Preferential Treatment
A couple of more points on the allegedly “preferential treatment” that Michael Goldfarb thinks Sonia Sotomayor received during her Princeton years. First, as Michael O’Hare says:
I remember arriving at Harvard (a decade before SS went to college) from the Bronx HS of Science, whence Harvard had admitted eleven students a year since forever, out of a graduating class of about 800- of whom, we learned, none had ever graduated less than magna. There I found many things of interest to a New York kid, for example (1) Protestants! (2) …who seemed to be in charge of everything! My social justice gland went into overdrive as I started to meet the thirty-odd Pomfret students (a third of their graduates) in my class through my roommate, and compare them just on general smarts to the BHSS students who hadn’t made the cut with me.
Right. When I was at Harvard in the early days of the 21st Century, it seemed that there was very little year-to-year variance in the number of kids admitted from Dalton to each class. Similarly, there was very little year-to-year variance in the number of kids admitted from Stuyvesant to each class. These were two very good high schools in New York City. One was very expensive, one was free. Admission to Dalton was competitive, but only a minority of families could afford the tuition, and many of the students had been admitted in kindergarden. Admission to Stuyvesant was done via a standardized test administered to eighth graders. Naturally, the more-or-less fixed formula had Harvard take in a higher proportion of any given Dalton graduating class than any given Stuyvesant graduating class. Consequently, while the Dalton kids were considerably worldlier and in some ways more sophisticated, on average the Stuyvesant kids were smarter.
Which is to say that, as everyone knows, the main affirmative action at fancy private colleges is for the well-to-do in general and legacies in particular. Read about the “z list” (see also) and then complain about preferential treatment.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the specific innuendo Goldfarb was peddling about Sotomayor was false in all its key particulars. he didn’t get “preferential treatment” by being allowed to teach her own class
89 Responses to “Preferential Treatment”
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May 30th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
“Admission to Stuyvesant was done via a standardized test administered to eighth graders…..on average the Stuyvesant kids were smarter.”
Probably also because nobody decided to ignore the test results. Just a theory.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Probably safe to say that digging into the Goldfarb background would reveal some unexamined privilege.
Will we ever get to a day when we can all admit we each represent a complicated and unique mix of merit, privilege, luck and talent? Or will we be plowing this same dull and dreary field in 80 years?
May 30th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
And you stick by a guy who is okay with rape. Who seeks to cover it up, and bury it so that he never has to prosecute any of the thugs that did this.
You’re a fucking joke. If I saw you, I’d laugh in your face if I wouldn’t be too busy spitting in it.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
In the Ivy League, the only students getting more preferential treatment than the legacies are those whose families have buildings named after them. At Cornell, these two groups were always the ones most likely to be bad students. And let’s face it, if your name matched a name on a building, there was nothing you could do to fail out.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Matt, you have it all wrong. I mean, Jeb Bush himself said that being the son of a President was a net disadvantage in his life because it prevented certain business practices. Can’t you see that being a poor Latina in a single-parent household is like getting one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets?
May 30th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
“he didn’t get “preferential treatment” by being allowed to teach her own class”
Presumably you didn’t finish writing this (I infer this from the missing “S” and period), so it’s important to say: not only did Sotomayor not get preferential treatment, she also did not teach the class. As Julian Sanchez points out, the class was taught by an actual professor, just as one would expect if one weren’t looking to make ridiculous accusations of special treatment.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Why is there this impulse on the left to deny that affirmative action actually exists while at the same time arguing that it’s absolutely necessary? The whole point of affirmative action is to admit members of underrepresented groups who don’t have the numbers. There are good reasons for that, but it makes no sense to deny that that’s what’s going on (this has nothing to do with Sotomayor, btw, who was pretty clearly much smarter than virtually everyone she went to school with).
It’s also a horrible negotiation tactic to point to legacies when someone questions the justice of affirmative action. When someone suggests that something you support is unjust, pointing to something even more unjust and just saying, “see!”, doesn’t advance your argument.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
“You’re a fucking joke.”
The joke is you. You keep posting this non sequitur because your life is empty and meaningless and you crave attention. If you were serious, you would just stop reading this blog.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Sancho,
When people like Matt ridicule the idea that Sotomayor’s background was unusually advantageous, it’s a mistake to understand that as a denial that affirmative action exists. The claim being made is that even with affirmative action policies in place, growing up as a poor, latina woman cannot be reasonably thought to be advantageous. Even if Sotomayor was only admitted into any of the schools the went to because of her race/gender, that isn’t nearly enough to make up for the institutional barriers she faced.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
“It’s also a horrible negotiation tactic to point to legacies when someone questions the justice of affirmative action.”
