[waychukucha]

I have seen this argument against African Americans made several times (mostly by asians). As an outsider , I cant stop thinking how shallow the argument is. Here is a counter argument. First, am not American. Am from Kenya. When kids join highschool in kenya, they need to sit a nationwide exam. Total score out of 500. For kids in Nairobi and other well established cities, they will need to get at least 400 marks out of the 500 to get a spot in a national highschool (which are the top of the top public schools) while kids from “rural” and marginalised areas, the cut off point for them can be as low as 350 marks. These are the kids who have pastoralists families that probably move constantly, or stay in areas where its too hot they only attend classes for 4 hrs a day. They most likely dont have electricity, no water etc. Its therefore only fair for their cutoff point to be different from a child who grew up in the city (like me) with access to all modern day life necessities including luxuries like private tuition. Now back to America, would the same argument not be made for black Americans (or any other ethnic groups or even people from other “rural” regions that are marginalised to have their cut off point be different from people from well established regions? That’s what equality is all about. Being able to identify such disparities and create solutions as permanent solutions are sort after.

[Jensson]

It is the opposite case here, black students in medical school are more likely from higher income families than the Asian students. So they are accepting people with more resources and lower scores. This is the problem with racial affirmative action, it takes resources from worse off kids and give them to well off kids, if it was based on family resources like in Kenya people wouldn't object as much.

First % is from upper income families, second is from lower, Asian has better representation from lower income families than any other racial group among med students.

> Asian: RI, 2.3 [21.7% vs 9.5%];

> Black: RI, 5.3 [9.1% vs 1.7%];

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[achates]

I don't really care about being "fair" to the applicant, I care about getting the most competent doctor I can. Being a doctor is position of grave responsibility, it shouldn't be a reward that we give to people who deserve it because they tried really hard and had a tough life.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Those kids who had a tough life might be super smart and fully capable of higher scores but didn't achieve them because they didn't have the time to study or were exhausted from just trying to survive. But once in the school setting and then in medical practice can thrive.

It's like trying to find the fastest sprinter using a race but some of kids are wearing heavy backpacks and some aren't. How do you find the actual fastest sprinters?

[talldatethrow]

If you want to possibly argue that people from poverty need assistance, I could almost get behind that. But to make it just race based is insane because you're getting middle class African Americans taking the spots of poor Asians.