Have white people have been systematically excluded from basketball teams for decades?  That's news to me.  OK, let's take this idiotic idea seriously and set up an affirmative action board made up of coaches, alumni players, and other basketball experts.  They can watch tryouts and practices to make sure that skilled white players aren't being excluded from the team because of their whiteness.  It's been a huge problem all through the history of sports that the most talented white people have been excluded from sports teams just because they are white, so such an affirmative action panel would ensure that white players are cut from the team because they're not good athletes, not because they are white.  Conversely, it will keep bad black athletes, the ones who have benefited from more playing time not because of their skill but because of their connections, status, and socially-acceptable skin color, off the team.

But that's not what this guy is talking about. He thinks affirmative action is "reverse racism," in which minorities get special treatment over whites, even if they are not as skilled or talented, when affirmative action is simply a mechanism to ensure  that discrimination is not taking place.  The goal of affirmative action isn't to give preference to minorities over whites; it's to make sure minorities aren't being excluded just because they are minorities. 

It may be a bit much to put such well-considered arguments in the mouths of the students portrayed. I think "it just is" is probably a lot closer to their actual thoughts on the matter.

The reason it is ok in the sport and not the sports team is that you have accepted the premise that, in a sports context, ability is the most important attribute of potential team members, because having the best team is the most important goal. You disagree that it should be the primary attribute when choosing students in general, because having the smartest or best qualified student body takes a backseat to other values.
Is it hypocrisy to think that we should maximize performance on the court, at the cost of diversity, but not in the student body in general?  *shrugs* Only if our court performance is part of a larger philosophy on the importance of maximizing ability and worthiness, which I gather it is not for most liberals.

Ugh.  I, as a student, can give a pretty good answer why redistributing wealth via programs for the poor and redistributing grades are not the same thing.  First and foremost, no one dies if they fail a class.  I can say this as someone who's life WOULD be pretty drastically inconvenienced if I failed even one class (on a merit-based scholarship) and even I admit that it wouldn't be the end of the world, no matter how much grade-grubbers insist it is.  But programs for the poor often provide food, shelter, and medical care....something that people very well might die without.  Also, once one is in college, they have the tools available to them to make good grades.  One does not implicitly have access to things like medical care (at least in this country) based on simply existing.

Also, this guy sounds like he isn't sure what affirmative action even is (as most people who oppose it don't).  The system isn't there to give minorities (for some reason, people assume this means exclusively blacks) a leg up over people who've worked harder.  It is really there to prevent people from practicing the discrimination that existed prior to affirmative action, when a single black student would need an armed guard to get through class alive, and even then it would probably start a riot. Anyway, affirmative action doesn't only go to black students.....in fact, it goes to white women significantly more than any other group (interestingly, this is one group I see complaining about affirmative action the most).  As for blacks "dominating" basketball, that is a whole different issue I could write a book on...

He's probably trying to pad his resume for when he applies to be a Fox News correspondent; he seems like a "Gotcha!" journalism wanna-be, at best. 

It seems to be the same reasoning that they had over here when deciding to make elite classes for language and maths a few years ago (apart from the "poor overlooked over achiever"- argument). Sure, it works with sports and music, but that's because only one in a thousand can go pro in those areas anyway. It seems like people just turn their brains off as soon as sports comes up - on one hand they can insist tyat it's completely cut off from the rest of society, while on the other it's perfect as a mold for society. It must have something to do with that pedistal that it seems to have been put on...

FYI: the "moral clarity" link is broken.

To his first question:

1. A student will not starve and will not die if he gets a poor grade. He will still be able to meet all his basic needs, even if he drops out of school as a result. Thus, the consequences of NOT redistributing wealth to some degree are significant, while the consequences of redistributing grades are not.

2. Academia is a meritocracy. Our economy is not. How much money you make is not actually well correlated with your skills or effort, it's determined by a huge host of factors including luck, genetics, family connections, class, and timing. While these ALSO affect academia (for example, a wealthy student getting better grades because she does not have to work full-time), in grades, merit IS the most significant factor. And merit should be rewarded.

To the average college student with a few seconds to come up with an answer, they know there is a difference, they know they "earned" their grades and poor people dying is bad, but what they can't vocalize quickly enough is the exact details of the difference.

As to the second, it's a blatant misunderstanding of affirmative action. The students are right and clear-- white people shouldn't be helped by affirmative action because they are the ones in charge. What he fails to understand is that non-whites need assistance BECAUSE OF that oppression and programs like affirmative action are designed to correct the problems of the past.

this guy should've at least made the argument about the golf team and not the basketball team.

golf is a sport that (I don't have the actual statistics, but after all this attempt at journalism is about perceptions not facts anyways) is over-represented by white people at the collegiate level and it's likely this arises from related class issues. 
at least that argument removes all the other problems with his comparison other than the difference between sports and school. 
he wouldn't be able to claim "poor helpless white victim" anymore, but at least he could get in that annoying jab about "racial discrimination is always bad". after all, colorblind is the new racist, so when you aren't even that, you're being too obvious. 

