Surprisingly, the amount of people who consider racism to always be bad barely changed over the last two years.
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I'm confused about people not thinking racism is bad. I assumed that most racists don't identify themselves as such and would say racism is bad. You would have to be an ideological racist to say it isnt bad, no? 20% is a huge number.
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Somebody who supports affirmative action or diversity quotas might say that racism, in such cases, is a fine way of counteracting a history of oppression.
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But affirmative action isnt racism under the typical definition of the word.
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Racism: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of anotherspecifically : WHITE SUPREMACY sense 2
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Or: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. -Miriam Webster Dictionary
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The first sense, according to the Cambridge English dictionary (the OED is more authoritative, but paywalled), is:
policies, behaviors, rules, etc. that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race
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Exactly, my point is not that a sociology major would consider it racist, it's that the average person would, EG:
My friend John, who is Asian, and my friend Jim, who is black, both applied to Harvard, John's SAT was higher, he didn't get in. It kinda seems racist.
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Well, you can debate if it is fair, but I don't think its racist to try and shape your student body or give historically disadvantaged groups a leg up. They aren't saying one race is superior or inferior to another. I think defining the term is part of the misunderstanding.
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It seems kinda shitty to give people a leg up on the basis of their race in a zero-sum area, where giving them a leg up means kicking down somebody else.
Would prefer leg up in areas where this isn't the case.
Well, it's a complicated issue, and there are no simple solutions to addressing multigenerational and systemic racism that has disadvantaged large segments of society. I do think that many of us who haven't suffered those effects don't fully grasp how bad it is.
Due to test bias, one could argue that SAT scores may be an unfair determinant of college admissions.
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