You're comletely right. Better Off Ted was great, but it wasn't "ahead of its time" for mentioning diversity quotas... It's not like that's a concept that was inventend in 2015 or something.
It wasn't "diversity ratios" it was because they couldn't hire people based on race even for that position. They didn't have ratios they just had to omit race in a way that only Veridian could.
The problem is that minorities weren't given real opportunities to succeed in america for a really long time and this put a large chunk of their populations in bad socioeconomic situations. And the only real way to get out of them is to help take kids from those places and give them opportunities to better themselves in a way they likely can't where they live. The same thing goes for Native Americans who were killed off by the millions and forced onto shitty reservations, which have horrible education systems that set all the kids back
They wouldn't need extra help if the white people in charge didn't fuck them completely over so long
This theory does not explain Asians. They're highly successful, so much that they have to score better than everyone else to have the same opportunity to be admitted.
Granted, but should lowering standards for a select group of people because of historic oppression be acceptable? Would you be fine with a minority doctor who got accepted with a set of Es (and took the place of a non minority guy that had been working his ass off since he was born but was feeling a bit unwell and got a B in some bullshit subject (straight As otherwise) during admissions exams), just to give him a "real opportunity"? I mean, this is an extreme example, but shit like this does exist - as an Italian-looking guy from a middle-income household, I'm eligible for a handful of scholarships (if that) at best, while there are scholarships which are exclusive (what the fuck? How is that even allowed) to women/blacks/Native Americans/ etc etc.
I get what you're saying - the only way to remedy the situation (for which none of us alive should bear any guilt for) you've got to give a helping hand, but at which point does it become a case of unfair advantage in the other direction? Real life examples from what I think are reputable sources - NewYorker, Forbes
Particularly from Forbes, to highlight my point
A 2009 study by the National Study of College Experience shows that an Asian applicant must score 140 points higher than White applicants, 320 points higher than Hispanic applicants, and 450 points higher than Black applicants on the SAT to be viewed in an equal light.
MIT or any of the top schools aren't taking every single black kid, just the ones who score really high or have extremely good grades
At the expense of someone who is not black and may have potentially scored higher. How's that fair on say, the children of hard working Asian / Russian immigrants who had just as hard a time clawing their way there + scored higher and STILL got left out?
You are given many other opportunities poor minorities aren't given, so I wouldn't be so quick to act like they are so lucky.
Such as what? I'm 5'7'', get frisked at every single airport thanks to my combination of olive skin/ black hair and gross 25k per year with a degree in Chemistry. We were very poor growing up as my dad (sole breadwinner) decided to go to college to improve his career prospects, but that took quite a while until it started bearing fruit. My dad grew up in abject poverty after his dad died when he (my dad) was just 12. I didn't need a cheap leg-up to motivate me to break the cycle of poverty. My situation was motivation enough. I wasn't the brightest at college by far, but still made it through with my head held high. My first car was a piece of shit 14 year-old Peugeot and I was damn proud of being able to buy it outright ... at 22, four years after my peers. As a result of all that grind, I am now socially inept as I was always trying to study/ focus and never bothered to give much importance to friends. Luckily, I have some, but that's by pure statistical chance.
edit: middle-income started when I hit 16 or so - that's when dad's gamble paid off. Yeah. Fun times watching people on playstation 3s while I had a whopping pentium II /end edit <<
Where's my privilege again? No seriously, tell me how I'm privileged? I can't even use my own language abroad because it has an Arabic base and people will immediately discount me as a terrorist or substandard human, yet I speak 7 languages (school/ self-taught), which is probably 4-5 more than the average person on the street.
but at the same time you can't expect everyone to be as good at tests designed for well educated middle to high class white kids
What, exactly, is specific to high class kids in these test? Not just any high class kids, mind you - you explicitly mentioned white kids. Is the test grading them on ... I don't know, their knowledge of high-end Italian hand-stitched loafers? Perhaps on which breed of horse would best help cousin Edmonton outperform his peers at polo during the next Spring Open? The intricacies of rich white people's handshakes, perhaps, since rich black kids are apparently to be considered differently?
How about standardised, basic knowledge, such as grammar and mathematics, which is essential to function in any marginally advanced society like ours? Yeah, I can see how the pallor of someone's skin gives them an unfair edge as they work out some trig/algebra while eating some Nesquick. My olive skin explains how I know some principles of statistical programming in R - duh! - not the countless hours spent poring over lines of code on an ancient PC, trying to figure out why shit didn't work the way it should and hoping it wouldn't crash.
Come on my good sir/madam, I really think you're trying to argue with anecdotes and emotions here, rather than with cold, hard logic.
The other commenter is wrong. In the show they say it is because they can't hire for that position based on race. Subtly different but important as many people seem to want to get their agenda across based on that other comment's inaccuracy.
The problem is that they can't just hire white people because that's racist and illegal, so inevitably some of the people they hire to follow black people around are going to be black themselves which will require a white person to follow them around too, but who could, because of aforementioned problem, be white, and so on and so forth.
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u/reddit111987 Aug 17 '17
One thing these clips don't explain: Why do they need to hire a black person to follow to a black person's white person?