Affirmative action makes people think blacks are idiots. I mean, what does it look like when we have to design programs that substantially relax academic standards for African American applicants? It looks like black people are too stupid to get into college without help. This isn't necessarily true, but that's what it looks like to many, many people. It's a PR disaster. And it must be a blast to be a black person who didn't need affirmative action to get into MIT, you'd better just staple your perfect SAT score to your forehead, because otherwise the first thing folks are going to think when they see your face is that you got in because of your race.   

Affirmative action creates student bodies that are more racially diverse but not necessarily more culturally diverse. I.e. you get a bunch of people who come in all the colors of the rainbow, but are all quite similar once you go more than skin deep. I've met upper class black kids who go to Princeton and Harvard, they are much more similar to Upper class white kids than those upper class white kids are to white people who grew up in trailer parks. There is very little social class diversity, particularly at elite institutions. 

It also results in a lot of black people winding up in colleges where they can't compete academically, then they underperform and wind up worse off then if they hadn't gone in the first place. Black people fail out of college at much higher rates than white people or asians or any other major minority groups for that matter. Maybe affirmative action has something to do with this? Maybe black people just suck at school? Maybe it's cultural bias and poverty and all that? I don't know, but one thing is certain.

THEY GET ALL THE DEBT BUT WITH  NONE OF THE BENEFITS. When you drop out of college without completing a degree, but you have 50k in non-dischargable debt your life suddenly sucks even more than if you just never graduated high school. I mean, maybe you were enriched by the experience, but you could probably have just gone to the public library or maybe used the internet. Have fun paying back those loans on minimum wage.   Higher education is a scam anyway. We're breeding a generation of indentured servants with no practical skills who's few remaining avenues for menial employment will shortly be eliminated by increased automation and smarter, cheaper foreign labour. 

Anyway, I'm not opposed to affirmative action because I think it's "unfair." Life is unfair, it sucks to be ugly, poor, short and stupid and all the other things are society deems unworthy, that's fucking unfair as shit. It sucks to be black and be treated like a criminal because of racism and the fact that you look similar to a group of people who commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Might as well just pile a little bit more unfairness on, if it meets some policy directive, but I don't even think affirmative action does that. It's just fucking stupid. 

As a college student, it did bother me that none of the students in the video could put together more than a couple of words on the subject. I think what it comes down to is the inherent difference between a fundamental human right, and a privilege.  I think education is a human right, while playing on a professional basketball team is most definitely not. The world of basketball would change drastically if players that did not have the same level of talent were drafted  simply based on race. Basketball is more of a meritocracy than most other sports, due to its nature of being accessible to a wide range of classes. I also believe that idealistically education should be a meritocracy, but due to the history of our country that is not a viable option. After hundreds of years of racial oppression, a pure meritocracy in higher education would allow people born with privilege and access to high quality public or private education to achieve the top spots in universities. Not having access to a top level high school education does not mean that someone isn't perfectly qualified to succeed at an elite university, although their journey may be harder than upper-middle class white male who is the fifth generation to attend (insert ivy league school). Without at least attempting to level the playing field for students born into lives of less privilege, then we can never move past the current levels of racial inequality that persist in our country.

The funny thing is, a basketball team is actually a perfect example of the importance of diversity.

When you're assembling a basketball team, you're not just looking for the players who make the most baskets -- you need people who can play defense as well as offense, point guards and shooting guards and centers and forwards. Someone who's tall and slow and can wait under the basket to grab a pass and get two points, and someone who's fast around the outside and makes 3-pointers.

When you're assembling an elite learning community, you're not just looking for the people with the best GPAs and SAT scores -- you're looking for athletes and artists, scientists and poets. You also want students who bring a variety of experiences to the campus, kids who went to prep schools and kids who went to crappy schools, kids whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower and on slave ships, kids who went to Chinese school and kids who went to Hebrew school.

This is actually a much more complicated topic than even this blog post begins to address. Let me say first I am a supporter of things like affirmative action, I do firmly believe that minorities in the US have be discriminated against since the begin, and still suffer at least subtle (and occasionally not so subtle) discrimination.  

