Yolo, everybody. Have you heard about this little thing called affirmative action here
in the United States. It's the idea that universities put certain quotas on their
admissions processes to ensure racial diversity because they see who have had historically a problem
with not admitting racial minorities into their schools. Well, recently, the Supreme
Court decided that affirmative action is no longer constitutional, that it violates the fourteenth
Amendment of the United States, which states that there should be no laws that
restrict people for based on the color of bist on the race, on the
color of their scam. And we were reading an article, this is an
article from Forbes dot com written by Koreen Letch that talks about how the end
of affirmtive action we routes the talent pipeline. And also there's another argue we
read about Clarence Thomas's that Clarence Thomas wins long game against affirmative action in Bloomberg
Law by Kimberly Strawbage Robinson. Cynthia, you know, I have a lot
to say about this particular topic, and you know, especially affirmative action of
itself. I am not completely against the ruling from the Supreme Court, but
I'm not also for it either, for I guess obvious reasons. But before
I really get into the weaves of my thought, um, TEO, you
being at south of US, like extreme south of US and hearing about affirmative
action. Is this something that you even heard about or the concept of affirmative
action? No, this was so weird for me. I had her I
had read an article that I quoted and I'm going to mention later like years
ago, and I was like, no, this cannot be possible. And
it's because, I mean, the USA is so racist that in order to
try to achieve a kind of equality, it's being racist, and it's choosing
amongst people based on their color. Even maybe some people want to college positive
racism, but still it is being racist. I mean, if you discriminate
people and decide they're what race they are, or how they look like before
deciding if they deserve certain opportunities. I mean, I really don't want to
be that guy. But if somebody says, oh, yeah, I am
white, but I'm poor, So I'm being discriminated because they are choosing other
people who are based on their color and not giving me opportunities. I don't
know what I could tell this person. And the problem is that in the
USA is extremely racist. And also, you guys over there, you have
this toxic capitalism in which students are not the future of the country. They
are not people who these are opportunities, They are a product. And I
had a problem reading this article because when I was reading everything, it wasn't
about like, yeah, people not having opportunities, people having issues a student
here there. No, it was like, how universities we're going to select
their best for their numbers, and how this was going to create a demographical
position of universities, And it was this shouldn't be the problem. The problem
should be that students they need to study, they deserve opportunities. They shouldn't
have to get a loan that is going to cripple them for the rest of
their lives just to get a job. And there are so many things that
are wrong with that you get your system in the USA that my mind was
blown. I mean, really, you have to you have to start being
racist in order to give people some opportunities instead of choosing, you know,
giving education to people based based on the idea that everybody deserves that The last
thing that I would say before giving this to you back to your Synthia,
is that the name problem. It's still that poor people are not getting education.
It doesn't matter your skin color. But let me let me quote some
something. I want to quote this article code the impact of affirmative action bands
of college. Oh no, no, that's the second one. It's the
first. Sorry, sorry, sorry, that's affirmative action lead to mismuch And
you justed an evidence by Peter I, Ken don Qui and Stepan whatever.
And the idea is that in this study, the concept of mismatch theory is
a study which suggests that affirmative action may result in a student being placed in
academic environments where they struggled to compete. So you can have one hundred black,
Chinese and Latino students getting to an university that is way too hard for
them. Why because they went to awful schools that didn't prepare them for this.
So the USA, instead of deciding, yeah, maybe we should have
schools that prepare students for academic life, they start deciding, Okay, which
school is going to have a new football scholarship and where are we going to
find out find people to feel the racist quada that we have to feel and
there are so many problems in here. We have talked about education and the
many problems of it in that you said before I would just say that I'm
scared about that. You say, yeah, well, I think I'll actually
clarify a few things about affirmative action, specifically, like where do we where
do we even get this from? There was this thing called the civil rights
movement. I don't know, we might have heard of it. You know,
people like you know Black Rights Act of His like doctor Arnold King,
Malcolm x um a, Philip Randolph um abenat the Reverend Apban at the James
Baldwin one of my heroes, Um were all a part of this particular movement
where and it started with the death of Emmett till and Um. Part of
the civil rights movement came about with a particular court case in the Supreme Court
that was argued by before he became a Supreme Court justice named Thurgood Marshall.
And that particular court um case was called Brown versus the Board of Education.