Well, my argument for affirmative action is to counteract the much older program of giving preferential treatment for rich white guys. Get rid of the legacy programs and the favoritism towards elite private schools, and I’m all for getting rid of affirmative action. What the Republicans are arguing is that ONLY white people should get special advantages. And they do get them. I’m a white guy with a black last name. I couldn’t get a job in the South until I put my picture on my resume to prove I was white. After I did that, the same resume caused the job offers to roll in.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
“Well, my argument for affirmative action is to counteract the much older program of giving preferential treatment for rich white guys.”
You could also do this by making poor white guys eligible for affirmative action, which never happens.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Re “La raza” Every OCt. 12 around this country, and some others, there are parades for “El Dia de la Raza” in celebration of Columbus Day, since Columbus Day is politically incorrect insome circles. I’ve marched up 5th Avenue in NY City more than once in the parade. For those wondering, it really is just like a KKK rally where we wear hoods and burn crosses and generally terroorize non-hispanics, especially white people.
I don’t know why the Republicans don’t just get real and make Daniel Carver their official spokesperson. His “wake up white people” schtick is a very terse and accurate expression of their view of many of their fellow citizens, not to mention all the rest of the warthy ones trying to get here to rape, pillage and steal.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Who’s decision was it to admit Michael Chertoff into Harvard? I guess Adolph Eichmann had to settle for Bucknell.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
If you told me nine years ago that everytime I heard some republican talk they would be defending torture or bitching about racial things I’d have thought you had lost your mind.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
I grew up in working class Brooklyn and went to Bronx Science at the same time that MY went to Dalton. Nothing against him, but at the time we always took it as a given that we were smarter than the prep school kids. It was a year into college before I realized that some prep school kids actually were hella smart. Before that, I had just assumed it was where rich folks could send their kids who weren’t good enough to get into Sty. I also had the same “wow, Protestants” experience as O’Hare. Funny stuff.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Sotomayor was class valedictorian at her Catholic high school. You don’t become class valedictorian by being a Latina in a South Bronx Catholic school, you become class valedictorian by excelling academically.
She graduated from Princeton summa cum laude from only the fourth undergraduate class at Princeton to include women. You don’t get Latin honors by being a Latina woman at Princeton in 1976, you get Latin honors from excelling academically.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
You could also do this by making poor white guys eligible for affirmative action, which never happens.
If we’re talking about college admissions, yes, indirectly. Schools like Harvard include things like regional diversity in their calculations, which makes it somewhat easier to get in if one is from an area of the country underrepresented or if one is from a rural area or from a school that rarely sends someone to Harvard. They also want to keep the student body more white than test scores show (the top schools would have more Asian students, as a percentage, than they do now.)
The reason people keep pointing to legacy admissions is not to change the subject, but to point out that very little about the admissions process approaches the pure conception of merit that people imagine. There are many, many factors beyond SAT scores and high school grades.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Of course they’re smart, their parents could afford to send them to top-quality schools. If their parents were poor they wouldn’t be as smart.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Ed, it does seem insane, but remember the Republican Party was just off its drive to impeach a President over his sex life (fuck off trolls, a decade later it’s time to admit the truth). When those idiots voted to impeach I predicted the end of the Republican Party, it was so insane I was sure the American people would reject them wholesale.
I can’t believe how wrong I was. They got close enough to steal a Presidential election and then had the great benefit to undermine national security enough to invite a massive terrorist attack which they rode to two consecutive election day victories.
But those victories were hollow. They were hollow because, at its core the Republican Party was still insane. I am probably wrong again, but the past year demonstrates that the Republican Party is fundamentally un-American and, for that reason, unstable.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
I sort of agree with Sancho. In the way people should engage this topic.
Although I think the more valid point to make would be to point out that if Sotomayor DID receive preferential treatment with admissions, then obviously affirmative action has it’s benefits, as she went on to become an honors student and editor of her school law review. She’d be a shining example of what happens when you give someone a chance.
But that’s if i just wanted to argue about affirmative action. As it stands I’d just call Goldfarb a racist that makes presumptions about hispanic women that he wouldn’t make about white men with the same credentials.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Why is there this impulse on the left to deny that affirmative action actually exists while at the same time arguing that it’s absolutely necessary?
