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

Warren was a fool to engage Trump, and it would've served herself - and the country - better if she had focused more on the ongoing plight of Native Americans in the US, especially in the area of voter suppression, rather than get baited into playing a bully's game.

Maybe the silver lining is that people are suddenly remembering that Native Americans are actually still around.

 

We must have had a Native American congressperson before, since we have had a Native American Vice-President and Senator (3/8, but he and his mother grew up on a reservation and was an official member of the Kaw Nation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis

Born on January 25, 1860 in Topeka, Kansas Territory, prior to its admission as a state in January 1861, Charles Curtis had roughly 3/8 Native American ancestry. His mother Ellen Papin (also spelled Pappan) was Kaw, Osage, Potawatomi, and French.[1][2] His father Orren Curtis was of English, Scots and Welsh ancestry.[3] On his mother's side, Curtis was a descendant of chief White Plume of the Kaw Nation and chief Pawhuska of the Osage.[4]

Curtis's first words as an infant were in French and Kansa, learned from his mother. She died when he was three, but he lived for some time with her parents on the Kaw reservation and returned to them in later years. He learned to love racing horses; later he was a highly successful jockey in prairie horse races.[5]

On June 1, 1868, 100 Cheyenne warriors invaded the Kaw Reservation. Terrified white settlers took refuge in nearby Council Grove. The Kaw men painted their faces, donned regalia, and rode out on horseback to confront the Cheyenne. The rival Indian warriors put on display of superb horsemanship, accompanied with war cries and volleys of bullets and arrows. After about four hours, the Cheyenne retired with a few stolen horses and a peace offering of coffee and sugar from the Council Grove merchants. No one had been injured on either side. During the battle, Joe Jim, a Kaw interpreter, galloped 60 miles to Topeka to seek assistance from the governor. Riding with Joe Jim was eight-year-old Charles Curtis, then nicknamed "Indian Charley".[6]

After Curtis's mother's death in 1863, his father remarried but soon divorced. Orren Curtis was captured and imprisoned during his Civil War service, and during this period, the infant Charles was cared for by his maternal grandparents. They helped him gain possession of his mother's land in North Topeka, which, in the Kaw matrilineal system, he inherited from her.​

 

I said congresswoman. Sharice Davids would be the first Native American congresswoman.

 

It's not about race... it's the country he comes from.

 

Eh, actually, to my understanding, most tribes have something known as 'blood quantum' where you measure the amount of Native American blood you have in you. And to quote a piece from NPR "some tribes say you have to have a certain amount of, quote, "Indian blood" to be considered a citizen. And different tribes use blood quantum and enrollment in different ways, like the Navajo Nation for instance. It says you have to have a quarter Navajo blood to enroll."

Just wondering, when they say "their heritage" do they mean Cherokee or overall Native American heritage?

 

I know. I'm just really surprised we haven't had one before, if we even had a Native American Vice President back in the 20's.

 

Read an interesting article about discrimination at Harvard this morning. Brought up that logic never fails: you can't "positively discriminate" without discriminating negatively against someone else.

 

That is statistically untrue. Depending on the number of applicants from different populations, one can in fact favor the admission of certain applicants without materially affecting anyone else's chances. This is literally the case in affirmative action.

Taking a step back, does this discussion even matter? It is not the role of schools to reward people for past exploits. It is to foster a learning environment that best potentializes future growth. Just as all the faculty don't share the same backgrounds, interests, and viewpoints about the world, the student body shouldn't either. Helping people encounter things they never have before is a major stimulant to learning and growth. Is one student's betrayed feeling of entitlement more important than making the best place possible for everyone to learn?

 

Is having 22% of admissions if you are Asian, where straight results would dictate 41%, a positive result?

 

Eh, I should have left it as "It's complicated".
I know that the Cherokees have stated that they don't want "blood" to matter for members of the tribe, in the sense of the racial purity standards of white nationalists. But certainly, DNA tests aren't accepted.
Warren's boasts do highlight a casual racism in the US where whites claim to have a "little bit of Indian blood" as making them special, regardless of whether they have Native American ancestry. Apparently even the KKK thought having a "little bit of Indian blood" was a good thing. Racists are complicated too, evidently...

 

Natives call them "Pretendians."


The number of white people who claim to have 1/4 Native blood (usually Cherokee, Navajo, or Apache) is astronomical.

 

A. That’s not affirmative action. The Asian case is about a facially neutral “interview” process that systematically downgrades one group. That’s not “positively discriminating” at all. It’s directly negatively assessing individuals. That’s different than giving weight to applicants who are unusual for your institution, so that you can ensure you build a varied class profile.

B. Yes, it is entirely possible to have both a just and desirable outcome where a class looks very different than what it might based on past academic performance alone. Again, admissions are not a reward. Secondary school performance and standardized testing doesn’t correlate well to life success. Especially in highly stratified societies, wealth can have a major impact on early educational performance (money to buy tutors, don’t have to contribute to household income or childcare, parents’ availability to help with homework, etc) it is highly likely that usingbthis as a sole criteria would give you a very uniform group. Educators might understandably seek to ensure exposure to different kinds of experiences. The alternative model requires believing there is an intrinsic difference between the person who scores 89 versus 88% on a test, instead of fluke/random chance. Tests just aren’t that good in reality.

Unrelated: The blood quantum thing is a requirement of the federal government which otherwise threatens to suspend recognition of or reconciliatory efforts for a given tribe. They are also built around notoriously imperfect census lists. Absent this highly technical legal imposition that threatens their autonomy and well-being, attitudes around indigenous heritage much more closely mirror what we see for other ethnic groups.

