WHY ARE WE SCREAMING?

What is merit? How do you measure it?

An issue is that lower income areas often have less focus on things like test taking skills, so genuine ability is really hard to distinguish from test taking practice.

Also, schools in lower income areas often aren’t nearly as good, forcing a cycle of poverty since they can’t get into college very easily at all.

Better yet, expand universities and allow everybody in.

Do achievements under tougher conditions not have merit?

Agreed.

And we should give extra points to people who grew up in disadvantaged situations but still had decent grades. A ‘C’ in AP History by someone working a job in high school, is just as good as someone who got an ‘A’ And didn’t have to work.

Merit isn’t just a good GPA. It takes into account all of the things that made it some more difficult for a person. Getting a decent score on an SAT exam when you went to a shit school, should be able to get you into a good college. But the reality is someone who lived in a zip code with better schools is more likely to get into that college purely by where they grew up. And you tend to grow up in a good neighborhood if you’re parents were well off or had a degree themselves.

Purely looking at grades and scores is bad. Unfortunately, people of color tend (not always) be from worse neighborhoods. They tend to have a lot of disadvantages when it comes to getting good grades and good scores. Affirmative action is/was supposed to break the cycle. It’s supposed to help give a little more merit to the situations surrounding grades Ultimately, it’s supposed to diversify the nicer neighborhoods.

Meanwhile a neighborhood over, the kids don’t need scholarships.

Both scenarios breed resentment.

We need better answers, like… free public education, better schools, tutoring supplements for those who ask (including high acheivers), and it needs to go through uni and trades.

We can’t keep having people left behind because of structural issues. Poor decisions happen and it’s nice to soften blows where we can. But if a person commits no errors and ends up paycheck to paycheck for the rest of their life… that’s a failed society.

We need to transcend the “they get x and we don’t” part of this and get onto the real thing.

What’s the differing factor between them?

Obviously if you paint this hypothetical situation as between two identical parties it’ll look silly. What do you think would differentiate the two enough to warrant a scholarship difference?

I’m pretty far left, and even I felt resentment as a first-generation college grad from a lower middle class background that had to go into massive debt for law school. A friend of mine had Pilipino and black parents that were college educated and quite well off, but she had a free ride to law school because of her skin color instead of her grades, despite having far less financial need than I did. There’s no reason a poor white yokel and a poor black kid, both of whom have substantial structural and cultural barriers keeping them from accessing higher education, should be treated differently. I am not denying history, or saying that systemic racism isn’t a thing, but history and systemic racism shouldn’t be justifications for furthering inequality.

You’re missing the larger point. It isn’t about individuals.

If your parents and grandparents were from an ethnic/social/other group that did not have access to resources, then there’s less chance that you grow up in a household that values education or have resources like food, time with parents and caring adults, emotional support and, financial security and so on. These affect your academic success irrespective of how talented or smart you might be.

Providing better access to higher education for people from such groups is a way to make sure that their children don’t grow up in the same environment and the problem is solved over generations.

Such measures of equity are always stop gap measures to address problems until you find grass root level solutions. Right now say protected groups might be first Nations or African Americans. In the future that might change to immigrants from Ukraine or Honduras.

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Because money doesn’t cover the whole issue. Two people starting at the same economic point, one is statistically more likely to have downward economic mobility compared to the other based on race. There are people in our society actively being held back.

Tree is the situation, that is benefiting one person more than other.

Equality means you provide equal help to all and expect them to be equally benefitted. Sometimes that doesn’t work.

Perfect example would be a Spaniard and Frenchman learning a new language, say Italian. This would be easy for a Spanish person because Italian is similar to Spanish. Not so much for French. Providing them both with 10 hours of language classes will be equality but results won’t be equal.

Myriad factors, many of which are out of their control. The illustration could have added fences and other barriers, but that would have sacrificed clarity for unnecessary accuracy.

The tree is a metaphor. In reality it could be job market, one being man and other a woman applying for jobs that traditionally want/prefer men to work.

Or any number of things.

I don’t know. What stops you from living in any house you want?