In in essence, what Brown versus the Board of Education did was overturn the
the decision that was made in um the eighteen hundreds called plus e versus Ferguson
that UH and plus e versus Ferguson was the UM was the statute that actually
continued to hold uphold Jim Crow and specifically segregation laws, saying that you know,
separate as long as we have separate but equal, then you can separate
the races. But the problem that Brown versus the Board of Education actually argued
is that facilities specifically that you have for at that particular kid color black folk
versus white white folk were not equal, including education, including the schools and
resources. Oftentimes, in most black neighborhoods, especially in the South, you
had sub substandard school buildings. Also, you had children who were in like
the six and seventh grade that we're reading from third and second grade books you
and also you had even though these people were citizens and they were paying taxes,
they did not have the same facilities as their white counterparts. So they
argued that you were talking about that in plus a versus Ferguson, we can
have segregation because even though they're separate, they're equal, but in actuality they
were not. They were just separate, and that means that they even were
putting in funding when it came to public facilities like schools separately. So when
that particular argument came forward, that's when we had a push to integrate schools
like public schools that were predominantly white for black kids who happened to be in
those particular areas, because again, they were paying tuition too, I mean,
they were paying property taxes to their parents were Now you have like some
back and forth between historians and others who may still be activists or like to
comment on that particular area, saying that most people who were in the movement
weren't necessarily pushing for integration, they were just pushing for equal facilities. And
one of the reasons being is because when they started to integrate the schools,
the black students faced a lot of violence from white mobs, from other white
students and parents and a Jason neighbors when it came to integrating those schools because
they were v hit a mentally v hit mentally trying to keep black students out.
Now, then we had this landmark and legislation called the Civil Rights Act
in nineteen sixty four, and then part of that was called Title seven.
Title seven specifically is affirmative action. Affirmative action just basically says that, hey,
schools and hey our organizations, where you hire people, you have to
be more more sinct and also choose more people who happened to be of diverse
backgrounds to fill positions in different schools and also in different companies. Now that
was not necessarily just for black people. That actually became any person that was
considered a minority, and the persons that were also added to be a minority
were white women. And data has actually showed that the group that happened to
actually profit the most from affirmative action world white women, not necessarily black bool
And and so one of the things that people think that if a person happens
to go to school because they were a deffirmative action recipient means that they were
completely subparted, but they only got in because they were black. But that's
not necessarily true. It was just that the school made more of an attempt
in order for them to recruit somebody who actually had the grades, who actually
had the merit, but most likely may not have gotten into a particular school
like a Harvard because Harvard was one of the schools that were on trial here
or uncase because of other extenuating circumstances because of their race. So it's kind
of interesting specifically how you would have, you know, justices like Justice Clarence
Thomas say that, you know, we want to go back to a color
blind constitution, when an actuality the Constitution was never color blind, and that's
the reason why we had to get the fourteenth Amendment in the first place.
So it was attempting didn't quite do it, but it was attempting to even
the playing field amongst all constituents in the United States when it came to them
being able to get employment and for them to be able to go to school.
But that did not necessarily happen. And I'm going to stop there because
I can babble about this all day night long, but we only have a
certain time about this, And Aaron, I'm going to go ahead and take
it back to you because I do have more thoughts. But I'm very curious
to kind of get your take on this whole case, and specifically justin Justice
Thomas, because he definitely put his pen his quill into the inkwell and said
thing, yes, he had an opinion if he did, and he let
that opinion be known because I guess when they announced their decisions he actually read
from his own concurring opinion. Yes, it is not a usual thing that
happens when the Supreme Court announces their their decisions. Right, and a firm
of action shed a light on a on a real problem, the inequalities in
education and in access to the tools that you can that help you succeed in
life. Unfortunately, it solved a symptom. It didn't really solve the underlying
problem. You know. The underlying problem is education is not equal in this
country for people under the age of eighteen. So if education is not going
to be equal, of course you're not going to have an equal representation of
excellent students across that matched the racial demographics of the country. So the real
problem isn't mandating entrances. The real thing is probably to mandate better education for
people equal funding. There are schools that get more funding than other schools.
I don't understand it. I don't know why some schools get more money than
other schools. That's because education is being fun by property taxes. Yeah,
I don't care where the money comes from. You can distribute it equally,
well, I mean, but that's what that's a that's another I mean,
that's another thing that you know certain um uh, you know social you know,
anthropologist, society, social workers and other people have argued that you need
to have a separate um funding or another funding source in order for you to
fund like, you know, public education. Before the simple fact in the
matter is is that, especially in black neighborhoods, like we have like less
than forty percent of African Americans at own homes. So yeah, exactly,
racial discrimination against owning homes, the American dream, and so of course,
yeah, the way we fund education, guess what, it's a little bit
a lot racist, a little lot um so, but we should be solving
let's solve that problem. I agree with. I kind of agree with the
court in in principle, um, I think in theory and in actual practice,
it's going to hurt racial blacks and minorities. I really we really need
to look at the real underlying problems, and that includes funding of our education.
It includes poverty and solving poverty and helping people get out of poverty and
be able to make a living. You disagree with something, well, it
kind of goes back to what I was saying before, and I don't mean
to necessity at xu out tayo, because I'm going to bring you back in.
