See, this type of canard is why people are getting hung up on affirmative action, along with your earlier hypothetical about "two equally qualified candidates."

 

Both of those are complete BS. 

 

Here is reality:  NO TWO CANDIDATES ARE EVER EQUALLY QUALIFIED.  Moreover, you proceed to define "qualified" in a very narrow, self-serving way - education, job experience, etc.  That's not how people get hired either, nor is it how people are selected for admission to schools.

 

Reality is a lot more complex than that, as is affirmative action.

 

Strawman.  Big, giant, strawman.

 

 

And those things are obnoxious and offensive.  No doubt.

 

But let's look at a more up-close hypothetical:  I am interviewing two people for a job.  They both meet my basic criteria, in terms of education and experience.  Neither one is a jerk.  I wouldn't mind hiring either one, but I can only hire one.

 

So, I dig deeper. One candidate did peace corps.  Cool.  The other was a high-level athlete.  Cool.  One candidate has language skills, the other has a deeper science background.  One person grew up in the city, the other in the country.  One is obviously left-leaning polically, the other is more moderate.  One candidate belongs to an ethnic minority, the other does not.  One appears to be fairly religious, the other not so much.  One is a woman, the other is a man.  One has long family roots locally, the other is from out of state.  One is gay, one is straight.  One has military experience, the other does not.  One is tall, one is fat.  One belongs to my racquet club, the other does not.  One is a Packers fan, the other is a Vikings fan.

 

Might some of these factors influence my decision, whether intentionally or unintentionally?  Should they?  Should I be allowed to use some of these factors to influence my decision?  Which ones, and why/why not?

 

 

I actually wasn't talking about melding.  I was targeting something else entirely.

 

But since you brought it up...  you say "meld better" and "race" as if those two are always independent.  Yet that is obviously not always the case - arguably hardly ever the case.

 

 

See, this just isn't true.  There is a wide-spread belief, which is completely false, that corporate America goes massively out of its way to hire "diverse" candidates.  Yes, many companies (including mine) have diversity committees, diversity hiring practices, etc. - but the objective reality is that women and ethnic minorities are incredibly under-represented at just about every level of authority in just about every industry.   If the big companies are trying so hard to hire the "most ridiculously diverse people" they can find, then they are doing an incredibly poor job of it.

 

But FAR more important is the subtext of your comment - the same subtext that was in Linus'.

 

You are encouraging me to utilize any number of features to choose a candidate, with the presumed or stated purpose of hiring "whomever [I am] most comfortable with."  And then you set that up as incompatible with being ridiculously diverse.

 

Think about that.  Think about that next time somebody asks whether affirmative action is needed or not.

Also, this sounds very much like a high school Sociology class essay question. You have presented the two most perfectly diverse candidates alive. I dislike you.

 

Actually, all candidates are like that.  I interview a lot of people.  Everybody is "diverse."  Everybody has a backstory, everybody has their differences.  And if you interview properly you will learn about the candidates, instead of just looking at the resume.

 

Back to my point of "no two candidates are ever the same."  Everybody I interview has already passed through the paper test.  Yet in all my years of interviewing, I have never - NEVER - faced a situation where two candidates were interchangeable but for ethnicity.  Ethnicity is ALWAYS only one of many differences.  Yet all too often, this illusory "diversity-uber-alles" decision standard is what people point to when they themselves fail.

 

Hence my favorite affirmative action cartoon:

 

 

Wrong.

 

The correct answer is "hire the Packers fan and have the Vikings fan thrown down the stairs."

 

But a noble effort.

 

 

I was SOOOO tempted to put that I was a minority on scholarships. Im 25% Middle Eastern. I look and act like a normal white guy from the suburbs. No one could ever pick out my background if they tried. I have a fairly large nose and thats it. My brown hair even has some blonde and some red in it randomly. I just think that its unfair to even ask about race anymore. Why should I, a 3.96 GPA student with great "extracurricular activities" and a clean record be turned down by most scholarships because a lesser qualified person is a different color than I? When they dont even ask about family need, I usually skip that scholarship. I know I have no chance to qualify for it.

AA was desigined to protect the "minority groups" from very bad / wrong hireing / admittance practices.  Most of the colleges / businesses have changed the policies to accept the "minority."  Now they are left with the current AA rules.  I believe the AA is still needed, It just needs to be  looked over again and changed.  There is still alot of hate in the world.  If AA was removed all togather I believe that there would be alot of companies falling back to the "old" ways of doing things.  I know that most people wouldn't agree with that, but that is the way I see it.  There is always someone that will complain about something.  You can't make everyone happy.

Maybe it's just me but, I have yet to ever see a resume that included a space to tell the potential employer/university their life story.  That would be extremely impractical for admission to any kind university, who already have a massive stack of applications that they have to sort through.   

 

Personally, I stopped giving my ethnic background to things like surveys and standardized tests 8 years ago when I was a freshman in high school.  I go with the "prefer not to answer" box.

 

 

I'm currently applying to veterinary school, and took the MCAT, and following my standard procedure - did not give any information about ethnic background.  Now, so far I have gotten 4 emails from different medical schools saying:

"Congratulations on your impressive MCAT scores.  Please look into our minority applicant registry, which can be found at ******"

(that would be a direct copy-paste from the most recent one, I omitted the schools name)

 

Were my MCAT scores impressive? Not even close!  They were actually very close to average for a student that gets accepted into a medical school.  Is it possible that every/most schools are sending out this message to everyone who takes the MCAT regardless of if they scored a 14 or a 42, just to get people to consider applying there?  Yes, however, then my inbox should be clogged with hundreds of similar emails.  Also, why did it direct me to the minorty admissions page?

It most certainly is not - especially if you work for state government.  I'll give you an example.  I am a state employee that took an exam for a supervisory position.  When a supervisor's position became available, a hispanic that had NOT taken the exam was selected.  I (among other people that took the test) were not considered.  Why is that?

 

To give you a low down on the supervisors on all three shifts:  Fifteen total.  One white female, one black female, one Hispanic male, twelve white males.