 

Er... Simple merit-based result say barely over half of those belonging to a specific racial minority, not white and not materially privileged, were actually admitted after the application of corrections weighing in favor of other minorities. Applicants belonging to the first minority were, in the end, discriminated against as a result of more favorable conditions applied to other minorities. It's simple maths.

 

I'm basically pissed off at how ignorant just about everyone in this discussion is right now (by which I mean the social discussion going on in the larger world, not just the discussion here), so I'm going to keep my mouth shut.

 

Well, where's the fun in that?

 

When you see red and you're in the JCC, that means go.

 

Is it part of the lonely existence of being a white colonist, where essentially your identity has to be comprised of other, perceived exotic, ethnic mixes to act as a de facto personality?

See also: Irish-Americans and not being remotely Irish.

 

A1. The biggest specific complaint is about the "live interview" portion of the application. It consistently rates the personalities of Asian applicants as uninteresting or unengaging. That has nothing to do with how other minorities are treated. If these interviews are being used dishonestly to eliminate Asian applicants, then it is just directly discriminatory against them. If it is being employed sincerely but still getting this result, then the Asian applicants are actually making the same point I am. That is, they are actually just giving disproportionate favor to one style of interaction or personality, when A)there's no justifiable reason it can be called objectively better and B)as a learning climate, things are probably worse when everyone is exactly same.

A2. The biggest problem in math is making sure you are doing the right problem, and that's your mistake here. The question is not "do other types of applicants get positive weight." It is what changes an Asian applicant's chance of success. We've done this before in the US with white applicants complaining about weighting in favor of minority applicants. However, even after the policies they were complaining about were removed, the chances of successful acceptance for a white applicant with a given performance did not change at all. This is because there were so few matriculants from the other minority groups that the overwhelming determinant of a white applicants chances of success were other white applicants. The other stuff was superfluous.

You've taken two separate facts (1. Asian applicants are accepted at lower than expected rates 2. Under-represented minorities have weighting in favor of their application) and linked them causally without any evidence.

A3. Your discontent seems quite selective here. Legacy admissions overwhelmingly favor the white and affluent, have no defensible educational purpose, and can be just as disadvantageous to Asian applicants. Why is there no push to eliminate this? Why, instead, is your target affirmative action?

 

Literally started with this.

As to the more general question, I'm wary of discriminatory practices in general, positive or negative, and not just with regards to race. Their lowest common denominator is someone getting spoliated on the basis of what they are, directly or indirectly - again, it's not exactly a complex issue to understand just favoring certain categories creates an inequality by definition, regardless of whether it corrects and/or aggravates other inequalities.

I'm doubly wary in education, where, to keep things simple, I've personally participated in an affirmative action targeting districts, which failed in spectacular fashion despite our best efforts (the gap in knowledge prior to those students' admissions was enormous). Not only did it do nothing to correct the preexisting inequalities, what little impact it did have in the end came not at the expense of the local privileged, but at that of the local underprivileged who were re-routed elsewhere by repercussion.

I don't think affirmative action can fail. I know it can.

 

I know. I'm suggesting to you that the article's outlook was very likely skewed. It started from a place of disliking affirmative action and thereby grabbed at something that wasn't really related in order to attack it.

The relevant question is not whether affirmative action "can" fail, though. Everything in life "can" fail and in fact has some intrinsic rate of failure. The question is whether there can be a reasonable level of success from such initiatives.

 

I'll grant that possibility.

Such initiatives can certainly succeed. Unfortunately, not only can they fail, they can also be used as tools to effectively aggravate discrimination under the pretense of reducing them. This, too, I wish I did not know beyond the shadow of a doubt

How does "once burned, twice shy" work in multiples?

 

Elaborate on that comment? "Aggravate" discrimination?

 

I think he means it's more likely to facilitate discrimination than reduce it.

 

The action I was a part of was integrated in a larger, nation-wide policy.

I'm not going to surprise anybody that despite France being a country where any policy-making based on racial origin is strictly prohibited, up to and including the establishment of any kind of racial statistics, certain districts have very different racial compositions from others.

In principle, the experimentation and then implementation of a nation-wide policy to integrate students from those districts into high schools, prep schools, faculties and great schools (lit. from grandes écoles) is very sensible, and something direly needed at this point - we're talking of districts where criminality is rampant, the economy basically runs on drugs, smuggling and petty crime, the quality of education is piss-poor, and the 16-25 segment roughly think, for 50% of them, that Shari'a should always supersede French law (yep, France sucks too - we screwed up royally in the past 60 years). Opening those districts up is not an option.

In practice, what was implemented does very little for those minorities brought in without saying it (the resulting drop-outs are massive), accession of those residing outside of "priority" districts has become harder, and the net beneficiaries are the richer and already well-educated segments of society, whose access to prep schools and great schools was preserved and whose exit results were improved. Political schools gained access to a new pool of students which allow them to "diversify" their electoral listings, and the most prestigious schools have never consistently recruited as much from a few Parisian prep schools than they do at this time.

Or, simply put, what was presented politically as measures to metaphorically make the poor richer effectively was implemented in a way which resulted in the poor staying poor, the rich staying rich, the filthy rich getting even richer, and everybody else getting poorer - all in the name of combating discrimination and giving everybody a fair chance.

EDIT - Should have quoted Ender straightaway.

Not that it's more likely, but that it can be deliberately used that way.