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An anti-affirmative action group is suing the US Military Academy at West Point over race-based admissions policies | CNN

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/19/us/west-point-affirmative-action-lawsuit/index.html

The US Military Academy at West Point is being sued for its race-based admissions policies by the same group that won a landmark case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Supreme Court over affirmative action earlier this year, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

An anti-affirmative action group is suing the US Military Academy at West Point over race-based admissions policies | CNN

103 comments

quindraco

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Man, these comments are going to be full of racism in an hour or two.

alienanimals

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More racism and more stereotyping is never the answer.

ChonkyOwlbear

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Centuries of racism can't be fixed without compensation for those harmed.

alienanimals

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Agreed. Though, that compensation should not come from everyone, but rather from the rich assholes who profited.

ChonkyOwlbear

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If you inherit a house with a leaky roof, it isn't your fault the roof is leaking. It is your responsibility to fix the roof now though.

It isn't just about the rich people who profited off slavery. It is also about the net effect of the entire society's racism. Things like black children being given worse education or black families being prevented developing generational wealth through home ownership. We didn't cause that, but we all inherited the house with the leaky roof and it's our responsibility to fix it.

afraid_of_zombies

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I am pretty sure if you inherit a house you can sell the house.

ChonkyOwlbear

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I guess the equivalent of that for a country would be moving to a different one.

Edit: That was a bit of a snarky answer.

From 1945-1956, the GI bill dispensed $33 billion in loans for over 4.3 million American families. Another 8 million more veterans received education or training. Those went almost entirely to whites.

My grandfather bought a home because of this. The only wealth he had to leave to his children when he passed was that house. My father put a down payment on his own home with that inheritance. In turn when my father passed, I sold his house and paid for a condo in Chicago. That all happened because my grandfather was white.

afraid_of_zombies

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If I sold a house in my area I could get about half a million dollars, if I moved to say Canada I would have to spend money to do it.

How is gaining half a million equivalent to losing around ten thousand dollars? Also I don't exactly have to repair a broken roof, I should but I don't have to.

Generational sin/debt doesn't make any sense. People are responsible, sometimes, for what they do not what some ancestor did.

ChonkyOwlbear

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I wasn't literally comparing selling a house to moving out of the country. It's a metaphor.

What I am saying is that participating in this society is a choice. Along with our rights and freedoms we also accept responsibilities and debts (just like inheriting a house is a choice and with the property you accept the responsibility of maintaining it).

It isn't generational sin, it is a debt owed by this country to its citizens. It would be absurd for a new president to say the country didn't have to pay the national debt because that debt was created by previous administrations, right? We all collectively owe that debt as will future generations of citizens until it is paid off.

afraid_of_zombies

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How did you determine this? Because all I see here is an assertion without evidence.

ChonkyOwlbear

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Which part do you doubt?

The idea that people wronged should be compensated is literally the foundation of our legal system. The 14th amendment clearly reads that the State shall not deprive citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process. A similar sentiment was part of the original Declaration of Independence.

If you are questioning the part about home loans, you can read more here https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits

afraid_of_zombies

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That wasn't what they argued. They argued they would get a specific result from a specific action not if the action was good or not.

ChonkyOwlbear

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I was the one you were responding to, so I think I know what my argument was.

afraid_of_zombies

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I respond to what is written not to what you claim to be thinking much later on.

ChonkyOwlbear

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You claimed I made an assertion without evidence. Which part of my statement do you think isn't true?

JustZ

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Try going to college?

afraid_of_zombies

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Right instead of making this about me why not just present evidence of your assertion?

phillaholic

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People looking at an issue surface deep is never the answer.

alienanimals

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I'd rather use a more important metric like net worth to determine whether or not someone needs help. It doesn't matter what color your skin is if you have money.

Instead stupid people will use racist ideologies like "It's okay to make it harder for asians to get into schools, because they all had good upbringings!" No, not all asians are smart or had good upbringings. And yes it's racist/wrong of you to imply they did.

themeatbridge

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I get what you're saying, and I do agree with you to an extent, but

"It doesn't matter what color your skin is if you have money."

That simply isn't true even a little bit. And you more or less disproved it with the second paragraph.

Racism exists in a wide variety of formats. Being wealthy makes everything easier, but easier is a relative term. Affirmative action may not be the best answer, but there's nothing wrong with asking the question, "how can we ensure the military leadership closely resembles the demographics of the soldiers they are leading?"

phillaholic

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Controlled for exact same family income, there are biases against people of color. So you’re not fixing anything.

MindSkipperBro12

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So, genuine question: Is affirmative action good or bad?

NAK

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It's good.

There are people who are arguing it's bad. They are either doing so in bad faith, or have the luxury of either never experiencing the racism that made affirmative action necessary, or never looked into the historical reasons for it.

A good place to start to understand why laws like this we're enacted is Redlining

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

The TL:DR here is maps would be drawn that we're used to determine how risky it was to loan people money. These maps would be drawn based on the ethnicity of the neighborhood (this can be verified, there are poor white neighborhoods). If an applicants address was in a neighborhood that was Redlined, they could be denied a loan.