That said, affirmative action strikes me as problematic in several respects. As some here have noticed, affirmative action can be implemented in a rather clumsy manner, such that it ends up making things worse (a situation which may occur deliberately, caused perhaps by resentful administrators who do not agree with the policy). If minority students who are not at least the equal of "majority" (ie white, possibly make) students, the minority students will struggle and/or fail, and that will "prove" the arguments of affirmative action opponents. And even if minority students do fine in classwork, they may still face more subtle discrimination, such as that they would not enjoy and do well in the glee club, the chess club or crew (I see no problem with minorities joining in these and other activities).

At the same time, I can appreciate the efforts of african americans or latinos (or any minority group) to preserve aspects or all of traditional cultures. There is a complicated dynamic about how much any "foreign" culture should assimilate into the wonder bread gestalt the is US culture in 2011. I think calm debate about such things is very positive, but of course too often in devolves into shouting matches (at best).

The framers of the constitution were very clever in setting up a government that promotes societal balance, although they did not for see the cultural changes and technological advances that the US has gone through. The Supreme Court and Congress do their best to address change, depending on which way the prevailing wind of a slim majority is blowing. At the same time, the history of the US is one of being late to end slavery, late to address women's rights, committing near or in fact total genocide against native Americans, supporting non-democratic foreign leaders because they supported our economic interests, etc etc yada yada yada.

I sort of feel that while affirmative action may not be the best policy, it is a starting point, and it is up to its opponents to show proof that a different policy works better, or to justify discrimination against minorities.      

If one student had a GPA of 10,000 b/c they were scamming off of everyone on a 4 pt scale, then yes.  Some redistribution is necessary.

I think the conclusion of the post is basically correct. Basketball teams do not operate under affirmative action because they are outcome oriented; colleges can afford AA because they are more experience oriented. To make the college experience fit the diversity of general life experience, AA is necessary.
The best colleges would be almost exclusively Asian and white without it. They would look almost the same as in the bad old days that Tucsonian talks about below, (except for all the Asians who wouldn't have been let in back then.) in fact, AA wil need to be stepped up considerably in the near future to deal with
the next generation of Asian legacy students with supercharged SATs and GPAs.

The difference is that Affirmative action ensures that so-called minorities who are good enough to attend college gets a spot, they aren't "given" to anyone; especially to random people irregardless of grades, as bigots would have you to believe.  So tell me, where are all of the the white people who can hang with Michael Jordan are being squeezed-out of paying basketball?

The difference is that there aren't any white people being denied basketball scholarships and places on the team, but there are groups of people in the US (and other places in the world) who will give white people who have lesser grades admission to colleges over blacks who have higher grades (just look up "legacy admisions" and see why George W. Bush got a free pass while someone like Philip Emeagwali has to struggle all of his academic life).

If you are one of those white people who can play basketball but were denied a spot on your team, it's most likely because the hoop you can slam on is hanging from your door in your dorm.

I agree that AA can not be discussed without also discussing legacy admissions. The way I look at this issue is to examine who benefits from the policy and who is responsible for its implementation. AA was implemented by university administrators, university boards, and the civil rights establishment. These are the people who, along with their children, benefit most from this program 

The children of administrators and board members are largely privileged whites, admitted as legacies and some not paying tuition because their parents work at the universities. They are therefore going to be admitted to the institution of their choice regardless of whether that institution practices AA. They benefit through their children being exposed to AA students (enhanced educational environment), and from satisfaction of their ideological preferences. 

The children of the civil rights establishment are well connected middle class to wealthy minorities. They are the students who might get bumped up to Harvard from BU because of an AA preference, but would have been gone to college either way. They are also unlikely to be afflicted by the difficulties another poster pointed out - dropping out because college is too difficult - because of the support systems they have and the good high school educations they likely received. 

The people who we would think AA was set up to help - poor under privileged minorities - are not the biggest beneficiaries because it is hard for them to be in a position to take advantage of it after 18 years of education deprivation. It is also possible that for some of these students it can be two-edged sword.  

The people whose social mobility is impacted are students from non-favored racial backgrounds and who lack social connections, apparently asians and down-scale whites. The actual impact on the social mobility of these people may be very small. In light of my analysis, I think that AA should be targeted at people who are first generation college students and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, not broadly at all racial minorities regardless of socioeconomic status. This would make it much less divisive politically and more just. 

You don't need to cite The Tacit Dimension if you mention tacit knowledge, it's a blindingly obvious and well established phenomenon in this ordinary sense: we can all write and identify (un)grammatical sentences without being able to say why theyr'e grammatical/ungrammatical.

Unfortunately this is also a terrible response if some-one asks you to justify a view. You could append the response "It's tacit knowledge, as written about in The Tacit Dimension" to literally any assertion you want to make at all, no matter how ridiculous or offensive.

Luckily the differences between these cases are the most flagrantly obvious distinctions you could imagine and so myriad that I'm not going to bother listing them.