain how closely they were "tied to their culture"). This approach also ignores two thorny issues:
1) The taking of seats from qualified non-minority applicants in the name of a social engineering policy that is of unproven benefit. Ideally, this objection/criticism could be answered by saying that the college would institute the policy on a trial basis at first-- say, for four years-- to see how it pans out. However, this then begs the following question...
2) What empirical bases will be used to determine whether or not such a plan has "worked"? This is the same issue that arises when discussing affirmative action policies; that is, what
objective, verifiable conditions can be pointed to in order to prove that said policies are efficacious? "Less racism in society" is all well and good, but how do we quantify that? There's no doubt that it (racism) exists, but I'm of the mind that if we're going to implement broad social reform, we should at least have a good idea of where the goalposts stand. After all, policies that adversely affect certain segments of society (as this would, by denying qualified majority applicants seats at these colleges) cannot be allowed to exist in perpetuity-- the only reasonable basis for allowing them to be implemented is to redress systemic maladies. I can easily grant that such conditions exist; the pertinent questions are, "to what extent", and "how do we know when we've 'arrived'?" The answer to the latter question
cannot be "when the majority of blacks feel that there is no more racism in society," because that is a subjective thing. Subjectivism should seldom be used as a basis for policy imo, however well-intentioned.
Objective indices such as educational attainment and per capita income levels among the various races are also troubling to use for the simple fact that there are literally
dozens of confounding variables which can also be responsible for the disparities observed on these dimensions. How can we tease out the effects of institutional racism from the effects of other variables? It's not a trivial question by any means. This is why, personally, I feel that more efforts should be made at equalizing the primary educational experience (in terms of funding and the quality of teaching/facilities/educational culture, not necessarily outcomes, since we'd then go back to the notion of confounding variables) among the races as well as addressing the pernicious influences affecting the minority community, particularly in the inner city. Fix the communities, fix the families, and fix the elementary schools and you'll have no need for these stop-gap measures like AA later on. This would be the best course of action, since AA is a divisive issue; unfortunately, we're about 20-25 years late on taking the above actions, but I believe we should get started ASAP instead of continuing to allow our inner cities (and poor rural areas, too, which are breeding grounds for violence, illegitimacy, and ignorance just the same-- this is not strictly a "black" problem, but a societal one) to continue their degeneration.
This is to say nothing of the question of "what is black culture?" Who defines it? Is black culture strictly inner-city culture? Because I know quite a few blacks who would take issue with that, as would I. Needless to say, what you've proposed is fraught with questionable assumptions, and its benefit-- while not in question in terms of its
existence-- is not quantifiable; given that such a plan would be of tremendous cost and would create unequal opportunities for others, it would stand to reason that we'd need to be on solid empirical footing before enacting such measures. Just my opinion.
I simply feel that there are better ways to go about achieving the ends we're both seeking.
