I'm a frequent reader and commenter on Matt Yglesias's blog over at ThinkProgress. His readers seem to span demographics and view points and I often find myself learning just as much from them as from Matt.
Today he wrote on Sonya Sotomayor the most talked about judge in the country right now. Why? Sonya is seen as the front runner to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. Apparently Sotomayor, who is Hispanic, had a controversial decision in the lower courts regarding affirmative action that may prove detrimental.
Now I'm no flaming proponent of affirmative action but what I learned from Matt's commenters today is that the term affirmative action means something different to different people. For me, aa is a way to ensure that qualified individuals aren't screwed over by the ole boys club.
Exhibit A:
Jamal scores a 1550 on his SAT and applies to the Ivies. Having no rich family or legacy connections to help him out he applies to the ivies through the normal process and quickly has his application heaped into a pile with academically qualified individuals. Jim, whose father is an i-banker and whose family has a generational relationship with the ivies, scored a respectable but hardly outstanding 1130. In a world without aa Jim gets the spot. In a world with aa the spot goes to Jamal, wealth be darned. To me this is a good thing.
Now, the benefit of talking with other people comes in that I get to clearly understand how they view aa and we can reconcile any long standing discrepancies between us and potentially broader groups that we may represent. For instance in talking with one of the commenters it became clear that his interpretation of aa would be when Jamal scores a 780 but his allowed in solely based on his race. What's even better is that regardless of the definition, we were both able to agree that in my scenario the spot should go to Jamal and that in his scenario it shouldn't. This would have never happened had we just clung to our individual notions of what we thought aa was. So for all of my readers let me clear on my interpretation.
What AA is: A construct that ensures objectively qualified individuals are allowed to compete for spots, historically not allowed to their demographic.
What AA isn't: A fake construct that promotes lowering some fake bar in favor of fake attempts at fake equality.
