From the comments section on Black Boy in a White Land.
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Kurt says:
I bet that these people all remembered they were black when they filled out college applications in an effort to receive undeserved racial set-asides.
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Jackie replies:
Once upon a time in America, in order to become a lawyer all you had to do was pass the bar. Somewhere around 1896, a black man did just that and became the first person of color to practice law legally in the United States. The response of the academic community was to mandate that a bachelor’s degree was required before anyone could pass the bar. The few people of color who could afford higher education took their new BAs to the their bar exams, and when they passed, a new mandate was set forth that only people who’d acquired a law degree could apply to the bar exam. Deliberate economic prohibitions were placed as obstacles in the path of those seeking lawful, gainful employment. Set-asides would never have been necessary if the playing field were not deliberately made inaccessible by classism, based on racial prejudices.
See all our posts On Race, here.
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About the Editors
The logic of disparate impact requires equality of outcomes independent of anything else. This results in a mass lowering of standards, home lending standards for instance, and inequality of opportunity. The lowering of lending standards helped contribute to the housing/finance bubble that fueled our current economic meltdown.
Affirmative action is a double edged sword. Take any advanced degree, like an MD for example. Affirmative action allows for more black doctors but the significance of an MD for black doctor is reduced. On paper as far institutional policies go, there would be zero difference between a black and white MD or if anything, weighed in favor of a black MD for the benefit of diversity targets. By significance, I mean their performance and social expectations applied to individual members of that group (example: good doctors being weighed down by under qualified doctors). If other people have to take up the slack, this just creates more overhead for society. In the absence of affirmative action there would be fewer black doctors but the MD for black doctors would signify the same that it does for white doctors.
My father always said that he had to be 200% better than any white doctor in his class to get the respect of his peers. Clearly, he was right. Oh and he was. He graduated from a POOR POOR high school in Mobile, AL (which would explain his LOW college application test scores–let us not forget these disparities that create the so-called inequalities), worked his way through two years of community college, transferred to a major AL university with a 4.0 and graduated in the top 20% of his class, of which he was one of 5 minorities and 2 blacks. People like you will never believe that the truth is that the barriers that were firmly entrenched and those that, to an extent, still exist, are the general reason for the lowered test scores among minorities. The inequalities in the systems of basic education and, for my parents’ generation at least, the firm social barriers preventing a black man in Alabama from going to the best pre-school, elementary, junior high and high school would have left him far less prepared for the academic rigors of college–on purpose.
I am an attorney. I graduated from the best public school available, though my parents strove for more for me. Because of people with your attitude, my father, who won accolades for his surgery techniques throughout medical school and won millions of dollars in fellowship funding during his residencies, was marginalized and ostracized when he returned to the South to serve who he thought were “his people.” Because of people who think like you, he was never able to achieve the heights that he did in his residencies and post-doc because of people like you, he actually began to believe that he was no more than a mediocre surgeon. I will never believe that.
So, forgive me if I tell you, in very few words to go screw yourself. You are an idiot, bred from a long line of idiots who have contrived of every machination possible to maintain the status quo that has long departed. Affirmative action is the ONLY way of removing the status quo. The only problem with it is that it is not implemented at EVERY LEVEL. If affirmative action were to be as effective as it could be in creating professionals of EVERY GENDER, ETHNICITY, RACE, COLOR AND CREED, it would be utterly pervasive. It would start in the elementary schools, the junior high schools and most definitely the high schools. There would not be such discrepancies in the education of those children born in the “ghetto” as those born in the “suburbs” (from my generation) and there would not be such an OBVIOUS lack of interest in those born into families with fewer means. Affirmative action helps those that society has denigrated, not those denigrated by their own choices–why? Because those seeking to USE affirmative action ARE actually trying to better themselves.
People like you assume, wrongly, that people like me had to get into graduate school because of affirmative action. Wrong again. I took a soft poll in my law school class, and my LSAT was not only above the median, but above most of my close friends’ scores. Even that predictor was wrong. Now, I will be even MORE blunt. There may be people that cannot score in the upper percentiles because of the fact that they lack the fundamentals in their early education, but that is not the best and only predictor of their success in medical school or in life. Further, there are WHITE candidates that fall at the lower ends of the score spectrums as well and no one tells them that their MD doesn’t “signify the same” as that of the doctor with the higher test scores. So, again, I will be even more blunt: GO FU@# yourself. Have a great day
Your father could have probably become a doctor without affirmative action. My point is that there are doctors (or lawyers,etc) who otherwise couldn’t. To map out for a profession that will X amount from group A, Y amount from group B, etc is not a meritocracy.
Dear DD,
I’m lovin most of what you said (but why keep asking this guy to masturbate?)
To impress others in our own field we do have to be better. Do you wish your dad had stayed away from the South, from that heartbreak? Or did he want to, need to, be there, be at home?
cool story, bro
Oh and the name (please don’t pat yourself on the back)–just an obvious reference to your backward ass beliefs.
Affirmative Action only helps people get into the institution, it does not do their homework for them. I think that’s the main flaw in your argument. So what if there are a higher number of X race in a certain major because of affirmative action at the BEGINNING of the term? They surely won’t make it to the end of the term if they cannot or are unwilling to do the work. They are doing the same coursework as everyone else in their major. So if there are more black doctors because of AA, it prolly helped reduce an initial barrier to education (ex. tuition costs). They earned their degrees on their own and did the same work as the rest of their graduating class. If a black dr is crappy, it’s not because of his race, it’s just because he’s crappy. Just like there are crappy drs of all races. Then the problem of crappy drs lies not in which of them got help early on but in the system that allowed them to become drs in the first place.
This need of a bachelor’s degree is the rationale for Joel McHale’s character’s inclusion on the show Community. Let’s all acknowledge that sometimes a good thing can come from an unjust law. In this case, a great thing… the character Jeff Winger on the show Community.
On a different note, a few states allow legal professionals to take the bar exam without a JD. Serial conman Frank Abagnale passed the Louisiana bar exam on his third attempt without any legal training. However he was required to have a law degree which he forged.
Vivien Theodore Thomas, born in 1910, attended a segregated public high school. Economic hardship derailed his plans to attend medical school. When he was laid off from his carpentry job, he was able to secure work as a research technician for Dr. Alfred Blalock. Within several years, he was doing the work of a postdoctoral researcher, despite receiving a janitor’s salary.
Thomas’s research in association with Dr. Blalock directly lead to the development of the procedures–and the physical instruments–for open heart surgery. Because he was black he was not permitted to perform the operation he developed. He stood on a stool and coached Dr. Blalock over his shoulder through the first open heart surgery performed in America. He was not given credit by the hospital or the surgeon he worked for. He was so poorly paid he sometimes had to double as a bartender, serving drinks to people he’d taught surgical techniques to the same day. A college degree was made financially inaccessible to him by Morgan State University, who refused to recognize his contributions, and insisted he fulfill freshman requirements.
in 1976, over three decades after the man who pioneered open heart surgery had the possibility of higher education blocked by institutes of higher learning, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate–of Law, not of medicine.
Now speak to me about “meritocracy.”
JFB
Why don’t schools offer minority scholarships for us? Oh yeah, we’re too small a minority.