8 ms·

This is what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation, not because their skin color or gender.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 3y ago
Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  > regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
  - j45 3y ago
    Learn like kings Grow like kings Dream like kings Give back like kings
    - noah_buddy 3y ago
      History is not my forte but it’s funny to use kings in this metaphor.
      - j45 3y ago
        It sure is. Not my choice of word. ;)
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Utopia has a really low bar if we get it from treating foster kids like middle-class kids.
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      Wait, regular people are jealous of how middle class kids live?
    - qwytw 3y ago
      So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    Status is relative. If everyone is a king, no one is a king.
- throwawaysleep 3y ago
  > regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    They should give their kids up if they don't want them.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them? That does not sound dystopian at all..
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate. Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does. If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country. Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own. Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work. Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here. The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
    - shric 3y ago
      > Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
      - lr4444lr 3y ago
        You do realize that most people in a "bad upbringing" don't go on to commit crimes?
- themitigating 3y ago
  It wasn't just about slavery but also racist laws that existed until the 70s~.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
  - Glide 3y ago
    It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise. The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids. It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
- slashdev 3y ago
  Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences. I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead. The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors. I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
  - eli_gottlieb 3y ago
    > Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
      - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
        Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended. That's a good STARTING point. Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person. Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery. Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
- whall6 3y ago
  If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
  - rlt 3y ago
    This is called a “moral hazard”, and I agree.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
    - simple-thoughts 3y ago
      Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
    - erickf1 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - XorNot 3y ago
        So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops. Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.
- tomcam 3y ago
  One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years. How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand? And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
  - tyg13 3y ago
    You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
    - wrs 3y ago
      It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Generally state colleges will take any applicant who meets the pre-set bar. Where as tier 1 universities are more a zero sum game.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
    University of California, Washington, and Texas are hardly uncompetitive. Their admission rates are very low for the good programs.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      UC's are a huge exception, yes. The better equivalent is the CSU system and even then it's relatively competitive comared to other public unis.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > UC's are a huge exception UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue... America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
        johnnyanmac 3y ago
        yes that is a good list of 20+ universities (if I throw in the prestigious UC's) out of... 1700 public institutions. Pareto heuristics suggest there will be about 300 "good" universities that people compete over compared to the other 1300 we can't name.
j45 3y ago
Are you commenting on not comment on things that would to apply to you? It can be easy to say what’s good for another and how to solve them when their problems aren’t ones you have grown up or lived through.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lotsofpulp 3y ago
I do not understand why it should be limited to foster kids. Just make the schools free for all, and collect with higher marginal income / wealth taxes. It should not be dependent on parents’ status either. I got zero aid due to my parents, but I also got zero from my parents.
- er4hn 3y ago
  Assuming the best intentions of those running this, there may not be enough money in the budget for it to be free for everyone.
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    Somehow European countries pull it off without bankrupting themselves.
    - nobody9999 3y ago
      >Somehow European countries pull it off without bankrupting themselves. While providing universal health care to a similar number of folks and with a smaller aggregate economy. Those Europeans must be cooking the books, eh? /s US GDP[0]: $25,462,700 million Aggregate EU GDP[1]: 15.8 trillion euros N.B.: USD/Euro Exchange rate (23 July 2023)[2]: 0.89 Euro == 1 US Dollar. [0[ https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022 [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-the-european-union-eu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-pr... [2] https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=EUR https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...
