People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise iden… - Coleman Hughes

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People have long defended affirmative action by saying 'It's really just a thumb on the scale. It's used only as a tie-breaker between otherwise identical candidates.' I've always known that that's just a lie or just uninformed by the people who say it. But it does betray a sense that even defenders of the policy are a little bit unconfortable defending the reality of it; they would wish it to be more of a thumb-on-the-scale thing but it's not. And we've had research that's shown that for several decades actually. Thomas Espenshade found it was the equivalent of 450 SAT points for an Asian student relative to a black student, everything else held equal.

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About Coleman Hughes

Coleman Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Coleman Cruz Hughes
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Additional quotes by Coleman Hughes

The way that I think about wars in general is not just in terms of the actions of the armies, but in terms of what kind of society they're trying to build. [...] I think you can go through every single war in history, be right about who the good guys were, and find war crimes done by the good guys. A hundred percent with no exceptions. If the crux of talking about [the Israel-Gaza conflict] is to get at who is on the right side of the conflict, you're having the wrong conversation. The right conversation is what are the aims of each side, what are they trying to do, what are they trying to build.

There are videos of white people, getting killed by the cops, with their hands up begging for their lives every bit as brutal and terrifying and awful as the videos we've seen. At all the Black Lives Matter protests there's this thing, they always say 'Say their name!' [...] There are so many white names. There are in fact, in absolute terms, there are more white names than there are black names. And I've spent some time looking at them and they're identical. The case is for every black person killed by the police there are usually two or three white people that died exactly the same way. Nobody says their names and nobody cares. That seems to people like the correct moral bias because we're imprinted with the symbolism of the civil rights movement, but we have to outgrow this if we're going to be a cohesive country going into the 21st century which is a very different reality than where we're coming from.

[In 2018, Donald Trump passed] a bipartisan bill, that includes every progressive criminal justice reform that people on the far left have been calling for since 2007, called the First Step Act. He releases a couple of thousand inmates from federal prison, reduces sentences for a couple of thousand more. The majority of these people are black. It shifts the focus from punishment to rehabilitation. It's just everything that you wouldn't expect a sort of law-and-order politician like Trump to do. And of course he got no credit for it because it was too awkward and surprising to admit that he did something like that. But that was exactly the kind of progress that if it had come after a riot, people would have seen it as proof that riots work. But because it just came out of the blue, in the middle of Trump's first term, people just didn't even pay attention to it. My point here being that progress is happening all the time it's not that it needs riots to happen, it's that all the people that are justifying the riots are not paying attention when the progress is happening.

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