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Summary Of Why America Is Self-Segregating By Danah Boyd

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“Why America is Self-Segregating,” is an essay written by Danah Boyd that reveals a thesis as to why America is a self-segregating society. Boyd sees technology as a tool that was supposed to create connections among people, but rather it is polarizing differences between them. Although I agree with the author that America is self-segregating, I do not accept that technology is the main culprit. By focusing on technology as the main cause of self-segregation, Danah overlooks the deeper problem of government and segregation. It is my belief that the government is the elephant in the room. Governmental policies have created and enforced actions that move society toward diversification, and now the long experiment of forced diversity has failed. …show more content…

I disagree since all the institutions discussed in her essay are regulated, mandated, licensed, taxed and follow the polices enforced by the government. Government intervention reduces choice, it picks winners and losers, and eventually erodes capitalist markets. Ultimately, this interventionism leads to division and self-segregation in a society. For example, in his article “Manufacturing Race Conflict,” Walter Williams maintains that the government is the cause of such division by claiming that, “We have chosen to play what amounts to a zero-sum game in the public policy arena.” He further clarifies his statement by continuing with, “The reason government allocation amounts to a zero-sum game is because government does not possess any resources of its very own.” The government does not create any value or resources for society, yet it has the power to dictate which groups of people get them. This zero-sum allocation means someone makes gains on the behalf of someone's loss. We see zero-sum allocation in crop subsidies, bailouts, food stamps and welfare where the government picks the winners (Williams …show more content…

Race preferences in college admissions are mandated by the government. Certain race quotes must be met, or federal funding is reduced. The trend of government mandated quotas does not end there. We now are starting to see forced diversity quota hires/admissions with LGBT persons. In Canada compelled speech is forcibly enforced, so that one must call people by their preferred pronouns, even if they are biologically incorrect. I agree with Walter Williams on the importance of this issue when he writes, “Regardless of their chosen strategy, one can safely predict that they will organize themselves on the basis of that "less-preferred" characteristic, whether it is race, religion, language or region. It is precisely this form of human organization that has given rise to history's most brutal and tragic episodes.” Williams' point is that if the government's allocation of resources is given to selected groups, then these groups gain over the non-selected groups. This will cause division and self-segregation among a society, which always leads to

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Though in Grutter v. Bollinger we deal with the 14th amendment of the Equal Protection Clause and racial classifications too, the way race is used is slightly differs. In this particular case, the court had to decide whether the use of race at the Univeristy of Michigan Law School during the admissions process violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. Barbara Grutter, a Caucasian applicant, applied to the University of Michigan in 1996 with a 3.8 GPA and a score of 161 on her LSAT. Grutter was placed on the waitlist, but was subsequently denied admission to the school. Grutter claims that she was only denied because of her race, as the University uses race as a factor in the admission process.

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n the Supreme Court case University of California v. Bakke in 1978, Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was denied admission to the University of California, Davis Medical School because he was white, although he had great MCAT, GPA, and test scores he was denied twice, because the school was using “racial quotas” during admission and had “reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians"’’("Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. " West's Encyclopedia). Bakke sued the University of California for using “racial quotas” as well as claiming that the schools admission processes was a violation of “Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth

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In “Net (Race) Neutral: An Essay on How GPA + (reweighted) SAT - Race = Diversity,” Christine Goodman illustrates the opposing viewpoints in regards to the racial discriminatory efforts by the college institutions to help diversify the incoming freshman class. With this, Goodman provides statistics and opinions of experts on the matter, which includes comparison of such discriminatory acts against other institutions. To begin, she brings up an enlightening, yet controversial court case decision: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2013). This court case demonstrates significance to this topic because it counteracts a previous court case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which, “upheld diversity as a compelling interest that would justify narrowly

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The main precedent that has stuck with the court from Bakke to now Fisher is that a diverse student body is a compelling enough interest for a university to pursue. This goal is to be carried out in a narrowly tailored manner which the court has accepted as a race-conscious admissions program. The program is deemed constitutional on the basis that it only uses race as a plus factor in the admissions process. These programs, however, run in stark contrast to the provisions set forth in the Equal Protection Clause; in which the state is not allowed to treat individuals differently based on the category of race. The race-conscious admissions program albeit better than a pure quota system still uses race as a crucial factor.

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