    - qwytw 3y ago
      In most cases higher education is to some extent "rationed" and generally less accessible than in the US. Only a few countries in Europe have more University graduates. Which is of course perfectly rational if you have no ideological objects to some degree of centralized planning.
    - Der_Einzige 3y ago
mmanfrin 3y ago
Affirmative action was to address systemic inequalities, not individual ones. Bringing it up in an article about foster kids and then further including the bit about gender feels like flamebait.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  Ironically affirmative action is systemic racism itself, no matter how well intentioned.
  - PierceJoy 3y ago
    True, but many forms of discrimination are legal and good. Minimum age to drive is ageism, but I think we would all agree that it’s a good form of discrimination. You say “no matter how well intentioned” as if the intention isn’t important. But intention and outcome are both very important and determine whether a given form of discrimination is good or bad.
    - lockhouse 3y ago
      Harvard and other Ivy League universities got caught discriminating against Asians in their admissions. How do you justify that as a good thing?
      - hotpotamus 3y ago
        I wonder how Harvard, elitest of the elite of educational institutions justified it? Presumably such learned ones must have their reasons.
      - PierceJoy 3y ago
        The parent referred to affirmative action, not a specific case. Affirmative action is practised by many organizations in many different forms. That’s what I was replying to. If you’re genuinely interested, you can find well though out opinions on that specific case with a quick Google search.
      - 3y ago
desireco42 3y ago
Pretty much I thought the same thing, this is the right thing to do, everybody benefits, nobody is getting less from this. I am almost amazed how they managed to do the right thing...
asveikau 3y ago
In the United States, a lot of times the individual situation is correlated to their skin color. The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected. The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.
- axlee 3y ago
  How many slaves in the family tree should someone have to qualify? Do white slaves count? How far back should we go? Would citizens whose families have immigrated to this country after the deed be also on the hook for reparations? Should reparations only be given to struggling people, or should they be given out regardless of the situation of the descendant of a slave? It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds. Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now. Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
  - asveikau 3y ago
    I agree, it's hard to codify. But there is undoubtedly a large group of people, often identified by their race, that face disproportionate hardship and continued to be legally discriminated against well after slavery was abolished. And note that I mentioned other, post-slavery problems, and you jump right into "how many slaves??"
  - 3y ago
throwawaycities 3y ago
Just to play devils advocate… Foster children are not a protected class under the law. Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws. I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids. I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between. It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.
- ttfkam 3y ago
  Oh no! Some young adults might have an easier time attending college even when their lives weren't as shitty as others. Squint and we might start looking like college tuitions in Europe.
  - throwawaycities 3y ago
    You missed the part where I say I support the program and programs like this for foster kids that age out, I just don’t agree that the program is narrowly tailored to individual situations. Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances. I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt. I don’t think your comment adds much.
    - deleted 3y ago
pbjtime 3y ago
Oh honey
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
[dead]
Sparkyte 3y ago
I COMPLETE AGREE ON THIS! Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Yes. I have to add a "but". But why "Foster Kids" and not "Passes means test". That means test would probably include all/most foster kids of course.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Why not just expand it to everyone? We don't means-test free high school and that works great.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
irjustin 3y ago
This ignores that many individual situations were bad simply because of their skin color.
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
So fuck me for having 2 parents, right? They were both poor, worked menial jobs. I wouldn't have qualified for this. There's always someone left out.
jojobas 3y ago
Does being a foster child automatically mean you're poor though? Could one be taken away from rich abusive parents with a mandated allowance?
zzzeek 3y ago
Being Black in America is actually a specific situation with structural inequality baked in. It is strictly based on skin color and it is backed up by a significant number of studies, as well as observed by its actual victims [1] [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-americans-differ-from-other-u-s-adults-over-whether-individual-or-structural-racism-is-a-bigger-problem/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-ame...
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pessimizer 3y ago