No what’s denied is that affirmative action is unfair. One sad thing in all this racism talk is that liberals (not coincidentally) get diverted from any real talk about class-based privilege, as it’s also true that the system is not fair to poor and middle-class whites. That’s changing some, as major universities are phasing out student loans in favor of scholarships and grants. But the Republicans love so much to make this entirely a racial fight, which is to our collective economic disadvantage.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
If Yanks do not want non-whites to receive preferential treatment, why do you have Affirmative Action? The answer: because giving preferential treatment to the lower class is socialism.
Sotomayor’s family was not poor. Her mother was a nurse, she lived in a middle-class neighborhood, her brother is a doctor, and she went to private schools. That is middle-class. Are Yanks so divorced from the world that you have forgotten what poor means?
So calm down. Sotomayor has never argued that the poor deserve health care or to live in neighborhoods that are not crime-ridden.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
This post, and that of Michael O’Hare brings back some memories. I went to college about the same tima as Sotomayor. Despite 1400+ SATs and top 5% class rank, I didn’t get into Harvard or Prinecton, probably because I went to a very large northern NJ public high school with a very low reputation. Admission to the Ivies in toto was perhaps one or two a year from that school, less to the “inner” Ivies–one guy in my class got into Yale, the last Harvard admission had literally been about a decade earlier. I’m sure that similar scores, albeit a somewhat lower class rank, would have sufficed for admission from Dalton or Andover. I went to Colgate where I had a culture shock similar to O’Hare’s. I was an untraveled NYC area Jew who was the first to attend college from a working class family (via some scholarship money, some loans, and my father working much overtime at a decent union job). Luckily for me, the vast socioeconomic differences were largely ameliorated by early ’70s culture in fashion (we all wore long hair, t-shirts, ragged jeans, and workboots) abd politics (even at relatively conservative Colgate, anyone who was not to the far left of McGovern was regarded quite strangely). Also, even the affluent were soewhat less affluent, or had differenct spending spending patterns in those days. For example, even though Colgate is a pretty isolated shool geographically, only a small minority had cars, and those cars were usually old junkers either passed down in the family or bought from summer savings. However, I will never forget a fairly nice (but dim) girl who looked at me incredulously when she learned I had neve vacationed in Europe. She literally could not comprehend that such a creature existed.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
I don’t know enough of the rest of it to know what the Sotomayor family’s financials were like, but I doubt her younger brother was bringing in any income from his medical practice during Sonia’s formative years/
May 30th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Matt, that post seemed…..drunk.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Kafka (#11) raises an interesting point that the pro-affirmative action crowd needs to respond to. If it’s the injustice of legacies you’re against, then poor whites are just as much victims as people from any other race.
But the better response to the whole situation, it seems to me, is to discount the value of an Ivy education. If, after all, a sizeable chunk of the students who go to school there are only there because some ancestors went, then it does tend to dillute the solution a bit.
All of which leads to the main point – which is that discussion of Sotomayer’s educational background – whether disparaging it from the right or lionizing it from the left – is secondary to her judicial record, which is considerable and publicly available. I would hope that public discussion quickly turns to her casework. Matt could help by reviewing some of it rather than spending all his time cataloguing the predictable inanity of comments from the usual suspects on the right.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I’d like to know if she did benefit from affirmative action—when and how often. I’d also like to know if, as a woman, she had to score higher on her entrance exams to get into Princeton. That used to be the norm for most colleges.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Yes, and his mother was a nurse and father a factory worker too. What’s your point?
May 30th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
Dusty, I believe the point he is making is that it’s likely these guys had connections, if not wealth. Poor people can’t afford college, and nobody is giving an educational loan to someone who’s parents make 20k a year. Student loans only cover up to 3 or 5 K (depending on which semester), and it seems kind of fishy to hold this person up as an oppressed minority given that information.
It’s possible for one member of a poor family to luck out on scholarships/savings to go to a real college. It’s even (vaguely) possible for them to go to a good school. There’s an extremely slight possibility they could afford 7 years of college. It is extremely unlikely that they lucked out enough to afford first an the 8 years of college/medical school (assuming no further speciality) AND the 7 years of college/law school.
If a family has the money and/or connections for that, they should definately be excluded from affirmative action. Helping poor folk is one thing, giving Will Smith’s kids a hand up is a fucking joke.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Thankfully, George W. Bush got into Harvard purely on his merits.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Like all bloggers, Matthew Yglesias is free to cover whatever topics he chooses. Try SCOTUSblog if you want a discussion of her casework. I’m sure there are others.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Re soullite:
I admit I’m not an expert on college scholarships, but it seems to me you’re talking about what kind of funding is available today, not 37 years ago. It also seems like you’re making a lot of assumptions about what kind of financial aid or unfair or unwarranted advantages the Sotomayors might have received.
