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Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

“It is somewhat ironic to have us so deeply disturbed over a program where race is an element of consciousness, and yet to be aware of the fact, as we are, that institutions of higher learning... have been given conceded preferences to the children of alumni.”

Quote by Harry A. Blackmun

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Harry A. Blackmun

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“Affirmative action and equal opportunity was never and is not intended to let people with fewer skills and less experience triumph over those with more. It was intended to aid a decision between two people who have the same set of skills.”

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“However much history may be invoked in support of these policies (affirmative action), no policy can apply to history but can only apply to the present or the future. The past may be many things, but it is clearly irrevocable. Its sins can no more be purged than its achievements can be expunged. Those who suffered in centuries past are as much beyond our help as those who sinned are beyond our retribution.”

RacismCivil RightsAffirmative Action
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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“Page 141: Group Polarization Patterns Political anger and demands for privileges are, of course, not limited to the less privileged. Indeed, even when demands are made in the name of less privileged racial or ethnic groups, often it is the more privileged members of such groups who make the demands and who benefit from policies designed to meet such demands. These demands may erupt suddenly in the wake of the creation (or sharp enlargement) of a newly educated class which sees its path to coveted middle-class professions blocked by competition of other groups--as in India, French Canada, or Lithuania, for example. * * * A rapid expansion of education is thus a factor in producing inter-group conflict, especially where the education is of a kind which produces diplomas rather than skills that have significant economic value in the marketplace. Education of a sort useful only for being a clerk, bureaucrat, school teacher--jobs whose numbers are relatively fixed in the short run and politically determined in the long run--tend to increase politicized inter-group strife. Yet newly emerging groups, whether in their own countries or abroad, tend to specialize precisely in such undemanding fields. Malay students, for example, have tended to specialize in Malay studies and Islamic studies, which provide them with no skills with which compete with the Chinese in the marketplace, either as businessmen, independent professionals, or technicians. Blacks and Hispanics in the United States follow a very similar pattern of specializing disproportionately in easier fields which offer less in the way of marketable skills. Such groups then have little choice but to turn to the government, not just for jobs but also for group preferences to be imposed in the market place, and for symbolic recognition in various forms. *** While economic interests are sometimes significant in explaining political decisions, they are by no means universally valid explanations. Educated elites from less advanced groups may have ample economic incentives to promote polarization and preferential treatment policies, but the real question is why the uneducated masses from such groups give them the political support without which they would be impotent. Indeed, it is often the less educated masses who unleash the mob violence from which their elite compatriots ultimately benefit--as in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, or parts of India, Africa, or the United States, where such violence has led to group preference policies in employment, educational institutions, and elsewhere. The common denominator in these highly disparate societies seems to be not only resentment of other groups' success but also fear of an inability to compete with them, combined with a painful embarrassment at being so visibly "under-represented"--or missing entirely—in prestigious occupations and institutions. To remedy this within apolitically relevant time horizon requires not simply increased opportunities but earmarked benefits directly given on a racial or ethnic basis.”

MulticulturalismAffirmative ActionEthnic Conflict
Book:Race And Culture: A World View
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“pp. 87-88: The usual way in which the media and politicians talk about race discrimination in the job market is to compare the percentage of Africans or Latins in a given occupation with the percentage of Europeans. This makes the situation look bad. The 2014–2018 American Community Survey found that Africans, at 13 percent of the population, accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians, and 5.2 percent of lawyers. Latin percentages in those prestigious occupations ranged from 5.3 to 7.6 percent, but Latins are almost 18 percent of the population, so their underrepresentation was nearly the same. The picture flips when race differences in cognitive ability and job performance are taken into account. Africans and Latins get through the educational pipeline with preferential treatment in admissions to colleges and to professional programs. Their mean IQs in occupations across the range from unskilled to those requiring advanced degrees are substantially lower than the mean IQs for Europeans in the same occupations. Race differences in measures of on-the-job performance are commensurate with the differences in cognitive ability. I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.”

Affirmative ActionRacial DiscriminationAnti White Discrimination
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
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“Page 65: The consistent findings about cognitive ability and job performance that apply most directly to group differences in cognitive ability are these: • Measures of cognitive ability and job performance are always positively correlated. • The size of the correlation goes up as the job becomes more cognitively complex. • Even for low-skill occupations, job experience does not lead to convergence in performance among persons with different cognitive ability. • For intellectually demanding jobs, there is no point at which more cognitive ability doesn’t make a difference. Increases in IQ scores are statistically associated with increases in productivity at every level of cognitive ability.”

IntelligenceImmigrationMulticulturalismAffirmative ActionIq
Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
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“Page 67: For jobs that require a college degree, race differences in cognitive ability in the workplace should be minimized by the process of obtaining that college degree. But it hasn’t worked that way since at least the 1970s. Colleges have been complicit in transmitting the mean IQ differences by race in the general population not only through the college pipeline but through the graduate-education pipeline as well.” Page 76: The mean IQs of Africans and Latins increase with each higher category, just as the European means do, but the size of the difference generally keeps pace. In the case of the European–African difference, the size of the difference tends to increase along with IQ, from 1.01 SDs for occupations with European mean IQs under 100 to 1.20 SDs for European mean IQs of 110 or higher.”

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Book:Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America
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“Page 46: Our picture suggests that for every person within the ranks of college graduates, there is another among those without a college degree who has just as high an IQ—or at least almost. And as for the graduates of the dozen top schools, … they too are apparently outnumbered by people with similar IQs who do not graduate from those colleges, or do not graduate from college at all.”

Affirmative ActionAnti White Discrimination
Book:The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
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“Page 321: But after controlling for IQ, the picture reverses. The chance of entering a high-IQ occupation for a black with an IQ of 117 (which was the average IQ of all the people in these occupations in the NLSY sample) was twice the proportion of whites with the same IQ. Latinos with an IQ of 117 had more than a 50% higher chance of entering a high-IQ occupation than whites with the same IQ. This phenomenon applies across a wide range of occupations, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 20.”

IntelligenceAffirmative ActionRacial Differences In Iq
Book:The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
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