Affirmative action shouldn't ever have been a contest with prizes for the most unfortunate. It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of slavery. Having been enslaved legally in the US is not a race, it's an atrocity. The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. There's no clearer illustration of our values than the fact that children who, through no fault of their own, have become the responsibility of the state are treated like unwanted trash. The idea that a society like that could figure out how to ethically treat prisoners or immigrants is laughable.

bagacrap 3y ago
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived In this utopia you describe, I'd think all kids lived like kings.
- j45 3y ago
  Learn like kings Grow like kings Dream like kings Give back like kings
  - noah_buddy 3y ago
    History is not my forte but it’s funny to use kings in this metaphor.
    - j45 3y ago
      It sure is. Not my choice of word. ;)
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Utopia has a really low bar if we get it from treating foster kids like middle-class kids.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    Wait, regular people are jealous of how middle class kids live?
  - qwytw 3y ago
    So lower class kids (through no fault of their own as well..) should not have access to higher education? That's was very weird of phrasing. What about making education accessible to all people regardless of their who their parents were instead of trying to make people jealous?
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Status is relative. If everyone is a king, no one is a king.
throwawaysleep 3y ago
> regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived Given that the money to do that would have been taken from those parents, you can see why in a democracy parents would object to having their resources stolen for government kids to have better lives over their own.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  They should give their kids up if they don't want them.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    This makes me think that your original comment was some form of sarcasm. So your plan is to incentivize lower class parents to abandon their children because the state would be able to take better care of them? That does not sound dystopian at all..
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I agree completely. Something so striking about the situation as well is that on balance, we have a staggering amount of wealth to share with the less fortunate. Yet these are children, specifically, who deserve every opportunity we can afford them by default. Not “hopeless addicts” or some other group deemed not worth saving by so many of us, but people quite literally the epitome of worth saving. These people need every ounce of reassurance that we care and that they can integrate and function in society. That they deserve opportunity as anyone else does. If we had to be self serving we could look at it like “each one of these people is statistically far more likely to be a burden on my own children in the future, so a small investment now could save a lot later”, but we seem to fail even in being selfish about it. I find this topic heart breaking.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  For me, state wards are one of the four metrics for judging the quality of a country. Wards of the state: our responsibility, through no fault of their own. Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. Immigrants: not our responsibility, but an indication of how well we can manage our economy. We should be able to put anybody who comes here to work. Emigrants: we should let people leave who don't want to be here. The first three are connected because there's no way to sustain providing anything for prisoners and immigrants that you don't provide for regular citizens. Wards of the state are the nation's children; there's nothing that normal citizens get that they shouldn't get. If they don't get anything, normal citizens are getting less than nothing.
  - shric 3y ago
    > Prisoners: our responsibility, their fault. What percentage (approximately) of prisoners in the United States would you categorize as "their fault" and not some product of their upbringing/situation?
    - lr4444lr 3y ago
      You do realize that most people in a "bad upbringing" don't go on to commit crimes?
themitigating 3y ago
It wasn't just about slavery but also racist laws that existed until the 70s~.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Actually this sounds completely dystopian. In what world should people really wish they were foster kids? Its no wonder people warn against an effort to destroy the nuclear family.
- Glide 3y ago
  It's probably the most dystopian and I'm very glad I didn't have to scroll to the bottom before someone said otherwise. The logical end of this thinking is that people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of raising children would put them up for adoption because they would want the best outcome for their kids. It's like Black Mirror episodes write themselves.
slashdev 3y ago
Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Please cut me some slack here, by the nature of the world we live in, I have not uttered these thoughts to another human being, and they might have obvious flaws. It's tough when you can't talk about ideas out of fear of the consequences. I think nobody argues that it's a vile, morally repugnant thing to enslave another human being. But that was a long time ago, and all those slaves and the people who enslaved them are all dead. The descendants of those slaves are now much wealthier and better off by pretty much any metric than their relatives who were not enslaved. How do you make an argument that those descendants are victims in need of reparations? No crime was committed against them directly, and they seem to have benefited from the crimes committed against their ancestors. I must stress that this is not in any way excusing or justifying the wrongs that occurred. But how would you make an argument for reparations, given how things turned out?