We do know that her single mother was a nurse, which I don’t believe has ever paid Will Smith-level salaries. Working-class to middle-class at best for a single mother of two children.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Yes, and his mother was a nurse and father a factory worker too. What’s your point?
My point is that Sotomayor is from a middle-class family as middle-class is understood by, it would seem, everybody except Yanks. The poor do not have mothers who have middle-class incomes, such as nurses. They do not go to private schools, or school at all. They do not receive medical care. They do not have running water. You know, poor, like the poor in the world who really do exist.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
A single mother working as a nurse in the sixties was middle class. Yeah, right.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
We’re talking about middle class in the U.S.A. I didn’t think it was so bad to be among the working poor growing up, because we had enough to eat, and had shelter; but that’s no reason to say I was middle class by American standards. That makes the term meaningless.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Her father died when Sonia was nine, so the family didn’t have that income. She was working-class or possibly lower middle-class. Her mother worked hard to give her children a decent life and a good education. Sonia wasn’t dirt poor, no, but I’m not sure who’s claiming that. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t barriers to success for a Latina from the Bronx in the early ’70s and it doesn’t substantially diminish either her achievements or her family’s.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
For the record, commenter 29 knows nothing about student loans, scholarship aid, or much of anything else related to financing post-secondary education. Two major points:
1) In the ’70s, college was much less expensive (in inflation-adjusted terms) than it is today. $3-5K in student loans plus summer jobs plus minor parental contributions would have covered both students, and scholarship aid probably made the parental contributions unnecessary.
2) Lenders are more than willing to give loans to students attending Princeton and Yale Law School because of the enormous earning potential associated with those schools and the non-dischargeability of student loans in bankruptcy. Parental income is meaningless in those cases. Same applies to med school.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Matt writes:
“he didn’t get “preferential treatment” by being allowed to teach her own class”
Who he?
May 30th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Soullite — you don’t know how it works. I went to grad school at Princeton for four years (75-79) while my widowed mother worked as a secretary. Tuition and board was waived — totally — and a stipend provided a little spending money. And there were plenty of undergraduates who weren’t rich or even middle class. Why? Because Princeton set aside money for scholarships, loans, work-study, and then actively sought out people like that to admit.
As for “connections,” what the fuck are you talking about? Do you really think your family friends, if they have any, can just pick up the phone and override the admissions process at a place like Princeton? Yes, there were legacy admissions, but I’ve never heard of someone getting that kind of break through connections.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Probably safe to say that digging into the Goldfarb background would reveal some unexamined privilege.
Well, I don’t know Goldfarb himself, but his wife was in my high school class. We went to a fairly well-regarded magnet high school in the DC suburbs. We would generally send a decent number of people to Ivy League schools, but it was still pretty hard to get into the inner Ivies – I don’t think anyone got into Harvard my year, and maybe a couple to Yale.
The future Mrs. Goldfarb was, so far as I can recall, reasonably smart, and, from what I gathered, got good grades and decent test scores. I’m sure she was perfectly well qualified and prepared to go to Princeton. But plenty of people with better scores and grades didn’t get into Princeton (or Harvard or Yale), whereas she did. Why? Well, her father was a big DC lawyer (a big-time Democrat, weirdly enough) and Princeton grad who’d given them loads of money.
So, er, Mrs. Michael Goldfarb pretty clearly got in to Princeton because of who her father was. For Mr. Goldfarb to accuse Sotomayor of receiving preferential treatment verges, I think, on rank hypocrisy.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
That makes the term meaningless.</em
Other terms that would seem meaningless to the average Yank would be “left” and “socialism”, indeed anything that has to do with society and social class.
The left was killed in the US. All you have left is blather about fake ethnicities, imposed self-identification, images, stereotypes, and role models. Such nonsense is what got Sotomayor into trouble in the first place.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
What exactly is your complaint, Lupita?
May 30th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
This is very true. And it’s true at least in part because “merit” is an extremely difficult thing to quantify. Schools vary so much in quality and offerings, that it’s like comparing apples to oranges. Standardized tests don’t really measure enough things and aren’t that finely calibrated – from my own observations, I suspect that SATs provide a decent bulk measurement of academic intelligence, but probably have an error bar of at least 100 points (more under the new system). Beyond all that, I think that there is a real good in making a college class diverse – not just ethnically, but by region of the country and socio-economically. It’s the last measure that I fear gets ignored too often.
