We are all equal again, right?

[Dill]

(07-11-2023, 02:21 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Quote:Creating greater minority access to higher ed =/= proof AA advocates think minorities lack natural ability or "agency"--especially when minorities have done the directing and heavy lifting. It's proof AA advocates then and now think the system unfairly discriminates against minorities who DO have natural ability and agency. And now we are headed back to pre-AA numbers.

How does it not?  if a black applicant has the same, or better, qualifications as a white or Asian applicant and fails to get in, that would be discrimination.  If said applicant had significantly less qualifications than said white or Asian applicant and got in instead of them, that would be discrimination.

Still some cleaning up to be done on this thread.

In the pro AA argument, there is a prior question about how people get "qualified" in the first place.  

The conservative con-argument assumes only three things at play--natural ability, individual determination, and family support. Gaining qualifications is basically a matter of ability and choice, not whether one's family has little wealth and has been denied access to good education for generations. (Actually, plenty of "liberals" fall into this group as well. No actual leftists do.) 

The liberal/left argument is that wealth and social placement play a large role in who gets to gain qualifications or not. That's why, e.g., the U of Texas Law School, fanatically segregated before Brown vs Board, could embrace "colorblind" admissions in the late '50s--that would reproduce very nearly the results of segregation, which was now illegal. 

And they could (and did) argue that was fair because it would of course be "discrimination" if a qualified black candidate failed to get in. So no "discrimination" against any race--especially the one producing the vast majority of "qualified" candidates, given Black students' lack of access to the kind of training that makes for qualified students.  

So if today, 10 socially privileged white applicants are matched with 10 Black applicants who never came from private schools with expensive tutors and could not enter Ivy League schools, liberal/leftists wouldn't see colorblind admissions as merely producing "fair" results because "only those qualified" get in. Leftists-without-quotation-marks would see the direct reproduction of class, wealth, and privilege in that "fairness." 

They would also know that most of the minorities now denied access to Harvard, Yale and UNC will not be "significantly less" qualified.  
And some will still be more qualified than legacy admissions. Support for this SCOTUS decision secures that outcome.

This framing is probably very new to you, but it is not to Blum and the Heritage Foundation or the Federalist Society.