- eli_gottlieb 3y ago
  > Do reparations for slavery even make logical sense? Yes. The slaves did labor. That labor demands wages. The fact that the formerly enslaved also benefited from public goods to which all citizens had access does not pay down the debt owned to them for their labor.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    I guess a better question is whether reparation paid out to 5th+ generation descendants of slaves make sense. How do you even implement that practically?
    - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended. That's a good STARTING point. Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person. Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery. Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.
nobody9999 3y ago
>The reason we should be paying for foster kids' college is because the state is their parent, so it's our responsibility. In a country that wasn't shit, regular people would be jealous of how kids who were wards of the state lived, and how well-raised they were. Absolutely. As my mother used to say, parents should (at a minimum) pay for education and therapy (not to mention housing with electricity and indoor plumbing, food, clothes, etc.). Since the government of California is the legal guardian of these children, it's really the least they can do.
whall6 3y ago
If foster children were raised so well that people were jealous, maybe that would create an adverse incentive for people to create more children than they can handle and desert children that they’ve already had?
- rlt 3y ago
  This is called a “moral hazard”, and I agree.
- XorNot 3y ago
  You live in a democracy. If ward's of the state were well taken care of, it would imply a voting majority who recognize this as valuable. Maybe they would also do other things with that power, like vote for increased assistance and benefits for parents in general, or expand the program to be a blanket "everyone can have free state college".
  - simple-thoughts 3y ago
    Social constructs don’t determine what is real or not. Instead they function as processes within a wider ecosystem. Every political decision that’s made has adverse consequences since they require force, no matter the political structure. If something is valuable to people they will do it freely without requiring force; but if something is valuable to a select group at the expense of others, the result is always some degree of negative side effects. It may be possible to argue some social good outweighs those effects, but dismissing them because “we live in a democracy” reveals a totalitarian view of the state.
  - erickf1 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - XorNot 3y ago
      So tell me, how are state congressman chosen? Senators? Federal congressmen? Local school boards, state judges, county sherriffs. What happens before a new president takes power? What procedure is implemented to facilitate that?
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Affirmative action came in response to Jim Crow. When slavery ended during the civil war, people had the idea that it wasn’t needed. It wasn’t until reconstruction ended and southern states leaned heavily into racist policy making that it became popular.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nemo44x 3y ago
Disagree. It is not the states job to raise foster kids. It’s the states job to match them with families that want to take them in and care for them like their own. There’s a line a mine long of people that are desperate to adopt but have to job through endless hoops. Fix the adoption system and stop needlessly expanding the state and taking on more clients.
kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
It was sold as a way to fix the wrongs of institutionalized bigotry. Unfortunately certain minorities get turned away from AA benefits because the narrative is focused on only one group despite historical slights affecting many more. As implemented, it wasn't even fair to the people it was claiming to assist.
tomcam 3y ago
One of the basic principles in Western law, stretching back 700 years or so, is that prosecuting people not involved in a crime is unacceptable. The slaves and the enslaved are long dead. No one has legally owned slaves for 150+ years. How do you apportion the taxes? Do new immigrants owe the same as people here generations? Do the descendants of Irish immigrants owe the same as descendants of slave owners? What about the black descendants of black slave owners, of whom there were over a thousand? And how far does this go back? The Comanches were extremely brutal. They killed and enslaved many people from many tribes, especially the Apache. Should they be responsible for reparations to the Apache and other tribes they crushed?
- tyg13 3y ago
  You're missing the point. No one is being "punished" for their ancestors having owned slaves. The idea is to assist people whose ancestors were exploited, legally and systemically.
  - wrs 3y ago
    It may help to think of it as assistance for victims of a natural disaster, which seems pretty universally acceptable. The disaster being a very messed up society. Or as something like the Marshall Plan that helped restore Europe after, again, society’s global screwup.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> what affirmative action should be... helping people out based on their individual situation Also, just helping them out. Nobody gets hurt. This isn't creating an allotment of seats for foster kids. The selection process, and thus odds, are the same for them and everyone else.

