That's not even playing dumb here, that's downright trolling.
Expected more from a previous mod. Shouldn't have.
Is it trolling? It seems to be an accurate assessment of your statement. In a discussion about a policy that primarily increases enrollment of blacks, hispanics, and natives in college you made a comparison that it is "a bit like" increasing incarceration of non-black people to match the incarceration rate of black people, as though going to college and being imprisoned are even remotely similar concepts.
You want more people in college, not less. You want less people in prison, not more. In both scenarios there is a racial disparity: less discriminated-against demographics in college, more discriminated-against demographics in prison. The simplistic solutions to both are opposites of each other: more discriminated-against people in college, less discriminated-against people in prison. Your "a bit like" analogy fails because your comparison is an opposite even if we were to take the comparison in good faith (and not a weird equating of college enrollment vs. incarceration).
What are you saying if not that? If you find my question leading, then you might consider rephrasing.
I don't really see where you saw I advocated for services "for demographics that are discriminated due to race". Because my point was the opposite : ignore race, redistribute wealth. You can't measure race (unless you become racist and then the whole "fighting racism" becomes meaningless), but you can measure income. Helps those who ACTUALLY NEED IT, instead of helping those you consider being part of a selected "race". It's less racist, it's more efficient, and, incidentally, it's more just (isn't that the core point ? Being "more just" ? Because I mean, if we don't care about justice, why should we care about racism and "races" being disadvantaged after all ?).
This is based on a fairy tale, though. Even accounting for wealth, demographics targeted by affirmative action are still at a disadvantage compared to (primarily) whites. A poor white man and a poor black man are both poor, yet the black man will face harsher odds statistically. On average, demographics targeted by affirmative action are also less well off than those that aren't. That's pretty much why affirmative action exists. It's not some arbitrary blessing from the heavens for a random skin colour.
Released last year, a study
confirms that race matters when looking at income and financial mobility within the US.
Additional academic work:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/race_paper.pdf | Bite-sized presentation:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-poli...arceration-income-chetty-hendren-jones-porter
Just about any "focus on the income!" idea will inevitably impact discriminated-against populations most if the goal is correcting racial disparity. Which is great, but a lot of these initiatives would require specific focus on those demographics, thereby defeating the intent behind your "focus on the income!" idea (i.e. that positive discrimination is bad and affirmative action is bad).
Your idea, by the way, has already been addressed:
https://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/reardon_white_paper.pdf
The results of our simulations suggest at least three important patterns: (a) even relatively aggressive SES-based affirmative action policies do not mimic the effects of race-based policies on racial diversity; likewise race-based affirmative action policies do not mimic the effects of SES-based policies on SES diversity; (b) there is little evidence of any systemic mismatch induced by affirmative action policies; students who benefit from affirmative action are not, on average, admitted to colleges for which they are under-qualified; and (c) the use of affirmative action policies by some colleges affects enrollment patterns in other colleges as well. Kahlenberg (1996) has argued that “class-based preferences provide a constitutional way to achieve greater racial and ethnic diversity” (p. 1064).
Yet, based on our simulations, SES-based affirmative action policies do not seem likely to be effective at producing racial diversity. The SES-based affirmative action policies we simulated are fairly aggressive in terms of the weight they give to SES, and they had large effects on socioeconomic diversity, so their failure to produce substantial increases in racial diversity at elite colleges is not a result of tepid implementation. These results are consistent with Sander (1997), who found that SES-based affirmative action at the UCLA law school did not produce the levels of diversity achieved under race-based affirmative action policies.
[...]
Until racial disparities in educational preparation are eliminated, then, other strategies are needed. Our analysis here suggests that affirmative action policies based on socioeconomic status are unlikely to achieve meaningful increases in racial diversity. That is not to say that socioeconomic affirmative action would not be valuable in its own right—it would increase socioeconomic diversity on university campuses and would benefit low-income college applicants—but only that it is not an effective or efficient means to achieving racial diversity. Race-conscious affirmative action does, however, increase racial diversity effectively at the schools that use it. Although imperfect, it may be the best strategy we currently have.
