Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

I see what you're getting at but -wouldn't white supremacists rather like your portrayal? The smaller group dominating the rest of the world.

 

It's weird to me that the author of Roots who made some, uh, eyebrow-raising claims about the historical accuracy of his novel didn't face further scrutiny of his work earlier.

 

Affirmative Action : Throughline : NPR
"The Supreme Court is expected to rule on affirmative action sometime this month. Most of us understand that some colleges use race as a factor in college admissions. But journalist Jay Caspian Kang argues that this focus is too narrow, and that it avoids harder conversations we need to have as a culture. In his view, focusing on the admissions practices of a select few universities creates "a fight for spots in the elite ranks of society" — and blinds us to the bigger problems plaguing American democracy. On today's episode, we talk with Kang about affirmative action's origins in the civil rights era, what it does and doesn't achieve, and what a more equitable education system could look like."

Behind the link is the program for listening straight away or download, and the transcript.

 

Some really interesting points in there that are about more fundamental structural changes to education. I do think one of the good examples is community colleges as a pipeline to 4 year degrees:

And of course, that's one point in a pipeline, there needs to be more resources going in to making K-12 education better across the board, and I think there's also an unaddressed gap (largely reflecting class biases) on graduate work as well. Normalizing some variations along the way should involve providing the support to students so that they have the resources to complete that education and, if they want to, advance. For example (and this is focusing more on graduate education as it's where I've spent more time working on this), Native Ameican and African American Ph.D. earners are more likely to have earned a master's degree at a school that doesn't offer a Ph.D. and then try to go to a Ph.D. program than directly into a Ph.D. program. Academia does not make the transition between those two easy, and that's absurd. Fixing that would make it easier for students who are taking that pathway, and the students that are doing that are disproportionately underrepresented in STEM so it's currently underrepresented students that are disproportionately getting those excessive and unnecessary burdens. There's some major gaps on data collection here still, but I do think it reaches a broader range of students (including avoiding what Kang talks about on diversity attempts that miss economic dynamics).

Also think test scores have to go (or be significantly refactored as to how they're often used), because I do think there's a case to be made that those are more indicative of race than they are of potential success.


I think there's also a good point raised about this not being the only way to have diversity, since UCLA, which is legally barred from affirmative action policies, is 27% white, 38% asian, and 35% in what'd be underrepresented minorities (generally, I'm grouping some stuff broadly in part because they do) while Harvard is apparently 40% white (they don't state this, they just provide the other groups so I'm inferring this), 28% asian, and 32% underrepresented minorities (same caveat as before). So it comes off as a lazy patch because the hard and significant work is not being done to actually improve educational opportunities in a broader and more systemic way.

There's also the outsized power that the Ivies have that does need addressing (which is really hard to actually advance, though there's a really fun way to upset the Ivy leaguers by pointing out Trump graduated one... they rarely know which and so they tend to all shut up).

 

Man, it's great living in the post-racism world!

"“Let’s not tie it to the skin color and say the skin color determined that,” said head of Oklahoma's Department of Education to a GOP crowd recently, regarding the Tulsa Race Riots

 

America's failure to deal with its racist past and present is a disgrace.

 

Blocking bluechecks on Twitter earlier, and I ****ing hate how putting "Pureblood" in your bio is a thing among MAGA types. No connotations there!

 

Pureblood? How very Nightwatch.

 

Both qualify and are not mutually exclusive.

 

I think it’s actually an anti-vaxxer thing, though I have no doubt the people doing it are also huge racists in other ways.

 

Even if it's 'only' anti-vaxxer, the word choice is hugely tone deaf.

 

Oh, it definitely was in reference to being anti-vax, but I doubt that the choice of word was a coincidence in any way.

Not directly related, but I get the feeling that somehow JKR is going to give us at least one more Harry Potter novel and its going to be a revisionist story where Voldemort and his followers were actually misunderstood and had been right the whole time

 

The only problem is that all the new fans that 'discovered' how great Harry Potter is when JKR decided to focus on transphobia tend to think that the Death Eaters had some pretty good ideas about 'racial purity'

 

Why is this in quotation marks? Lol.

 

Yes it was. I thought your quotation marks were implying they weren’t a real thing.

I think that the far right can try to frame it however they want, but those who do try to be overly inclusive is problematic. Any extreme is bad, imo

 

What does "overly inclusive" mean, exactly?

 

Lol. I’m not doing this back and forth with you this time Lowbacca. You’re not genuinely unfamiliar with the term and even if you are, I’ve seen your mastery of the English language and research ability first hand.

You got this one mate.

 

what about being extremely centrist