US Supreme Court Rules Against Affirmative Action in College Admissions

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06/29/2023 14:28

Subject: US Supreme Court Rules Against Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Anonymous

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Anonymous wrote:Affirmative action is just another form of discrimination. And yes, Asians were definitely discriminated if you know anything about the true history of these great United States.

How were Irish immigrants treated in the late 1800s?
Most stayed in slum tenements near the ports where they arrived and lived in basements and attics with no water, sanitation, or daylight. Many children took to begging, and men often spent what little money they had on alcohol. The Irish immigrants were not well-liked and often treated badly. Employers had signs that read: Irish need not apply.

The Irish refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists.

Herded like livestock in dark, cramped quarters, the Irish passengers lacked sufficient food and clean water. They choked on fetid air. They were showered by excrement and vomit. Each adult was apportioned just 18 inches of bed space—children half that. Disease and death clung to the rancid vessels like barnacles, and nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to North America aboard the aptly nicknamed “coffin ships” in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard to sleep forever on the bed of the ocean floor.

Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely hungered to eat. Largely destitute, many exiles could progress no farther than within walking distance of the city docks where they disembarked. While some had spent all of their meager savings to pay for passage across the Atlantic, others had their voyages funded by British landlords who found it a cheaper solution to dispatch their tenants to another continent, rather than pay for their charity at home.

And in the opinion of many Americans, those British landlords were not sending their best people. These people were not like the industrious, Protestant Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America in large numbers during the colonial era, fought in the Continental Army and tamed the frontier. These people were not only poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic.

Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal only to the pope and ill-suited for democracy, and only recently given political rights by the British in their former home after centuries of denial, the Irish were deeply engaged in the political process in their new home. They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups. Their sheer numbers helped to propel William R. Grace to become the first Irish-Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880 and Hugh O’Brien the first Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston four years later.

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United States and were moving up the social ladder into the middle class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. “Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered acceptable and assimilable to the American way of life,” Dolan writes.

Irish were not the only ones mistreated.

Why do people come here and expect to be treated better than they were in their own home country??

Why do people come here and expect to be treated better than just one immigrant generation before??

Get in line.

Agree. All immigrants went through this: Italians, Irish, Germans, Asians and Hispanics more recently. All of the first 4 groups assimilated and thrived. They learned the language, they assimilated, etc.

I truly think the only affirmative action should be for blacks given the unique history of them in our country. I am unclear why any other ethnic group was given special preference as this hasn't happened for other ethnicities at any point and time.

Harvard’s affirmative action wasn’t based on a reparations rationale for blacks whose descendants suffered in this country. And that was part of the problem here. Tons of recent African immigrants make up the black student population at elite schools. You can go on about European colonialism affecting them I guess but that quickly becomes a less compelling rationale (because every country has some hardship in its past). If you want affirmative action to make up for the treatment of African Americans in THIS country then you have to do it differently than what Harvard/UNC were doing.