Some Interesting Comments
In the comments to this post, Kimmit makes the following comment.
Further, even if one is not racist, one can have opinions which end up being antiblack. It is both my opinion and the African-American community's consensus that opposition to Affirmative Action laws is a position which disadvantages the African-American community.
There are a couple of problems with this view, IMO. The first problem is that it rests on a logical fallacy. If 90% of the population has an unfavorable view of homosexuals does this mean that the view is some how valid? I would hope not.
Now one could point to things like college admissions and the removal of affirmative action laws as support for the claim of being anti-Black. It is true that when race was no longer used as a factor in California that number of Black students admitted to state universities declined. However, is this anti-Black? It certainly puts some students at a disadvantage in terms of admissions, but what about such issues as graduation rates, secondary expenditures for tutoring and remedial courses? This issue is in part about how the state is going to allocate part of its resources for higher education. Given the number of state universities the decision is to not let the market mechanism do all the allocation. There are at least two dimensions here. How best to make use of these resources from the state’s stand point, and how the individual can best to make use of these resources.
Now one reason (probably the major reason) that there was a decline is that under-prepared students either were rejected or decided to apply elsewhere. So is it fair to say that supporting a policy that does not encourage under-prepared students to apply to a given university is anti-whatever-group-those-students-belongs-to? Not only does allowing for the admission of under-prepared students mean that there will likely be a prepared student who is denied, but later on the under-prepared students will continue to suck more resources than the prepared students.
Granted, getting a degree from a good university might have some impact on one’s income stream. But does that mean that under-prepared students should be admitted? What about a policy that addresses the preparedness issue of various groups of students? I have heard that many inner-city blacks like the idea of school vouchers. Yet the Democrats are opposed to vouchers. I could be cynical and say it is due only to the fact that the teachers unions are a big Democratic constituency and the Democrats are pandering to that constituency…at the expense of the Black constituency. Are we to conclude that Democrats are now anti-Black and by inference so is Kimmitt?
Further, it is but a short step from saying somebody supports a policy that is anti-Black to racist. And when things are looking desperate, might not this “card” be used to help gain an electoral advantage and further fan the racial flames in this country? Could we conclude that such actions are polarizing, insulting and bad for race relations, and are ultimately anti-Black? After all you start hurling around the term racism and people get angry and defensive. When they get angry and defensive they tend to dig in on their positions and regard their opponent as somebody who is arguing in good faith, but who is now being deceptive and malicious.
And one last fly in this anti-Black ointment we have here. When the use of race was no longer allowed, the number of students going to state universities such as U.C. Berkeley who were Asian went up dramatically. Are we to conclude that the Affirmative Action laws are anti-Asian and that supporters of such laws are also anti-Asian? Suddenly things aren’t so clear cut no are they? Well at least I don’t think they are.
Also, in the comments (same post in fact) was this
Finally (and this one really bothers me), why is it so terrible that a person would moderate their views in the presence of less-than-fully-confirming evidence? I know, I know, "flip-flopper" and all that, but who would you prefer to deal with, someone who has opinions but is capable of changing them when presented with an opposition (or, in my case, since no actual opposing argument was presented, failing to adequately justify the opinion to myself), or someone who holds to their opinions independent of discussion or evidence?
The issue isn’t simply somebody who can change their mind due to the data, but somebody who changes their mind because it is politically easy. For example (and sticking with the above theme), it could have been easy to side with the segregationists back in the 1950’s and 60’s. In the South, politically it was the “easy” thing to do. However, it was not the right thing to do. So changing one’s mind because of new data is indeed a desirable trait, but changing one’s mind simply because it is convenient is not.
Anyways, I thought these two comments were interesting enough to warrant an actual blog post vs. simply responding in comments.