this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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What you fail to understand is that the method for getting rid of racism in admissions decisions is to actually look at race.
Only willfully blind racists think that anything can ever be race blind. Because reality is not.
Another misconception that racists spread is that minorities who benefit from affirmative action are somehow not otherwise deserving. The reality is that you still need the grades (or money) to get in to the university. All that is different is that universities are rewarded (read as not sued) for having racist admissions. i.e. being an all white school in a state with a large minority population. Which was a real thing in the deep south into the late 1970s.
What racists also ignore is that having a mixed student population is actually good for the student body as a whole.
If that worked, then we really wouldn't need affirmative action.
Here's how the system actually works, because racists lie about it all the time.
Say you have two students, one gets straight "B"s in High School, one gets a mix of B and C. Their only main difference is that they're different races. One Black, one White.
Now, without affirmative action, the White student gets preference because school admissions is generally racist as fuck. Hall, look at Brandeis, that place has actually brought back "whites only" spaces.
Now, back to the two imaginary students, a racist would assume that the black student had the worse grades. But that's not how it goes down.
See, students are judged for admissions on a bunch of criteria. There are judgments on financial stability of the family, after school programs that the student is part of, previous family members that went to any college.
It mostly boils down to two factors, how likely is this student to graduate with a degree, and how likely is this student to pay off their tuition.
Now, thanks to a bunch of racist shit that happened at the end of the civil war and has continued in one form or another until today, black students score poorer on these random criteria than a comparable white student, even when the white student has slightly worse grades.
That's what affirmative action was trying to fix. Giving black students a chance to get an education, to fight for a higher paying job, to end the cycle of poverty that white people have knowingly inflicted on them since the end of the civil war.
The fact that affirmative action also helped other minorities was not an accident, because white people have fucked over every minority.
The final note here, the civil rights act didn't magically end racism. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan soared in the late 1960 and early 1970s.
Electing a black president didn't mean racism was over, The number of white nationalist and general hate groups in the US saw a rather large bump from the election of Barack Obama. That number died off a bit towards the end of his second term, but then soared again under Trump. They were pissed about Obama, but got a green light from Trump.