In the end, schools like Harvard and Yale have way more well-qualified applicants than they have slots for. Whatever metrics they use to winnow among them, there will always be an admit to point to who seems less qualified than someone else who didn’t get in. It’s never going to be an entirely fair process because we can’t agree on what fair means.
Frankly, for anyone at the point in their career such as Sotomayor, worrying whether it was “affirmative action” that got her there seems positively irrelevant. What matters is what she did when she got to Princeton and Yale and what she’s done since.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
What exactly is your complaint, Lupita?
It seems to be that the lower classes in America have access to running water and shelter rather than being “really” poor as they are in Somalia, and thus Sotomayor was brought up in comparative privilege.
Did I summarize your feelings correctly, Lupita?
May 30th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
My mom was a single mother raising three kids on her own and she was an RN. This was in the 80s. We certainly called ourselves middle class, though I’m not sure the rest of the middle class agreed. We were not anything close to poor, though we didn’t have things, like cable TV or a car, that even poor families seem to have in most places. I think it was, overall, a big advantage living in New York despite much higher rent than it would’ve been elsewhere because we could get around without a car on foot, on the bus, or on the subway, and because free entertainment is everywhere in New York.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
She wasn’t competing with Somalians for a job. She was competing, on the whole, with people more privileged than she was.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
I mean, I’m just not as pissed about the fact that a well-qualified, possibly well-qualified Latina got into Princeton in 1972 over a hypothetical well-qualified poor person as I am about the unqualified athletes and legacy admissions getting into Princeton over the poor person. Isn’t this what let’s call him “The Man” wants? For the powerless to fight over the crumbs he allows them? If were going to talk about class-consciousness, that is.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Whoops.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
What exactly is your complaint, Lupita?
I am not complaining, I am just commenting on the bind Americans are in: on the one hand, it is clear that Sotomayor was selected to add “diversity” to the Supreme Court, on the other, she is being attacked for actually believing that her “diversity” is of any particular significance.
All this happens because, in the US, class analysis was supplanted by multiculturalism to the point where “ethnic” has become a synonym for “poor” to the point where a bright, white girl from a perfectly stable and nice professional family born and raised in the 1st world is considered disadvantaged.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Sotomayor’s not being attacked for believing that her diversity of any significance. She’s being attacked because some right-wingers have chosen to equate her honesty and self-awareness about how her ethnicity and gender and personal experiences might influence her judgment with racism.
Poverty is not the only barrier to success in America. Especially in the early ’70s, race and gender were very big barriers to things like admission to places like Princeton.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Wait, Sotomayor is a “white girl”? So we’re pretending there’s no difference between being Puerto Rican and Swedish in America?
May 30th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
I see your point, Lupita. The fact is that when she started college in 1972 she was at a disadvantage because she was a woman. At that time, lawyers were arguing in court that “you can’t thread a moving needle” to defend their clients who were accused of rape. The idea of having a woman on the supreme court was laughable to most people then. It’s entirely possible that, as a woman, at that time, she had to score higher on her entrance exams to be considered at Princeton. We have made significant advances. Much of the reaction to her nomination shows that we have a long way to go.
I have yet to see evidence that she benefited from affirmative action.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Funny how the privileged start shedding tears for poor whites when the subject of “affirmative” assistance comes up for blacks and Latinos. I am guessing most of the respondents here have some affiliation with the Ivy League in some way. Because that is really what we are talking about, right? Letting the blacks and Latinos into the citadels of privilege?
Poor whites ARE admitted to Harvard all the time, for instance. Just not in significant numbers. Poor blacks and Latinos are admitted too, but in really insignificant numbers. Harvard’s student body (and we know we are talking about undergrad, mainly) is decidedly non-poor and non-working class. There is barely any diversity there when it comes to family income-wealth. Black and white are at the very minimum the solid middle.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Lupita, what is so bad about understanding class and privelege in a relative sense when discussing the access to opportunity in America and discussing it in absolute terms when that is appropriate? It doesn’t do any good to discuss “middle class” and “poor” in American society by a global standard of access to running water, and our perfectly sensible discussion of it within our society doesn’t mean that “Yanks” (or Southerners, or Americans) don’t know what poverty looks like in the developing world. A little good faith would be nice.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Joshua at 26:
Most supporters of affirmative action believe that there should be affirmative action on the grounds of race, class, and gender. I know that I do.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
One more point: if we’re going to get serious about talking about class, let’s remember that in between poor and middle-class there is another class – the working class. What’s wrong with saying that Sotomayor was a working class Latina who worked her way up?
