Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "What we get wrong about affirmative action" video.

  1. Oof, sometimes watching US political stuff is like deja-vu. We brazilians had a whole ton of these discussions some years ago, the a whole ton of the comments sounds pretty much the same, specially around centering things on income rather than ethnicity, or saying that there's nothing wrong with basing it on merit alone. These are valid arguments, but they do not solve the problem that these strategies are trying to address - historical discrimination that is still present because institutions never did anything to correct the historical deviation. Personally, I think universities in Brazil did it right. There are reservation of seats based on income, ethnicity and a merit based system that is applied on public schools via standardized testing. Private schools also have reserve seats based on certain things, and scholarships are given for a portion of it, as long as students manage to keep a set performance. It won't be perceived as fair and equal for everyone for a long time because historical discrimination created extremely unbalanced grounds that can only be corrected by tilting it the other way. But even though education in Brazil is pretty bad in itself, and it's for now an unsolvable problem because politicians couldn't care less about education here, the strategy has improved diversity in public and private universities, it has widen the range of experiences students have, and I've seen families truly transformed because it happened. Each society will have to chose itself what strategy to go for, of course. But it's worrying the choices some are doing right now. Brazil will most likely shift towards the wrong way too now with our new president. He never mentioned touching affirmative action in universities, but the guy is as sexist, homophobic and racist as they come. He has done some efforts to shut down LGBT affimative action groups while a congressman. We will need our institutions to stop him from shutting everything down. This isn't about putting white people as the enemy or anything like that, it's about recognizing the weight historical racism had in the past and trying to correct it in all fronts. When you have a foundation that is this tilted one way or another, it's not enough to correct current actions and let it go thinking that will be enough to balance things overtime. If we can't recognize that more needs to be done to balance things better, than progress won't be achieved. And I personally think this is one among the several things people in this generation can do to give better chances for future ones. People have to stop with tribalism, nationalism, explicit or implicit racism, complete polarization and other stuff stopping progress of humanity as a whole. The ability to overcome things like that can quite possibly be the biggest barrier the next number of generations will face. We have statistics and other measures to tell when things have gotten more balanced overall. And we need, as societies, to recognize, celebrate and elevate initiatives that try to correct historical distortions better. Because talk is just talk, there are very few and far between actions that are really contributing for more equal societies.
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