bushbaba 3y ago
Generally state colleges will take any applicant who meets the pre-set bar. Where as tier 1 universities are more a zero sum game.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  University of California, Washington, and Texas are hardly uncompetitive. Their admission rates are very low for the good programs.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    UC's are a huge exception, yes. The better equivalent is the CSU system and even then it's relatively competitive comared to other public unis.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > UC's are a huge exception UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Virginia Tech, College of William & Mary, Georgia Tech, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin Madison, Purdue... America has a solid stable of top-tier public universities.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        yes that is a good list of 20+ universities (if I throw in the prestigious UC's) out of... 1700 public institutions. Pareto heuristics suggest there will be about 300 "good" universities that people compete over compared to the other 1300 we can't name.

j45 3y ago

Are you commenting on not comment on things that would to apply to you? It can be easy to say what’s good for another and how to solve them when their problems aren’t ones you have grown up or lived through.

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lotsofpulp 3y ago

I do not understand why it should be limited to foster kids. Just make the schools free for all, and collect with higher marginal income / wealth taxes. It should not be dependent on parents’ status either. I got zero aid due to my parents, but I also got zero from my parents.

er4hn 3y ago
Assuming the best intentions of those running this, there may not be enough money in the budget for it to be free for everyone.
- ttfkam 3y ago
  Somehow European countries pull it off without bankrupting themselves.
  - nobody9999 3y ago
    >Somehow European countries pull it off without bankrupting themselves. While providing universal health care to a similar number of folks and with a smaller aggregate economy. Those Europeans must be cooking the books, eh? /s US GDP[0]: $25,462,700 million Aggregate EU GDP[1]: 15.8 trillion euros N.B.: USD/Euro Exchange rate (23 July 2023)[2]: 0.89 Euro == 1 US Dollar. [0[ https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022 https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/usa?year=2022 [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-the-european-union-eu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/279447/gross-domestic-pr... [2] https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=USD&To=EUR https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?Amount=1&From=...
  - qwytw 3y ago
    In most cases higher education is to some extent "rationed" and generally less accessible than in the US. Only a few countries in Europe have more University graduates. Which is of course perfectly rational if you have no ideological objects to some degree of centralized planning.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago

mmanfrin 3y ago

Affirmative action was to address systemic inequalities, not individual ones. Bringing it up in an article about foster kids and then further including the bit about gender feels like flamebait.

lockhouse 3y ago
Ironically affirmative action is systemic racism itself, no matter how well intentioned.
- PierceJoy 3y ago
  True, but many forms of discrimination are legal and good. Minimum age to drive is ageism, but I think we would all agree that it’s a good form of discrimination. You say “no matter how well intentioned” as if the intention isn’t important. But intention and outcome are both very important and determine whether a given form of discrimination is good or bad.
  - lockhouse 3y ago
    Harvard and other Ivy League universities got caught discriminating against Asians in their admissions. How do you justify that as a good thing?
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      I wonder how Harvard, elitest of the elite of educational institutions justified it? Presumably such learned ones must have their reasons.
    - PierceJoy 3y ago
      The parent referred to affirmative action, not a specific case. Affirmative action is practised by many organizations in many different forms. That’s what I was replying to. If you’re genuinely interested, you can find well though out opinions on that specific case with a quick Google search.
    - 3y ago

desireco42 3y ago

Pretty much I thought the same thing, this is the right thing to do, everybody benefits, nobody is getting less from this. I am almost amazed how they managed to do the right thing...

asveikau 3y ago

In the United States, a lot of times the individual situation is correlated to their skin color. The condition of being descendants of slaves, or people who faced other forms of official discrimination cited in the prevention of intergenerational wealth such as redlining, blockbusting or unfavorable treatment in the GI bill, etc., is ultimately an individual situation for each individual affected. The idea that you can dismiss that as not an individual hardship -- though it kind of is for those impacted -- strikes me as pretty much a word game, nothing more. Not unlike the word games American laws started to use when they could no longer punish people de jure for their race.

