If you are white the odds are massively stacked in your favor. That doesn't mean you can't lose, but it's less likely. All AA does is fudge the odds a bit in the other direction. No more.
Just stopping to discriminate would do nothing – because that's for the most part not the reason why the odds are stacked against minorities. Structural racism is the reason. Society is constructed in a way that leaves minorities with less opportunities, that decreases their odds. Individuals changing their behavior cannot address that problem.
Note the comment below. People in poverty in America by race
~24 mil white
~11 mil black
~14 mil hispanic
I cannot and will not believe that in 2012 we have structural racism in America, the day after a black man named Barack Hussein Obama got elected to his second term as President of the United States. Is their racism? Yes. Is it structural and 100% pervasive? No.
The reason they have less opportunities is a structural problem, but it is not because of racism. Maybe it grew out of that, and it probably did, but at some point when they stopped you have to change yourself. The problem is lack of a family structure. The stats of black single mothers living in poverty vs. other races is unbelievable. We have to get fathers back to change this dynamic. I suspect racism and the things that caused along the way contributed to this, but now it is just that way because it's been that way. If you can turn this around, you can turn around a lot of communities, get rid of a lot of poverty, and provide as many opportunities as anyone could want for the black community.
Do you accept that black people are two and a half times more likely to live poverty? From that, wouldn't if follow that a black person is two and a half more times likely to reap some sort of benefit from affirmative action, even if it wasn't based on race? What if affirmative action was based purely on the statistic of being part of a single parent family in poverty?
Do you accept that the median salary if you are black is less that 2/3 of that if you are white?
You comment on the stats of single mothers in poverty, say we need to turn it around, then and pretend it's an easy problem to solve when these communities don't have the money to fund programs at a local level (since they, you know, live in poverty), coupled with a history of racism and neglect at the state level, and you just say "well it's not really a problem because more white people are poor and we should end affirmative action"
Affirmative action seems pretty targeted to me. Sure white people don't really get affirmative action (that's not really true because there's all sorts of advantages you for just being poor), but life's not always exactly fair.
Oh here we go. White man's troubles and all that. The problem with those minorities is they're just lazy and need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
Thanks for at least refraining from using the N word.
If you are white the odds are massively stacked in your favor. That doesn't mean you can't lose, but it's less likely. All AA does is fudge the odds a bit in the other direction. No more.
Just stopping to discriminate would do nothing – because that's for the most part not the reason why the odds are stacked against minorities. Structural racism is the reason. Society is constructed in a way that leaves minorities with less opportunities, that decreases their odds. Individuals changing their behavior cannot address that problem.