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From: geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Affirmative Action is Temporary
Message-ID: <1989Oct17.174103.13126@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 89 17:41:03 GMT
References: <1058@uvaarpa.virginia.edu> <7052@cs.utexas.edu>
Sender: nadel@aerospace.aero.org
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 36
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org

In article <7052@cs.utexas.edu> turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:

>representation.  The reason is that cultural groups, such as the
>Amish, the Vietnamese boat people, and Haitian immigrants, are
>characterized not just by race, but also by different values,
>customs, and desires [2].  Such differences would prevent all the
>various groups that comprise our society from being
>proportionately represented in schools, jobs, and income, even in
>a perfect meritocracy.  And because some of these groups are
>racially correlated, proportional representation would also be
>absent at the racial level.  In short, the need for affirmative
>action will continue forever -- or at least until our society
>becomes perfectly homogenized.  Don't hold your breath.
>

In a way, affirmative action is a type of cultural imperialism,
and a means by which the dominant white, liberal, eastern establishment
culture can impose its values on minority subcultures.  A good example
of this can be found in the influence of government affirmative
action policies in professional education on the hispanic and
native American populations of the southwest US.  These cultures
have had strong traditions in art and literature, but have prized
science less strongly.  Affimative action programs have materially
rewarded those minority students who wish to pursue careers in
fields such as medicine and engineering where the underrepresentation
was assumed to be because of discrimination.  Those who are successful
in these programs are then held up to the young people of those
cultures as role models.  In this way, the values of the culture
can be altered by the policies of the government toward those of
the mainstream culture, and the traditional values of the culture,
which are not rewarded in the same way are slowly suppressed.
The conflict sometimes comes into the open.  One of my acquaintences,
who is the first Navajo indian to get a Ph.D. in science was giving
a demonstration of lasers to Navajo school children.  Afterwards, he
was told by some of the conservative tribal elders that they didn't
think lasers were good for the Navajo people.