axlee 3y ago
How many slaves in the family tree should someone have to qualify? Do white slaves count? How far back should we go? Would citizens whose families have immigrated to this country after the deed be also on the hook for reparations? Should reparations only be given to struggling people, or should they be given out regardless of the situation of the descendant of a slave? It's a lot easier to quantify and equalize the situation here and now rather than to try to make up for a future that could have been, and for which no living being is responsible. The past is complex and blurry, and families aren't a straight line. And generally, people aren't bound by their ancestor's misdeeds. Poor people should get more help from society in the US, that's a fact: race might be a strong predictor for poverty, but the best signal for poverty remains income and wealth, right here and right now. Why bother looking at anything else? Are poor whites or asians somehow more blameable for their poverty than poor blacks? Should a successful black person get reparations from a white hobo, simply based on their lineage (that none of them have control on)?
- asveikau 3y ago
  I agree, it's hard to codify. But there is undoubtedly a large group of people, often identified by their race, that face disproportionate hardship and continued to be legally discriminated against well after slavery was abolished. And note that I mentioned other, post-slavery problems, and you jump right into "how many slaves??"
- 3y ago

throwawaycities 3y ago

Just to play devils advocate… Foster children are not a protected class under the law. Perhaps foster kids could or even should be a protected class, however unlike most protected classes that have faced historical systematic discrimination codified in law, the general hardships of foster children are not based in unjust laws. I have worked in Dependency law (ie with children that have been abused, abandoned and neglected) which deals a lot with foster kids. I favor programs that provide funding for foster kids like this and provide assistance when they “age out” of care, but it is a broad brushstroke and doesn’t take into consideration individual situations as you suggest. In other words foster children are not all alike nor are their situations. Some live in group homes and they are just a number or a check for foster parents, some live in loving and supportive homes, even sometimes in the homes of relatives when parental rights were lost but they are still considered foster children. Some become foster kids at 17 and others are born into it. There is everything in between. It is about the equivalent in terms of diversity of situations as being a minority/protected class that has historically been discriminated against.

ttfkam 3y ago
Oh no! Some young adults might have an easier time attending college even when their lives weren't as shitty as others. Squint and we might start looking like college tuitions in Europe.
- throwawaycities 3y ago
  You missed the part where I say I support the program and programs like this for foster kids that age out, I just don’t agree that the program is narrowly tailored to individual situations. Trust me here in Florida there are many parents who put their kids in foster care at 17 so they qualify for governmental housing allowances. I’m all for free college tuition, for all. I want an educated society, I want better paying jobs resulting in higher taxes, and I don’t want government guaranteed loans resulting in unaffordable tuition and life long debt. I don’t think your comment adds much.
  - deleted 3y ago

pbjtime 3y ago

Oh honey

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

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Sparkyte 3y ago

I COMPLETE AGREE ON THIS! Affirmative action is about reinforcing the bottom so it doesn't fall any further. It isn't about supporting anyone for a particular reason, but anyone in a condition they can not control.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Yes. I have to add a "but". But why "Foster Kids" and not "Passes means test". That means test would probably include all/most foster kids of course.

TheCoelacanth 3y ago
Why not just expand it to everyone? We don't means-test free high school and that works great.

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irjustin 3y ago

This ignores that many individual situations were bad simply because of their skin color.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

So fuck me for having 2 parents, right? They were both poor, worked menial jobs. I wouldn't have qualified for this. There's always someone left out.

jojobas 3y ago

Does being a foster child automatically mean you're poor though? Could one be taken away from rich abusive parents with a mandated allowance?

zzzeek 3y ago

Being Black in America is actually a specific situation with structural inequality baked in. It is strictly based on skin color and it is backed up by a significant number of studies, as well as observed by its actual victims [1] [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-americans-differ-from-other-u-s-adults-over-whether-individual-or-structural-racism-is-a-bigger-problem/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/15/black-ame...

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