The problem is not as simple as you pretend
Madanthonywayne said:
If the problem is a lack of problem solving skills among minorities, the solution is to teach them those skills, not to game the system in their favor. That is treating the symptom while allowing the disease to fester.
With racial and ethnic segregation on the rise in American schools, this is a problematic assertion. If minority-dominated schools offered equal quality of education, it wouldn't be so much of an issue. Reality, however, apparently suggests otherwise.
Even worse, affirmative action engenders racial hatred by creating a convenient scapegoat for anyone passed over for benefits given to less qualified minority applicants. It also calls into question the competence of every minority to graduate under a system that doesn't hold them up to the same standards.
That hatred only seems to occur among those who advocate that the only equality is to preserve standing inequality in society.
While we hear much about people who were passed over for a job so it could be given to a less-qualified minority candidate, I've never actually encountered this directly. That is not to say that I've never directly encountered the assertion that one only reason someone got a job was because they were a minority. Indeed, I encountered this some years ago while working for an insurance company. Apparently, the black gay man only got his job as an accounting manager because he was black and gay. Of course, the person who asserted this could not establish that he was unqualified or even less qualified than other applicants. Does the company feel a politically correct need, when presented with two equal candidates, to choose diversity? Perhaps. But what guarantee is there that two people with the same qualifications on paper will present themselves identically? To borrow a stereotype, perhaps the gay black man was simply more charming in his interview. Or, equally speculative but less dependent on stereotype, perhaps his career goals matched up better with the company than the other candidate. And so on. And so forth.
You might, then, point to your
Los Angeles Times article, but among the problems there we find the possibility that you have misrepresented your source. There is a paragraph missing from your excerpt with no indication that the text has been changed. And that missing paragraph is important:
.... This is known as the "mismatch effect."
The mismatch theory is controversial. One of us (Sander) has advanced it in the academic literature. The other (Amar) believes that while it raises substantial questions, it has not been empirically proved. Some dismiss the whole idea as nothing more than a politically motivated attack on affirmative action or, even worse, an attack on blacks and Latinos -- the main recipients of current preferences. Many rightly point out that definitive conclusions are difficult because the data available to researchers thus far have been limited in very important ways.
Still, certain facts are indisputable ....
(Amar and Sander)
We might consider, for instance, that
wealth does not appear significantly accounted for in the article. To what degree does wealth affect one's resource access and, thus, overall performance?
A lot of legal scholars who focus on empirical work agree that the mismatch effect deserves serious study. A few weeks ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a 280-page report on these issues that came to the same conclusion.
The best data in the nation for studying any mismatch effect in law schools reside in the archives of the State Bar of California, the state agency that administers the bar exam and oversees the conduct of lawyers. Starting in the 1980s, the California bar has maintained careful records on the backgrounds of bar exam-takers and their performance on its tests. With this data, it is possible to compare how students with similar college grades and LSAT scores do on the bar when they've attended different law schools and experienced different types of legal education. It is also possible to more deeply compare the bar performance of minority students before and after Proposition 209 and use other careful techniques to test whether the mismatch effect exists.
(ibid)
If the mismatch effect was as definitive as you imply, it would not require serious study and deeper comparisons using more careful techniques to test whether or not it exists.
It is an idea that needs to be considered, but I do wonder why you feel the need to exaggerate it in order to justify racial hatred.
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Notes:
Amar, Vikram and Richard H. Sander. "Does affirmative action hurt minorities?" Los Angeles Times. September 26, 2007. LATimes.com. January 10, 2010. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-sander26sep26,0,4501633.story