I agree with Anthony – poverty is relative as well as absolute. T.H Marshall’s definition of social citizenship, “the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” is what counts.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Thankfully, George W. Bush got into Harvard purely on his merits.
No, he got into Harvard as a legacy.
This kind of sarcasm isn’t helpful. Remember there are many ignorant people.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
It seems to be that the lower classes in America have access to running water and shelter rather than being “really” poor as they are in Somalia, and thus Sotomayor was brought up in comparative privilege
Did I summarize your feelings correctly, Lupita?
No need to go so far. I was thinking Imperial Valley.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
So do you think that being female in 1972 wasn’t a significant disadvantage compared to being a male or not? Do you think that being Puerto Rican in 1972 wasn’t a significant disadvantage compared to being white or not? The fact that she wasn’t also grindingly poor doesn’t mean that she had an easy road in life.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Compared to 3 million agricultural workers she had it easy. The poor should come first.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
In terms of admission to Princeton? How many well-qualified agricultural workers did Princeton turn away that year? What other advantages in life do you think that she was handed that should have gone to day laborers?
And why are you choosing to focus on Sonia Sotomayor instead of the rich white male dumbasses who got into the Ivy League because granddaddy went there or daddy’s business partner made a call?
I mean, you’re complaining that the left is ignoring class. You’re ignoring race and gender.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I mean, you’re complaining that the left is ignoring class. You’re ignoring race and gender.
A Marxist analysis that descends into dogmatism!? Heaven forfend.
I agree with Dusty (in case that wasn’t clear).
May 30th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
I don’t know that Marx would encourage the poor and the working-class or even the middle-class to take up arms against each other. I suspect he’d want them to unite against the ruling class. But that’s just me.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Dusty–I agree, but I think Lupita is trying to apply a dogmatic Marxist framework to how we talk and think about class in America, what matters and what doesn’t.
It was just a crack–I really do agree with you. The snark was directed at Lupita.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
So, should we nominate a migrant farm worker to the Supreme Court? She did smashingly well in college, and has about 20 years of EXPERIENCE on the bench, in spite of being a minority. She wasn’t nominated merely because of her origins.
I agree that much more needs to be done for the poor of this world, and underprivileged Americans, but that is not a primary issue with this nomination.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Lupita is trying to apply a dogmatic Marxist framework
…and, partly for the reasons you note above, not doing a great job of it.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
As was mine.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
In terms of admission to Princeton?
In terms of living a life with dignity.
And why are you choosing to focus on Sonia Sotomayor instead of the rich white male dumbasses who got into the Ivy League because granddaddy went there or daddy’s business partner made a call?
Sotomayor is neither here nor there for me as well as who gets admitted into your ivy league schools. I do have an issue, though, with a whole class of people who are marginalized from basic needs and exploited. Yes, you do have them in the US. Appointing Sotomayor does not compensate or ameliorate their plight and I take issue with the notion that she will automatically reflect their interests because she is also disadvantaged, which she is not.
I mean, you’re complaining that the left is ignoring class. You’re ignoring race and gender.
I am not complaining about the American left, you have no left.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I am not complaining about the American left, you have no left.
We’re not all “Yanks”, either.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I am not complaining about the American left, you have no left.
Again, you seem to have a problem differentiating relative from absolute.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I’m out.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
The last time I looked, legacy admissions at Harvard averaged two (2) points lower on the SAT than the class as a whole. Blacks averaged 95 points lower than whites at Harvard, 182 points lower at Columbia, 288 points at Cal Berkeley (figures from the 90s)
But when you think about it, two points is really the same as 95, or 288. It’s the principle of the thing.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Shorter MY: I went to Harvard. And Dalton.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:15 am
@72 and in general…
Legacy admissions only averaged two points lower than the average, but that’s probably inflated a good 150 points over their unprepped score, given the type of parents (ivy-league educated) they have… that said, I don’t disagree with you that black AA admits have far lower scores, and a lot of the “black” students are biracial or are wealthy blacks so they quite often come from privileged backgrounds themselves.
