Does Texas A&M’s botched hire spell doom for classroom diversity? Some say yes
Does Texas A&M’s botched hire spell doom for classroom diversity? Some say yes
Texas A&M University marked its hiring of Kathleen McElroy with great fanfare — balloons, a banner and a signing ceremony.
Just days later, McElroy’s tenure offer unraveled after the university buckled under backlash from Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, and an unspecified group of individuals close to the university who opposed her previous diversity initiatives. A new state law will limit that and the discussion of race and inclusion on college campuses next year.
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The new state law just says you can't accept a student based on the race of the applicant.
Do yall honestly have a problem with outlawing systemic racism?
Affirmative Action helped get rid of all white classrooms and workplaces, it worked. Taking it away means we're just going to go back to an all white America. I'm sorry to tell you this but people are not inherently good or bad, we have to make laws like AA otherwise things would never change. We had to force the South to desegregate at gun point
A deeply racist state like Texas is never going to have racial equality without being forced to, just like the South was never going to desegregate unless forced to
And in California where they got rid of AA in 1996, Black attendance in higher education immediately dropped and it hasn't even recovered yet to what it was before 1996
I think there is a way to do a form of economic AA that factors in the applicant’s background in a way that doesn’t bucket them by race. It could still help historically marginalized groups without having to codify anything by race. Not saying I’m against AA, it was an important tool in partially fixing the systemic racism in America, but maybe there’s a different way of doing it?
AA worked by acknowledging systemic racism separately from economic issues, which is important when the racism is also a primary cause of economic issues when the government repeatedly destroyed black communities when they became successful.
You can't replace something that addresses racism by shifting it to economics. All that does is let the focus change to poor white people who also need help, but with a different solution because their economic hardships are not primarily caused by racism.
Wouldn’t the black communities that suffered the most economic injustice from racist policy benefit from an economic AA while limiting the benefit an affluent black applicant would have previously gotten over a poor Asian person, for example?
Not when there are still only 6 Black CEO's of Furtune 500 companies, 2 of them Black women.
There's still a thic ceiling for Black people in America.
Wouldn't directly working to address the outcomes of racism as a whole be better than trying to make it about something else and trying to focus on the exceptions?
I mean the real solution here (putting some real fucking consequences on racist people in power) simply isn't going to happen in our lifetime so as much as I can see the flaws in AA, it isn't the worst equaliser either.
I’m not sure. I feel like it could address the outcomes of said historic racism without having rules codified by race. I admit this would benefit kids of other races that are poor through factors other than racism. Economic AA would also benefit another marginalized group, Native Americans, although I will admit that I’m ignorant to what extent AA had already benefited Native Americans.
You can't fix racism without addressing racism.
The thing is, the white supremacists have had their thumb on the economic scales since the beginning of the country.
Rich white conservatives will actually spend more money making sure minorities fail, than they would earn if they worked with minorities for the common good.
The saying is, a raising tide lifts all boats, but the conservative addition is punching a hole in the minority boat, even if it stops the overall tide, just so their boat can be higher.
Do yall honestly have a problem with outlawing systemic racism?
Yes. They do. The specific problem is that some people in power really really want to be racist, and will try to find any possible way of enacting racist policies without being openly racist.
Want more black people picking cotton but can't because non-prisoner slave labour is illegal? Simple! Just quietly defund all public services from a majority-black area (except the police of course), and then start making arrests when people gotta commit crimes just to survive. Now you have your black people under ball and chain but it's okay, because he committed a crime!
Part of the reason why AA is so effective is because it partially defangs these more covert attempts at systemic racism. Because even if you do have these stealth-racism tactics, you can't stop, say 30% of university undergraduates from being African American
Do yall honestly have a problem with outlawing systemic racism?
Fuck you and your bad faith argument.