Originally posted by ckent
I think that the point of AA is to try to make a situation of "if all other things were equal" by creating a generation of under-represented minorities in professions and higher up on the corporate ladder with the hope that their children will grow up with the same advantages that "over-represented" people supposedly have that allows them to succeed. I don't think that it really gets at the heart of the problem though, it's much more of cultural "problem", if you want to call it that. It's been very well documented that many (note that I did not say all) under-represented children grow up around parents and peers that don't value education. To think that AA will correct this is a farce though, since all AA does is promote children who already come from highly educated families up higher on the ladder and emphasize to them that "education is not important" because "grades and numbers aren't everything". Think about it, do you know any URM's at your med school that came from inner-city families where generation after generation work in blue collar jobs or from broken families where parents are abusive or addicted to drugs. I suspect that there are many more white children who make it to med school under those circumstances then URM's. AA does nothing to get people out of that cycle, it only takes the best of the best URM's and gives them a small boost. To attribute the entire URM problem to racism is an insult to those other minorities (asians, indians) who have suceeded despite the racism that they face, and actually I read a recent study that suggested that hate crimes happen against asians more then other minority here in the US. And then there are the Jewish of course, who seem to be successful in every environment that they are placed in despite the well documented animosity towards them. I also think that it's ridiculous to argue racism is the URM problem when hispanics are URM's, and you can't even tell that many hispanics are hispanics and not plain white americans unless they can't speak english. It's definitely a complicated situation though, because even though I don't think that it's really fair, even I would be opposed to dismantling AA flat out because the number of URM's would drop off so dramatically that more then half of the med schools out there would have 0 URM's (the aamc published an article commenting on the dramatic drop off of acceptance into med schools urms would face if this were to occur a few years ago). I couldn't imagine what kind of racism that would breed among med school classes, because if you think about it, if all you see are URM's being admitted to your hospital (since most of us work in inner cities) addicted to drugs, HIV positive, and poorly educated, then you would no doubt begin to think that all URM's were like this despite your best efforts to not. I've always thought that the best way to make URM's stop being URM's is to be aggressive when they are young, have things like busing programs so that they can interact with the non-URM's; while keeping AA active for URM's of lower socioeconomic status so that you can continually infuse new groups of URM's who actually wouldn't have the chance to suceed. I do think that the whole idea of one race being "better" then another race just naturally makes no sense at all, since it would make no sense that skin color would correlate with anything besides skin color. They've done studies have shown this, as many "blacks", are not in fact african blacks, but rather have mixed family histories with whites, some have so many white ancestors that many other countries would call them white, not black. Americans usually classify anybody with any detectable "black" traits as black, even if genetically, they are predominately white; a lot of southern american countries are more accurate in classifying "race". If there was a difference, you would expect that the more white ancestors that a "black" person had in their family history, the higher they would score on IQ tests. This was shown to be completely false, there was no stastical difference between someone who came from a predominant white family background but who was still considered "black" by american standards versus a more pure person of african ancestry, genetically speaking. Anyways, I don't mean to offend anyone by this post, I know that it's a sensitive topic, so I will just end by reminding everyone that they end product of AA is good. There was a study a few years ago that evaluated URM's and compared them to non-URM's and whites and found that attending physicians rated their clinical skills as being equal to the non-URM's and whites, suggesting that AA is certainly not creating a "worse surgeon" or "deficient doctor" as some others would suggest. And there are of course many stellar physicians who would not have been found without AA.