Still, the main point shouldn’t be controversial to those who are familiar with the process first hand…
I went to the same private, Episcopalian elementary and Jr. HS that Matt Yglesias went to… in fact, I vaguely remember him and knew his younger brother. I was on scholarship, and went to Stuyvesant afterwards. Out of 32 kids in the private school graduating class, only two of us were admitted to Stuyvesant (admission there is based SOLELY on a standardized test). The other chose to attend an elite private school.
In my experience, the kids at Stuy were on average MUCH smarter than the kids at the private school, though from a whole range of backgrounds: 50% asian, 43% white, 4% black, 3% hispanic, mostly immigrants or first-generation, mostly middle-class, and not particularly well-connected.
When college-time rolled around, about 25% of the kids from private school had been diagnosed with ADD and taking amphetamines and getting extended testing-time on the SAT… Generally they got into better universities than the Stuyvesant kids, are doing better in life, and worked less the entire time.
That is the kind of unfairness that Matt is talking about. I think it’s horribly unfair to working-class whites, but giving preference to minorities is less odious to most people, than giving it to members of the elite… they’re both misguided, but at least the intentions are good with AA.
May 31st, 2009 at 9:18 am
What is annoying is people who went to private schools and then support preferences. It costs them nothing. 50 percent of dalton admissions should be selected via lottery.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:08 am
#37: Seriously, soullite (#29) describes a system that hasn’t existed in the U.S. for seventy years. Need-blind admissions and full financial aid became the norm post-war; but even the 40s colleges accomodated those whose parents couldn’t pay.
Next time leave your time machine in the garage, dude.
I am not denying the hardships that befall poor people attempting to attend public and community colleges on paltry Federal grants and usurious loans. Everyone knows public institutions are underfunded and that the public system, of late, is failing to meet its obligations to poorer students.
But for decades, the rich schools have made up the difference between family resources and cost.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:19 am
Hey, I went to Pomfret! If I recall (it was 25 years ago), nearly half the studentry there was on some form of financial aid–and the numbers, according to annual giving reports, have remained more or less constant.
Smart kids from poor (and poorly served) neighborhoods were quite well represented at Pomfret and many other prep schools. Plenty of smarties, too. Naturally, there were stoner rich kids in fair numbers.
Kinda like real life…
May 31st, 2009 at 10:39 am
A few final words on some of the disgusting remarks here on blacks, Latinos, and “affirmative action”: Harvard and the Ivy League can admit whomever they want; some of those commenting here must think they are admissions officers, with their idiotic citation of SAT scores, as if that is THE only criterion for admissions anywhere; Get used to it –blacks and Latinos will be admitted to the Ivy League from now on: you may not like it and you will probably do all you can to demean them, but they are there and they do all right.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:07 am
I can’t believe how clueless this Lupita person is.
A single-parent family of Puerto Ricans being supported by a nurse’s salary in the 1960s is a stable, middle-class, white family?
Seriously, you need to stop lecturing Americans. You haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:21 am
There is not impulse on the left to deny that affirmative action exists. There is an impulse among that cohort known as “all decent people” to react negatively to people who assume, based on nothing but noting someone’s ethnic or racial characteristics, that a particular person got to where she is through affirmative action.
You can see the difference, right?
May 31st, 2009 at 12:33 pm
A few final words on some of the disgusting remarks here on blacks, Latinos, and “affirmative action”: Harvard and the Ivy League can admit whomever they want; some of those commenting here must think they are admissions officers, with their idiotic citation of SAT scores, as if that is THE only criterion for admissions anywhere; Get used to it –blacks and Latinos will be admitted to the Ivy League from now on: you may not like it and you will probably do all you can to demean them, but they are there and they do all right.
What’s idiotic about acknowledging the fact that minorities, esp blacks, get accepted to top schools with lower qualifications on all objective measures? That’s the official policy of the schools. As a lark, I filled out “african american” on my PSATs… When I passed the cutoff for national merit finalist, I was flooded with mail from schools and all kinds of black scholarships. At my school, a black student with a 1400+ and a gpa > ~91 or 92/100 was virtually guaranteed admission to a top ivy league school… A non-AA student would have maybe a 50% chance to get admitted with a 1500+ sat score and a 96/100… And this includes some black girl with a 92 average who was rich, had doctors for parents, who grew up on the upper-east side who got into harvard.
At the most competitive levels, AA really warps things and really pisses off a lot of people. It’s a stupid policy, and it genuinely breeds resentment. Your attempt to paint its opponents as bigots is pretty weak.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Ah, the mythical “rich black doctor’s daughter.”
