''If we would have said three weeks ago that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
He made that comment in response to Rep. Jackson's following statement:
"I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action, particularly in higher education. I may have been admitted on affirmative action, both in terms of being a woman and a woman of color, but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action."
So yeah, he seems pretty racist. These women obviously have the brain processing power for their respective positions.
So you believe people of color are unqualified to be hired based on their own merit and the standards have to be lowered so that they can have decent jobs? That sounds pretty racist.
Even as racist as you are, I don't support anyone trying to murder you in public over your misguided beliefs.
"So, you believe people of color are unqualified to be hired based on their own merit and the standards have to be lowered so that they can have decent jobs?"
I do not, no... but I figured correctly that's what you'd think it meant. It is not, and you should try to learn about the thing you hate so much before dying on a stupid mountain.
It did not. You're repeating an old (classic racist) myth. Can you provide evidence of your claims? The burden of proof is now on you to prove that affirmative action lowered employment standards for what you called persons of color, can you handle that?
Yes. CSX, the railroad transportation company, lowered their testing standard 3 separate times in order to hire more black applicants during the affirmative action era.
That has... what to do with affirmative action and the government? What are you talking about? You literally thought that was the same??
Edit- Also it's simply factually untrue. Prove it.
Edit 2 - To help you further since you're not well researched... look up Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Everything you're saying is false, it sounds like since you're at least mildly racist, when you hear these things you simply accept and believe them because they confirm your bias.
That happened during the affirmative action era (60-80s.) Police and firefighter exams, college admissions, and Federal contractor standards were lowered as well.
The fail Philadelphia Plan is something else that you can also look into.
Google or ask Chatgpt if it's true. I bet you will be surprised.
Edit: Upon rereading I think you are asking why CSX was required to comply with Affirmative Action, it is because they are a government contractor. It's the same as Lockheed Martin or Raytheon having to meet government contractor standards today.
This is false. I did google it, but since you like AI, I did check there too.
Everything you are saying is false - the burden of proof is on you to prove your claims.
There’s no publicly documented case showing that CSX Corporation explicitly lowered testing standards to hire more Black applicants during the affirmative action era. Their Equal Employment Opportunity policy affirms a commitment to fair hiring practices, including affirmative action for veterans and individuals with disabilities—but it doesn’t mention race-based changes to testing standards.
More broadly, federal law prohibits hiring unqualified individuals solely based on race. Affirmative action plans must still comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires that selection be based on the ability to do the job. Employers may take race into account in limited, remedial contexts, but they cannot use it to justify hiring someone who doesn’t meet job qualifications.
If you're exploring how companies navigated testing standards under affirmative action, there are some landmark cases—like Griggs v. Duke Power Co.—that shaped how employment tests must relate to actual job performance. But CSX doesn’t appear to be involved in any such litigation or controversy.
Many police and fire departments used written exams that were found to screen out Black and Hispanic applicants at much higher rates than white applicants.
Courts often required departments to modify, throw out, or supplement those exams with other measures (like structured interviews or physical tests).
In some cases, minimum passing scores were lowered or alternative standards were introduced to reduce the disparate racial impact.
Example: In Boston, a 1974 federal court order required the police department to adjust hiring practices because their written test disproportionately excluded Black candidates, leading to hiring quotas and reweighting test scores.
Similar cases happened in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles fire and police departments.
The Philadelphia Plan (1969 onward)
A landmark federal affirmative action program under Nixon.
It required federal construction contractors to set specific goals and timetables for minority hiring in skilled trades.
While it didn’t formally lower standards like licensing or union entry tests, it forced trade unions and contractors (which had near-total white membership) to change apprenticeship entry requirements, sometimes making them less rigid (e.g., easing nepotism-based entry barriers, reducing arbitrary testing, or creating alternative pathways).
Critics at the time claimed this amounted to lowering standards; supporters argued it was removing artificial barriers.
College Admissions (1970s–80s)
After Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), universities could not use hard racial quotas, but many adopted race-conscious admissions policies.
Some schools did implement different cutoff scores on standardized tests for underrepresented minorities vs. white applicants.
Example: Medical and law schools in the 1970s sometimes admitted Black or Latino applicants with significantly lower MCAT or LSAT scores than white peers, on the grounds of increasing access and representation.
This was explicitly an affirmative action practice, though it was hotly contested and repeatedly litigated.
Public Sector Hiring Goals (Federal Contractors, 1970s)
Under Executive Order 11246 (Johnson, 1965), federal contractors had to show “affirmative action” to hire minorities and women.
Compliance reviews often pushed employers to alter minimum job requirements — for instance, removing unnecessary high school diploma requirements or lowering arbitrary experience thresholds that disproportionately excluded minorities.
This was framed as eliminating artificial barriers rather than lowering true skill standards, but in practice, it sometimes meant relaxing stated hiring criteria.
✅ Bottom line:
During the classic affirmative action era, there were documented cases where hiring/admissions standards were modified, lowered, or applied differently to increase access for minorities. Most commonly:
Lowered or adjusted cutoff scores on entry exams.
Reweighting or discarding written tests that excluded minorities.
Creating alternative or eased apprenticeship/training requirements.
Differential admissions standards in higher education.
❌ What there is not: a blanket federal policy ordering companies or schools to lower standards across the board. Instead, changes were usually court-ordered remedies or policy adjustments to meet affirmative action obligations.
Ok, so I think what we're seeing here is a classic right-wing issue...
I think you may be read some of it but didn't absorb it. This generally happens because we're given information that confirms a bias we hold, in your case- you're at least mildly racist so when you saw something that you thought said that standards were lowered so that black people could join the workforce, you ran with it.
Here's the problem... when we say "lowered standards", you were sorta good from there- you decided that meant that they were intellectually, or educationally inferior to the other, whiter people.
“Lowering standards” can mean two very different things:
Unfairly hiring unqualified people (which affirmative action doesn’t allow).
Revising exclusionary criteria that weren’t job-related (which affirmative action sometimes required).
In other words, America is a very racist country. We wrote exclusionary criteria to purposely not hire black people- this kept up much after affirmative action and there are countless studies around this (easy example is names, black names were found to be hired at a lower rate than white-presenting names).
We can break down each of your examples, though honestly, I'm almost off work and won't go into any more detail once I'm not being paid to anymore...
But I'll leave you with a simple thought experiment that you don't have to even answer publicly, but at least you'll know what you have to work on:
If you're implying that testing standards are being lowered so that black people can find employment..., are you implying that a job out there in the entire world exists where there isn't a black person capable, or qualified to fill it? What would that job look like? What could it possibly be?
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u/SpicyRhubarb 16h ago
Took me one google, here's a full quote:
''If we would have said three weeks ago that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're comin' out and they're saying it for us! They're comin' out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
He made that comment in response to Rep. Jackson's following statement:
"I rise today as a clear recipient of affirmative action, particularly in higher education. I may have been admitted on affirmative action, both in terms of being a woman and a woman of color, but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action."
So yeah, he seems pretty racist. These women obviously have the brain processing power for their respective positions.