Is the top comment on this thread seriously a reverse racism rant?
You are right about something, affirmative action is racist, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to try to balance out current inequities. I strongly believe people making arguments like yours, people fighting against affirmative action need to propose an alternative rather than just complain about it.
There are lots of people alive today that couldn't drink from the same fountain or use the same bathroom as white people, and people who had friends and family members lynched (and in the eyes of many George Floyd's death was a lynching). Their neighborhoods were bulldozed to make the highways and they were systematically excluded from housing by redlining. You won't convince me for a second that their children and grandchildren got an equal opportunity. There is so much evidence of systemic disadvantaging of PoC communities today too, underfunded schools because of how we fund schools with local property taxes, turning lots of the public school system into effectively fancy private schools for families well off enough to live in rich neighborhoods.
So I will say it again, I do think at the surface level affirmative action is racist, but it's such a simple thing to realize it seems extremely pointless to even bring up. It is fighting centuries of truly heinous racism and genocide with just a tiny bit of an attempt at positive racism and white people still find a way to be pissed off they aren't getting everything the "deserve".
> people fighting against affirmative action need to propose an alternative rather than just complain about it
Not only is an alternative proposed, it's already implemented for quite a while: discrimination is illegal. Equal outcome vs equal opportunity. You can argue for any side you want, just don't pretend you don't see or don't understand the other position.
I see this as just as simple and misguided of a take as noticing that affirmative action is racist. People have been making this argument forever, we passed all laws and did all the work we needed to when we ended slavery, oh wait nope we got it right in 1967 with the civil rights act, no more work to do, the only tragedy left is that the damn "riff raff" and lefties just can't stop talking about race. They're the real racists!
This thread is depressing as fuck and really is making me rethink how often I ought come to this site, and interact with this community. And I really didn't realize how much this toxic bullshit was pervasive in tech. I am going to be participating more in DEI initiatives going forward, while taking the feedback and criticism of the OP into account.
I said nothing like "damn lefties" or anything similar, don't know why you are replying this to me. Nor do I understand why you had to explain how repulsive the other side of the debate is to you.
As for "simple and misguided" - that is exactly how I see affirmative action where the recipients are selected by skin color and not by socioeconomic status and where the help comes in the form of outcomes and not opportunities.
This is the general course of any thread concerning DEI on HN. It's filled with concerns about reverse-racism, and how "skin color shouldn't matter" and whatnot. The history behind why such initiatives exist is intentionally ignored.
You are right about something, affirmative action is racist, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to try to balance out current inequities. I strongly believe people making arguments like yours, people fighting against affirmative action need to propose an alternative rather than just complain about it.
There are lots of people alive today that couldn't drink from the same fountain or use the same bathroom as white people, and people who had friends and family members lynched (and in the eyes of many George Floyd's death was a lynching). Their neighborhoods were bulldozed to make the highways and they were systematically excluded from housing by redlining. You won't convince me for a second that their children and grandchildren got an equal opportunity. There is so much evidence of systemic disadvantaging of PoC communities today too, underfunded schools because of how we fund schools with local property taxes, turning lots of the public school system into effectively fancy private schools for families well off enough to live in rich neighborhoods.
So I will say it again, I do think at the surface level affirmative action is racist, but it's such a simple thing to realize it seems extremely pointless to even bring up. It is fighting centuries of truly heinous racism and genocide with just a tiny bit of an attempt at positive racism and white people still find a way to be pissed off they aren't getting everything the "deserve".