The one who takes a spot that would have totally gone to the hale son of a West Virginia coal miner.
I’ve yet to ever meet a single such person, or even meet anyone who had met such a person, or seen anyone who postulates the existence of such a person who could ever point to any actual students who fit this description, but man, the people who totally aren’t bigots certainly do seem to have a lot invested in believing in her existence.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Re: A single-parent family of Puerto Ricans being supported by a nurse’s salary in the 1960s is a stable, middle-class, white family?
Nurses may not be _poor_, but I wouldn’t call them (at least in East Coast cities- things may be different in the Midwest) “middle class” either. Particularly not supporting three children on a single salary. What happened to the term ‘working class’, or has that fallen out of public discourse?
May 31st, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Hyperbole,
Wow, touched a raw nerve, didn’t it? Who made you boss of the Ivy League? What kind of anal jerk starts looking through such minutiae to justify their repellent stance on admissions?
So you have broken down admissions to such an extent that you know the SAT scores etc of every white non-Anglo group (Italians, Serbs, Irish, and so on)? Do you have the stats on working-class whites in the Ivies? (By the way, they tend to perform slightly worse overall on the standardized tests they take for admissions and tend to perform slightly worse in college than the children of the upper-middle, however you define upper-middle.)
I know people like you are racist because if you were truly interested in a true meritocracy you would eliminate all those admission slots for working-class whites from S. Dakota, N. Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma. You would also be a-bitchin’ about the overall underperformance of Italian Roman Catholics and Irish Roman Catholics from urban areas (vis a vis non-ethnic whites of non-working-class backgrounds).
This kind of reminds me of the reception of Charles Murray’s racist book, The Bell Curve: We know how you racists reacted to his “evidence” that blacks are dumber than whites –you reveled in it. Ok, that book was total garbage, but let us accept this point for that jerk Murray. What his stats also showed was that Italians-Americans were the dumbest of the white Americans. Where was the hue and cry about admitting Italians to the citadels of privilege? Even with the advantages of being white, they tend to do poorly in comparison with other whites.
I await the day when as much time and energy is spent on how Italian-Americans’ achievements are tainted by the one-two punch of affirmative action and white skin privilege (as they used to say on the left).
May 31st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Affirmative action means racial preferences: if someone gains, someone else loses. Supporters pretend that isn’t true, but they’re wrong. As a tactic, this untruth is effective, since most people are deeply innumerate. In fact, I should probably give those putting forth such nonsense some slack, because they’re usually innumerate too. Only a few are consciously lying.
If advocates of affirmative action laid it out clearly, they’d have less support: probably it wouldn’t exist.
May 31st, 2009 at 3:34 pm
gcockran,
Those who make the kind of point you make are under the impression they are making some kind of grand, cosmic point which will blow the concept out of the water. Is this the outcome of your Ivy League education, this sort of basic thinking? If it is, then your slot at Dartmouth or Brown should have been given to that go-getter from the barrio.
The small number of slots filled by blacks and Latinos are just that –small. The Gods of Admissions will never let the percentage of blacks and Latinos go beyond the percentage of blacks and Latinos in the general population. Get over it. Whites make up the majority in this country and pretty much occupy all the centers of power. If you are white and you are failing, you have no one else to blame but yourself. You have been given “affirmative action” for centuries in one form or another, so if you have not succeeded, don’t blame the handful of blacks and Latinos who go to Princeton or Stanford. With all the advantages afforded your families in the past –especially the one where you eliminate a sizable portion of the competition– if you are white and you are stuck or fail to gain access to the elite institutions, then you are truly mediocre.
I say this as a mediocre white myself.
Anyway, gcockran, white women get the most out of any kind of “affirmative” assistance programs. Start railing against them next time, will you?
May 31st, 2009 at 6:11 pm
My family consisted of farmers who volunteered to go south and kill Confederates for a few years. They seem to have believed in equality, not racial favoritism.
I guess having that kind of opportunity _is_ a kind of privilege, though, when you think about it.
May 31st, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Hector,
Let’s also keep in mind that this was the 1960s. Nurses got paid squat in the 1960s.
June 1st, 2009 at 1:24 am
gcochran,
Now blacks are supposed to be eternally grateful to you and your family for helping free them? This shows you know nothing of why “affirmative” assistance programs exist. It’s function is to deal with present-day problems, not to serve as reparation.
Like it or not, your wonderful family of farmers from the Union have been privileged. If you think otherwise, then you are refusing to see.