The image needs better ideas. Maybe make the right kid has broken legs so that kid could not freely move to the correct spot

I did consider no tools on both sides to be equal tools.

only if both people have the same starting point, but they don’t (in the illustration they don’t because the tree gives more fruit on one side, in reality this translates in to privilege, or lack thereof - a white person has more “fruit” and “tools” available to them than a Black person. An abled person has more “fruit” and “tools” available to them than a disabled person, and so on).

The exact same circumstances that punish the one kid in the first panel still punish them in the second. If anything they are worse off in comparison since the additional provided tools don’t serve any purpose for them but do help the other kid.

That’s the point - merely providing superficial assistance or tools or whatever, without changing the core of the problem (here - the fact that the tree leans only to one side) doesn’t solve anything.

So providing a ramp to a building might help wheelchair users (but probably not a Blind or Deaf person for example) very superficially to access that one building, but it doesn’t change all the other inaccessible buildings, or the accessibility issues faced by the Blind or Deaf person (or whatever other disability that doesn’t require the use of a wheelchair), nor the system that sees disabled people as reasonable to exclude because we take “too much” work to cater to (which is a core and very real example of systemic ableism).

Edit just to add: the one main flaw I find with this illustration vs the one with the boxes (here is my personal favourite example), where the obstacle is man made, is that the tree, ie the system, is made to look natural, when in reality it is anything but.
Capitalism (the core system that is the tree, and it’s branches are racism, sexism, ableism, queerphobias and so on) has done a fantastic job convincing society of the lie that humans are naturally greedy and selfish, and of “social Darwinism” and all that eugenicist crap, when in reality humans are hardwired to work together.

Yep, so the point (I think) is to get you to contrast equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome. It’s not hugely clear in the images, there are a few things that need to be assumed to make it clearer.

Firstly the goal is not 1 fruit, the goal is to have a many fruit as you need. For some reason these 2 kids both need a lot of fruit. Maybe they have huge seeds and 1 won’t sustain a small child, I don’t know.

Secondly, the tree in the first panel has fewer fruit to drop on one side, and it leans towards one person only. This is trying to communicate that they don’t have equality of opportunity on a systemic level. Both children have 1 significant barrier (height), but 1 child has an additional barrier of fewer fruit possible, and their height barrier is twice as tall. There is also an invisible forcefield preventing movement of children from one side of the tree to the other.

So in the first panel, yes it is unequal because one kid gets nothing and the other gets something, which is an inequality of outcome. The difference in tree lean and number of fruit provides an inequality of opportunity - which is often harder to see in real life too.

The second panel asks the question “what if we gave them equal assistance?” by providing equal ladders. Which is great, but if the assistance provided is only enough to help one child overcome the problem they both face while ignoring the other 2 problems the other child faces, you won’t have equality of outcome. And it can even cause greater inequality of outcome, because the left kid can reach a dozen fruit but the right kid can still only reach a few. For magic forcefield reasons.

The third panel is different to the second, because they’re no longer only being provided equal assistance. They’re both being provided assistance equal to their needs, but the kid on the right still has fewer opportunities because there are fewer fruit. They have more equal possible outcomes, but it’s still unlikely to be an equal outcome even though you’re (sort of) helping one kid twice as much.

And in the last panel, for some reason trees that are straight provide equal quantities of fruit on both sides? Whatever, the point us that the underlying systemic inequity has been addressed and you have proper equality of opportunity and potential for equality of outcome.

Sorry about length, I hope that reply doesn’t cause more confusion.

Some of it IS intentional, though, or (as in your own example) lack of intentionality from another time with a lot less attention being paid to equal access for people outside of the “standard human” powerful people had in mind when building structures both physical and societal.

There being a default at all is a form of discrimination and harm against the people that it disadvantages, whether or not it’s intentional.

Even if the inequality is completely accidental, shouldn’t we do something about it? Like, we don’t have to make everyone millionares, but if the system accidently makes some people suffer, shouldn’t we try to change that?

No. “Except for the basics of the system itself” is implied.

Do you know what an analogy is?

The OP comment did not criticize the comic for being too simple. He called it misleading. You’re both arguing with a strawman.

Someone disagreeing with something doesn’t mean they didn’t understand it. It’s a really poisonous mindset that hampers intellectual discourse and development.