Affirmitive Action Flashcards
Pro-Con Website: 1. What is Affirmative action?
is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer from discrimination within a culture. Often, these people are disadvantaged for historical reasons, such as oppression or slavery.
What is an argument for it? What is an argument against it?
For: is it is bringing justice, and attempts to make things fair.
Against:
Dan Slater, “Does Affirmative Action Do What it Should?” 1. What does affirmative action attempt to do, according to Slater (the theory of “mismatch”)?
From school admissions to hiring, affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for this country’s brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg up.
- What is an argument for how affirmative action might harm its intended beneficiaries?
Scholars began referring to this theory as “mismatch.” It’s the idea that affirmative action can harm those it’s supposed to help by placing them at schools in which they fall below the median level of ability and therefore have a tough time. As a consequence, the argument goes, these students suffer learningwise and, later, careerwise. To be clear, mismatch theory does not allege that minority students should not attend elite universities. Far from it. But it does say that students — minority or otherwise — do not automatically benefit from attending a school that they enter with academic qualifications well below the median level of their classmates.
“a student who gains special admission to a more elite school on partly nonacademic grounds is likely to struggle more” and contended that “if the struggling leads to lower grades and less learning, then a variety of bad outcomes may result: higher attrition rates, lower pass rates on the bar, problems in the job market. The question is how large these effects are, and whether their consequences outweigh the benefits of greater prestige.”
- What is an argument against the mismatch theory?
“black law students who are similarly qualified when applying to law school perform equally well on the bar irrespective of what tier school they attend.”
Peggy McIntosh, “The Invisible Knapsack”: 1. What is the difficulty of educating people about white privilege?
Since I have had trouble facing white privilege, and describing its results in my life, I saw parallels here with men’s reluctance to acknowledge male privilege. Only rarely will a man go beyond acknowledging that women are disadvantaged to acknowledging that men have unearned advantage, or that unearned privilege has not been good for men’s development as human beings, or for society’s development, or that privilege systems might ever be challenged and changed.
I will review here several types or layers of denial that I see at work protecting, and preventing awareness about, entrenched male privilege. Then I will draw parallels, from my own experience, with the denials that veil the facts of white privilege.
- Provide four examples of the daily effects of white privilege as McIntosh describes in her paper.
- If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live. 4. I can be reasonably sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me. 5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives. 6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely and positively represented. 7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