A modern example is the NFL. In 2021 they were ordered to pay a billion dollars to retired black players. The reason? The NFL were "race norning" cognitive tests designed to see if players had suffered mental decline over their career.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002627309/nfl-says-it-will-halt-race-norming-and-review-brain-injury-claims

Essentially if a white player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old (this example is made up, I don't know the exact metrics) that player would be paid for their injuries.

If a black player suffered mental decline and was reduced to the cognitive ability of a 15 year old that player would not be paid for their injuries. Because the NFL was working under the assumption that black people are fundamentally less intelligent than white people, so for them to be "damaged" they needed a higher level of mental decline to qualify.

This was happening in 2020.

The US needs affirmative action. We're a wonderful country that does many things well. We also still have a fuckton of racists at all levels of government and business. We're simply not there yet.

AeroLemming

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NAK

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Yeah it will. For decades, undeserving white people got loans over black people who may have been more deserving.

How would you right that wrong if not by giving more resources to the community that was denied them

AeroLemming

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NAK

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Sure, we can do both.

Why don't you want to give to poor people who also have been victimized by systemic racism?

AeroLemming

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NAK

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Yes it does

squirmy_wormy

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This doesn't explain why affirmative action is good or bad.

MindSkipperBro12

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I think he did just explain it with the modern day NFL example…

squirmy_wormy

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They explained why redlining is bad and why "race norming" is bad, but all that isn't connected to affirmative action (in the post).

Argument structure:

affirmative action good
redline bad
race norming bad
qed, affirmative action good

There's no link between the points. To be fair, I'm for affirmative action. Just that post doesn't really say anything about it.

InternetCitizen2

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Who is going to teach you to be a carpinter if your parents don't know and the school doesn't want you because you're non-white? This also include preparation to attend that school. To break a cycle of poverty people need to be granted a chance to escape. Education is one path to give people tools.

squirmy_wormy

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Again, I understand why affirmative action is a thing and why it's good. My point is that the top level comment doesn't actually answer why it's a good thing. It doesn't really make a coherent argument at all.

RGB3x3

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It forces corrections for racists doing harm to large groups of people.

If you couldn't get that from that explanation, you weren't paying attention.

aelwero

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Depends...

In the case of West point, the criteria for preferential admissions is going to be based on maintaining the number of officers who are black at 15% or so (to align military officer demographics with the general population). By and large there won't be any actual action, they aren't going to actively go looking for black people to enroll to add numbers. If there is an occasion where candidates are competing for seats, they will adjust preference to pursue their demographic targets. The standards won't get lowered, it's just a bias in competition among those who otherwise qualify.

In some cases, it ends up being a little different. It won't be preference among similarly qualified people, it will be an active pursuit of getting a specific number of black people into seats, sometimes with no regard at all for other qualifications. The qualification for a seat becomes skin color. Essentially, the standard becomes inherently racist.

I don't know exactly how affirmative action was implemented at Harvard or West point, but there's a very real chance that West point will fare better in a lawsuit, because the merits of affirmative action aren't fixed, it depends on how it's implemented. It can be good, it can be racist. If a white guy needs a bunch of qualifications and a black guy just needs to show up with his melanin, that's not cricket, but if both meet the qualifications (to a roughly equivalent degree) and you preference for a target demographic outcome (that roughly mirrors population demographics), thats completely sound and entirely laudable.

The devil's in the details, as with most things. It's not a black and white issue, despite the obvious :)

FlyingSquid

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Good. Correcting historical systemic injustices are always good.

ryathal

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Correcting injustice with further injustice isn't good though.

FlyingSquid

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How is it injustice to ensure that black people get admitted in at least proportional percentages to the general population? The injustice is allowing that to lapse. Do you really think that there will be proportional representation of black people at Harvard or Yale now?

alienanimals

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Assuming all Asian people or all white people had the same opportunities, money, and privilege is racist. Creating affirmative action that blindly looks only at skin color is racist. We should be looking at better metrics like family net worth. If you have money, you can literally get into any school you want regardless of skin color.

darq

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Assuming all Asian people or all white people had the same opportunities, money, and privilege is racist.

That isn't what is happening.

Creating affirmative action that blindly looks only at skin color is racist.

That isn't what is happening.

We should be looking at better metrics like family net worth.

That is indeed a good metric that we should use. But it also does not cover everything. Much of the issues that minorities face is because they are stigmatised. Simply looking at wealth does not address that. Additionally, one of the purposes of affirmative action is to ensure desegregation, which in itself has been shown to decrease racist sentiments over time through the contact hypothesis.

spacecowboy

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Because they’re not black and they want special treatment too, it’s not faaaaaait 😢

Tujio

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I think there are two separate questions. The first is 'Is the concept behind affirmative action valid?' and the second is 'Is the implementation of affirmative action effective, fair and just?'

I believe there shouldn't even be a damn debate about the first question. This country has a massively problematic history with race relations and there are obviously still ripple effects in modern society, and we should take active measures to fix that. Minorities have been explicitly excluded from opportunities to gain wealth and status up until disturbingly recently, and many are still implicitly excluded from them to this day. Anybody who says that racism and the problems that come with it is a thing of the past is straight-up wrong. They are either not trying to understand the problems, or they are actively trying not to. Both of those are unacceptable to me.

