The alarming aspect of this bill is that it extends to government contracts as well. Reading the wikipedia article for this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Assembly_Constituti..., I see that one of the primary motivations is to give women and minority-owned businesses 'their fair share'. If we apportion everything according to race and sex in this manner, where do we stop? It is reasonable to have affirmative action to help advance young children (integration in schools, for example), but is affirmative action for college-goers and government contracts appropriate?
Some people will feel strongly that the answer is yes. Some people will feel strongly that the answer is no. While I have an opinion, it seems easy to construct arguments both for an against.
I agree that both sides have arguments that they feel the opposition cannot rebuke, but I think that one place where a discussion can be fruitful is to understand whether this allows for a slippery slope or not.
Personally I dislike the concept of ethicity-aware policies as they give legal weight to a classification that ideally should hold very little legal weight, but more that a justification of why this is necessary now I am interested in why this is not too much (now or in the future).
So again without taking sides, those in favor of affirmative action would point out that life in America does not offer a level play field and that there are clear systemic discrimination based on race and some aspects of ethnicity.
African Americans have a life expectancy that is more than 10 years less than Asian Americans
If one accepts that one race is not inherently better or worse than others then one must accept that other systemic factors are in play that clearly favor Asian Americans over African Americans.
Affirmative action seeks to re-level the play field and measure the potential for success for two given representatives of their respective groups.
In this context it would be interesting to see how the current practices in affirmative actions would change under different metrics. For example, what if affirmative action was mostly calculated in terms of a combination of local Gini coefficient and yearly income. Would it in practice cause the same "re-leveling" of the playing field?
In the same line of thought there was a nice blog post on the (temporarily deceased Slate Star Codex) about how country of origin of ancestors in white Americans of European descent have strong statistical effects on income/class today. the same for African immigrants.
From this perspective the question becomes "can we improve the effect of affirmative action on fighting racial social segregation by using non-race based metrics?"
"I am appalled that a student with Chinese heritage must climb a 450-point hill in order to compete against someone who is Black for a seat at UC Berkeley."
Distilling the issue to either: you support "affirmative action" or you don't.
The author of the article clearly does not. They also coincidentally identify as a "Political Activist" associated with a party not traditionally supportive of "affirmative action".
I'm not sure this is the right forum to have a debate on a political issue like this.
Potentially relevant is that the UC system is going to experiment with dropping standardized testing starting next year.
I don't know, arbitrarily making it more difficult for a certain group of people to compete against others based on their race smells kind of like racism to me. Is that even debatable? Where are the pitchforks? I don't think that's politics. It's racism/discrimination right in front of us. Do Asian lives matter?
