rm | "scarce" resources, college and sexism

"scarce" resources, college and sexism

And then there's this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html

It's the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to imagine any world in which women, at least as a group, don't always lose.

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rackmount

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The correct, and interesting, analogy would be if blacks were the majority of the qualified applicant pool and colleges were having a hard time filling up the white quota.

Unless that was the analogy you proposed, in which case I misread you.

I think the question was, why are men being held to lower standards and still getting in? This happens with many Affirmative Action programs too, doesn't it?

I don't know what you're asking.

Many opponents to affirmative action programs on race insist that applications should be "color blind" - and if no black people, for example, can make the cut... that's too bad. If we oppose gender balance for men, then shouldn't we also oppose "balancing" race in the way affirmative action tries to do?

It's as if my first comment never happened.

How can we preserve one form of letting people in with diminished expectations for them, while attack another form of letting people in with diminished expectations for them?

It surely looks like a pickle.

It's only a pickle if you're dumb. People who aren't dumb know that the two examples are not congruent and the way you have phrased the question is tendentious.

One involves a group that is, speaking generally, systematically advantaged by the prevailing culture. The other involves a group that is systematically disadvantaged by the prevailing culture. To give a 'leg up' to a group that has been tripped is not strange; to give a leg up to a group that is already standing on a ladder is bizarre.

Or, put another way, the idea that 'qualifications' are the sorts of things that are meaningful measures when abstracted from individual and group history is false. It's to imagine scoring a road race without accounting for the handicaps.

Let me say one other thing. The way you have cagily tried to bait a p.c. liberal in this conversation, by steadily refusing to commit yourself to your actual position, which, when stated baldly, is neither fair nor intuitively appealing, is a transparent, lazy rhetorical trick that deserves nothing but contempt.

If you look at the discussion above, you will see someone actually advocating an end to any consideration except those based on merit - in other words, no weighing other factors in at all. I didn't see anyone immediately jumping on them - even though it would have meant no more affirmative action on race.

I may be stupid, but it seems like the women making this complaint sound an awful lot like the white people who resent affirmative action for groups other than their own. Some people claim that feminism went off the rails when it became all about allowing rich, well-educated, and privileged white women to feel like noble victims. But those people are probably dumb too.

Well, they didn't get flamed, but they certainly got disagreed-with. Perhaps that is a function of their tone - yours has been to advance loaded questions in the hopes of getting someone to overcommit, which is the kind of shabby gambit that draws fire. But that's as may be - I'm not the right person to ask about what other people said or didn't say, because I'm not those other people. (Relatedly - I'm not calling you dumb per se. I'm saying you're playing dumb, carefully avoiding saying what you really think, advancing fallacious questions and couching your own replies in weasel words, which is to say, conversing in bad faith.)

Regarding your second paragraph, I'm afraid the point you're making is not clear to me.

I guess I'll have to live with that.

Just wanted to say-really well-stated throughout this thread. I need to learn to debate in this fashion!

"The central debates about race in America today are no longer debates between racism and antiracism. Rather, the debate today is between two kinds of antiracism. One, identified with multiculturalism and the left, urges us to respect and preserve the differences between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whomever. It gives poor people identities and, turning them into black people or Latinos or women, insists on regarding their problems as effects of discrimination and intolerance. The other, identified with the right, regards the respect for racial difference as itself a form of discrimination and insists that the only identity that matters (the one we should be respecting) is 'American identity.'

"The problem with this debate is that, from the standpoint of economic inequality, it doesn’t matter which side you’re on and it doesn’t matter who wins. Either way, economic inequality is absolutely untouched. The dream of a world free of prejudice, the dream of a world where identities (whether American of hyphenated American) are not discriminated against, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And the dream is completely compatible with (is, actually, essential to) the dream of a fully free and efficient market. Here's where the concept of neoliberalism - the idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justice - is genuinely clarifying. A society free not only of racism but of sexism and heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated. Thus, when it comes to antiracism, the left is more like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right. Its commitment to rooting out the residual prejudices that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the market. And it commitment to the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the victims of racism, sexism, and heterosexism (the victims of discrimination rather than exploitation, of intolerance rather than of oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance) is a commitment to the essential justice of the market. The preferred crimes of neoliberals are always hate crimes; when our favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals."

- Walter Benn Michaels

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"scarce" resources, college and sexism

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Lower Standards

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Uphold The Market!