But when I think about, like specifically the schools that were represented in
this particular case, like Harvard and UNC, these are pwis, you know,
like predominantly white institutions. The black population specifically in Harvard was like less
than nine percent student population. Yeah see, I actually did the math.
See yeah, you can do the math. Seven percent of ivy. The
schools are our minority, right, And I mean, and that's this minority.
We're not even talking about, like how are we divving up those between
like race. Now, I know that Harvard had a larger aapium population student
population or student body than they did black. But even when you start to
look specifically at which black we see that a lot of those black students that
are there are not African American. They are either African Caribbean or they are
first generation of immigrants. And one of the things that I happen to do
a little research on I don't know if I got it from Pew or what
have you, but it does show that in order like a majority of students
that are coming over from different countries to study in the United States are paying
out a pocket. And if we are looking specifically at the African American population
specifically those blackly people who may be freedmen descendants in other words, they come
from they are descendants of slavery here in the United States. They also have
that additional weight of all those other policies that have kept that particular population population
I belong to out of UM from a being able to accrue wealth on a
on a on a systemic level like red lighting, right, um, which
historically kept people from being able to purchase homes or actually getting resources so that
they can get home. UM. And you know, and and and we
even have issues where red lighting is still being practiced by banks today. UM.
And there was, like I saw as e as early as was late
as like twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, different UM articles that were coming out
talking about even the gap between UM, African Americans trying to sell their homes
versus white people trying to sell their homes. It's like it's insane. But
UM, so yeah, I agree with you that there are more systemic issues
that happen to tie into this particular issue that needs to be looked at specifically
but i'm i'm i'm I'm a little hesitant to say how much will this affect
specifically a black pipe population that was very much so underrepresented in these PWIS IVY
League schools on the first place, Tall you what do you have to think?
What do you mean? Yeah? I already said about the but I
think that the problem is how the USA is based. You have mentioned it
all. You have mentioned the inequality, the problems with schools where children are
not receiving the proper education. Do you remember that time when when the American
government decided, Okay, these children, they are not performing well, they
are not getting good grades, so we're going to stop feeding them, and
we're going to only feed those students who are already doing well. Like,
who do you creating the laws in the USA? With the current supreme courts,
I only see things getting worse and worse, and it's quite sad.
Yeah, I guess there are There are many things about the I forgot the
name again. How was it called affirmative action. There are many weird things
about affirmative action that are not working well and it should be fixed. But
once again, the main issue starts with the primary education, secondary education,
where students don't get proper education. As you said, Cynthia, they were
they are supposed to receive certain type of education, and they received inferior type
of education. And now we see the governments trying to erase history from their
students. So things that can only get worse out And not to cut to
you off tail, but you also have to deal with other things that we
were talking about too, with being able to look at these particular fundings when
it comes to educational property taxes and tackle you know, wealthy inequality or and
also the lack of equity when we are looking specifically at African Americans. Now
I will say something that um, and I wanted to read this real quick
and then Aaron, I wanted to take real cool, Um if you can.
One of the things that I believe that Justice Thomas did as an out
specifically for a front of action. One of the things that he said in
his concurrence is that Justice sort of your argues otherwise, pointing to a number
of conscious federal laws passed to the time of the Fourteenth Amendment enactment post at
six dissenting opinion, she identifies the Freeman's Bureau Act of eighteen sixty five already
discussed above as one such law, but she admits that the programs did not
benefits black exclusively. She also does not dispute the legislation targeting the needs of
newly freed blacks in eighteen sixty five could be understood as directly remedial. Even
today, nothing prevents the States from according an emissions preference to identify victims a
discrimination. While most of the beneficiaries might be black, neither the beneficiaries nor
the disadvantage by the preference would be identified on the basis of their race.
So, in other words, he's saying that if you are doing blanketed only
by race, only by those who are are considered a minority, to make
decisions concerning affirmative action in actuality, you are ignoring the group that needs the
help the most. So if you're going to do more affirmative action, and
he actually goes on to kind of like talk about that specifically, but if
you're going to do affirmative action, it needs to be more targeted to the
group that was harmed. And then Aaron, I want to give the last
word. You I mean, I kind of I kind of hate to say
it. But I kind of agree with him. I think that's actually kind
of a good idea, is to target the people that were the most harmed
by the country's racial policies and racial and racist policy and things like that.
So there's a lot of most of the things I don't agree with Justice Thomason,
but I kind of agree with them on that, and um, the
yeah, that's that's I kind of agree with it. I don't have much
more to say about that. I mean, I can move on to a
different topic. But I think that's well, even though we don't agree on
everything, to Thomas says, we kind of agree on this. But if
you agree to listen to more content from the nonprofit