The thing that's difficult for me, as a logically minded person, is that it's not really provable at all. I keep thinking of it as: we only see one face of the moon, right? Before we had satellites and spaceships to go behind the moon, we could only speculate what was on the other side.
Privilege feels like that, to me. I can only stand on one side of the coin. There is no possible way I can actually stand on the other side, to see things from the point of view of a woman, person of color, etc. No matter what I do. The best I can hope to achieve is someone telling me what they see, and even then...
Quotas and affirmative action: I used to be entirely against them. Then I started trying to picture it like this: in a perfect world, all people are equal, have equal opportunity, and are never subject to discrimination. In that perfect world, it makes sense that the number of people doing various jobs, working at various companies, etc, would approximate the makeup of the world. I agree with this statement.
Yet, in the world that we have, we end up with a situation that is nowhere - nowhere! - near that arguably perfect world. All I have to do is look around every technology company I've worked at to realize that something is terribly wrong. To me, quotas is a way of saying, "we know that in a perfect world, things would look like X. we know that we do not live in a perfect world. we also know that the problem is too large to be solved with one change, one system, one program. therefore, we will do what we can, where we can, to try to create the world we see as perfect."
Quotas don't fix the problem, no. But they put pressure on various parts of the machine. It's an incentive. If Bill Gates were to create a scholarship program saying that 19 year old people who dropped out of High School, got their GED, and worked at McDonald's for a year got a free ride to WVU, I can promise you that within a year or two, there'd be a bunch of people who fit that exact description at WVU. While that particular example is contrived, in the case of quotas, it's not contrived at all.
Now, my personal jury is still out on whether or not the pressure it puts on the system actually will translate into positive change overall. But there you have it, maybe it makes a little more sense now.
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Date: 2009-06-30 05:31 am (UTC)Privilege feels like that, to me. I can only stand on one side of the coin. There is no possible way I can actually stand on the other side, to see things from the point of view of a woman, person of color, etc. No matter what I do. The best I can hope to achieve is someone telling me what they see, and even then...
Quotas and affirmative action: I used to be entirely against them. Then I started trying to picture it like this: in a perfect world, all people are equal, have equal opportunity, and are never subject to discrimination. In that perfect world, it makes sense that the number of people doing various jobs, working at various companies, etc, would approximate the makeup of the world. I agree with this statement.
Yet, in the world that we have, we end up with a situation that is nowhere - nowhere! - near that arguably perfect world. All I have to do is look around every technology company I've worked at to realize that something is terribly wrong. To me, quotas is a way of saying, "we know that in a perfect world, things would look like X. we know that we do not live in a perfect world. we also know that the problem is too large to be solved with one change, one system, one program. therefore, we will do what we can, where we can, to try to create the world we see as perfect."
Quotas don't fix the problem, no. But they put pressure on various parts of the machine. It's an incentive. If Bill Gates were to create a scholarship program saying that 19 year old people who dropped out of High School, got their GED, and worked at McDonald's for a year got a free ride to WVU, I can promise you that within a year or two, there'd be a bunch of people who fit that exact description at WVU. While that particular example is contrived, in the case of quotas, it's not contrived at all.
Now, my personal jury is still out on whether or not the pressure it puts on the system actually will translate into positive change overall. But there you have it, maybe it makes a little more sense now.