The second question does merit some debate. Is it effective to simply say 'if we have two equal candidates we'll hire the minority'? How often does that really happen? Is it fair to do things like the NFL rewarding teams that hire a minority head coach? Is it just to implement quotas and percentages? I don't have answers to all of these questions. I have some opinions. But as a straight white cis dude, I feel like my voice doesn't need to be the loudest in the room in this one.

ImplyingImplications

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It's like asking if investments are good or bad. Depends on a lot of factors. Affirmative Action is meant to be an investment in an underperforming, underdeveloped, section of the population.

Education Is directly correlated with long term income. The more educated a population is, the more money they make, the more taxes they pay. In most countries, free education pays for itself as the educated citizens earn so much more than uneducated citizens that their increased taxes easily pays for the cost.

I think everyone can agree with the above but the questionable part is: What does being Black have to do with it? There are a lot of Americans who are born into poor and uneducated families. Why can't Affirmative Action apply to anyone who meets that description regardless of skin colour? I think the general argument here is that Black Americans faced historical oppression and there needs to be some kind of amends for that. Which brings up another contentious question: When does it end?

greywolf0x1

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Was the Affirmative Action program or bill created only for Black people, POCs or minorities in general?

stopthatgirl7

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The largest beneficiary of Affirmative Action has been white women.

Zaktor

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Which is a perfectly correct and expected result. Of the discriminated against groups, women are the largest and in the United States white women are the largest subgroup.

520

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The answer to that question is "are people today still suffering from the domino effect of past discriminations and loss of opportunities?"

originalfrozenbanana

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I don’t even have to check comment history to find out this is a leading question

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WlPTmXi0pVk/hqdefault.jpg

MindSkipperBro12

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No not really, I’ve just heard a lot of debates about this but you’re more than free to judge me beforehand.🥰

darq

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No not really, I’ve just heard a lot of debates about this but you’re more than free to judge me beforehand.🥰

If you've heard a lot of debates about this, then you surely already know what the basic positions are on the matter? What else are you hoping to gain?

MindSkipperBro12

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It’s like overhearing an angry conversation: I kinda get the gist of it but I’m asking for a clear, concise conversation.

irmoz

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Not sure what you expect to learn if you've already heard the debates

You have to be lying about something, here

MindSkipperBro12

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It’s like overhearing an angry conversation: I kinda get the gist of it but I’m asking for a clear, concise conversation.

SeaJ

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Depends what you mean by good or bad. Is it a societal positive? I would say yes. Is it good at its intended purpose? I would say no. There are obvious major social injustices that have happened in the past with current financial effects as well as ones that still continue to this day. We could do reparations payments for families that have experienced those injustices but that would only solve past injustices and would not do anything to fix the system that are still causing injustices.

So whether you view it as good or bad is up to you. It is a policy to fix a clear issue. If you have better ideas, feel free to offer them up.

afraid_of_zombies

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For whom? For white woman it works pretty well for Asian males not so much.

MarigoldPuppyFlavors

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Just so you know, any opinion on affirmative action being bad is being deleted by the mods.

irmoz

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Lol sure

phillaholic

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Good.

It’s an equalizer to combat unconscious bias.

People act like the person chosen for every position is always the best person no matter what, but the very criteria they use is biased and even the most well meaning person is susceptible to systemic biases.

MarigoldPuppyFlavors

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Kichae

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I hate to break it to you, but experiencing less privilege because people want to make the sample better match the population is not "racism", any more than correcting typos or poorly constructed sentences is "censorship".

MarigoldPuppyFlavors

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I think there are better ways to achieve that than letting all of the horses finish the race and then reordering them based on color. It's using a sledge hammer to do the job of a scalpel and it is racist to both those who it aims to benefit and those who "experience less privilege". Change needs to happen before that, at the community level, which I am not against the government funding.

irmoz

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It's not a fucking race dude

It's life

MindSkipperBro12

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I could see it like a gun: Could be used for righteous or nefarious purposes.

Letstakealook

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Whites and Asians, always hand in hand to shit on black people.

Reddit_Is_Trash

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Yeah, they're really shitting on black people by taking race completely out of the equation...

Letstakealook

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Except their not. The biases and economic circumstances that created the need for this are still in existence. This is strictly about causing harm to black people.

afraid_of_zombies

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Yes clearly. Everyone who is even slightly critical of "affirmative" action either in general or in principle or in practice is only strictly motivated by the desire to cause harm.

You definitely convinced me.

AeroLemming

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Reddit_Is_Trash

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Whatever happend to rewarding the most qualified people?

darq

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What do you mean "whatever happened" to it? It has never been true.

Letstakealook

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That has never been the case. But you know that.

afraid_of_zombies

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The most qualified killed themselves when they saw their student loan debt.

Zaktor

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70% of Asians support affirmative action, the opposing voices are just commonly used as the gotcha and test case by anti-AA white people. (White people narrowly oppose it.)