wow.. our society really has a tendency to overcorrect regarding social issues
replies(2):
I don't agree. You're reacting to a one-sided, very partial critique of a policy change that no longer benefitted a specific group and the only tradeoff was a hypothetical and subjective drop of the hiring bar. This complain can also be equally dismissed as members of the privileged group complaining over the loss of privilege.
The article is very blunt in the way their framed the problem: the in-group felt entitled to a job they felt was assured to them, but once the rules changed to have them compete on equal footing for the same position... That's suddenly a problem.
To make matters worse, this blend of easily arguable nitpicking is being used to kill any action or initiative that jeopardizes the best interests of privileged groups.
Also, it should be stressed that this pitchfork drive against discriminate hiring practices is heard because these privileged groups believe their loss of privilege is a major injustice. In the meantime, society as a whole seemed to have muted any concern voiced by any persecuted and underprivileged group for not even having the chance of having a shot at these opportunities. Where's the outrage there?
* The FAA introduced a bigraphical questionnaire which screened out 90% of applicants.
* The answers to this questionnaire were distributed to members of the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
* Members were explicitly told not to distribute the answers to other people, to reduce competition for admission.
This is as bad a scandal as though the answers to the SAT were leaked.
This is exactly the kind of one-sided nitpicking I pointed out. You purposely decided to omit the fact that the "biological questionaire" was in fact a change in the way applicants were evaluated, which eliminated the privilege of an in-group to avoid to compete with "walk-ons", i.e., anyone outside of the privileged group. At best you're trying to dismiss the sheer existence of such an evaluation process by putting up strawmen over the implementation of this evaluation.
Not every white person has "privilege", the advantages typically referred to by this word is about heavily overlapping normal distributions between racial groups. We see statistical level differences in these overlapping curves, but people can be on opposite ends of the curve and that width is greater than the width between races. Ultimately when you boil things down the issue is individuals within systems discriminating against other individuals. In addition, skin color is one axis, there are literally thousands of axes in which one may be privileged, just to name a few examples, how many medical issues you have, the quality of your parents friends, the quality of your early school friends and teachers, whether you're attractive or ugly, many of these things are out of the control of a child and in many cases have a much bigger impact on the quality of your life than skin color, or even the big obvious ones like sex and sexuality.
It's becoming really common for advantaged people to feel justified in being a racist towards disadvantaged people, because the disadvantaged people are white. When this happens i'm not sure how you can see this as a good thing. By assuming every white person has "privilege" to be taken away you are committing racism against individual human beings with complex lives and life experience. Basically, stop! You can fight racism without devolving into racism yourself. I still remember the MLK era speeches about how fighting racism with more racism was unacceptable, we are all human beings with individual humanity, not our skin colors. Not sure what happened that so many people lost the plot.