[jacobreg]

>Political correctness and affirmative action are based on the idea that pretending the world is an ideal version of itself will eventually make it that way.

That is the opposite of how it works. Affirmative action is accepting that the world has bias against certain groups, and attempting to take that into account. Political correctness is about realizing that certain groups have been marginalized or traumatized and some words perpetuate that. In a perfect world neither are necessary.

[narrator]

The proof that a group has been marginalized is that their numbers are not representative of their presence in the population. Thus, we pretend that the ideal world exists by adjusting those numbers in situations where merit selection is the criteria in the hopes that the numbers will converge by themselves. We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics. People from strong well adjusted minority families that value education and have protected their kids from most of the harsh realities that poor minority families are subject to receive the same special treatment with affirmative action. The reason that the inequity exists is immaterial means that we don't even have to check if a bias exists, we just assume that since the world is not ideal that the numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow.

At least that's the way it works in reality. Maybe this reality is politically incorrect too and you are saying that we need to implement meta-political correctness in which the means of creating an ideal world must be hidden to instead pretend that the implementers know the exact and particular circumstance of each person they are selecting based on facts other than merit and are weighing all of them appropriately in correcting injustice. By pretending that this ideal world in which knowledgeable administrators skillfully and in each individual case correct injustices, this will somehow make it become a reality.

[tanilama]

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

Statistics show that man are the new minority in the campus. But it is surely will be frown upon by some AA activists if a that program is extended to cover male. If AA is said to what it is trying to accomplish, then that shouldn't be controversial at all.

[komali2]

>But it is surely will be frown upon

I think this is presumptuous. We can try to find out, why not?

[jjeaff]

>We don't interview each participant to ask them how they were traumatized, we only look at the statistics.

Yes, because implementing something like that would be near impossible from a legislative standpoint. Legislation has to be spelled out and enforceable or it will do nothing.

And affirmative action is not there just to prop up the numbers. It is there to push companies to hire minority groups.

There are two reasons for this. For example, on college campuses, the supreme court has upheld that it is lawful to use race as a factor in admissions because a well rounded or diverse student body is a desirable trait that will produce better outcomes for all involved. Including the white men.

The second is that it is trying to undo the many, many years of oppression (i.e. slavery) that carries generation to generation.

Programs like affirmative action are trying to tip the scales for these descendants to give them a chance to compete. After all, they were systematically disenfranchised as a race. It makes sense that we attempt to systematically bring them back up to speed with the rest of the population.

>we just assume .. numbers need to be fixed first and then the rest of it will follow

We don't have to assume anything. It is both empirically evident (as well as just "duh") that getting a higher percentage of minorities into jobs and higher education will result in a higher percentage of their children having the opportunity to do so without something like affirmative action in the future.