Affirmative Action should be abolished

Thanks tajshar2k. I don't have a lot of time so I have to keep this short.Observation:The definition I provided was warranted by the definitions that we agreed to in the beginning of the debate. You're shifting the goalposts by changing the definition, which I was afraid that you'd do, so I put this observation up front. The definition that we agreed to outweighs your other one since it's required for intellectual discourse.Contention 1.Pro says that we can learn about the world by being hidden from its complexities and its people; shrouded in the darkness of our own cave and not trying to understand that there exist other people just because we have textbooks that say what we want them to say. Pro says that we can learn about people by reading textbooks that reinforce our own view of the world and our own revision of the maps that we have of reality, through the guise of "education" and "studies of the world". This isn't true- in order to revise your map, you need to actually meet and compare maps with one another. Having a summation by someone who has the same map as you of another person's map isn't going to revise yours - it's going to make you think that your way of thinking is the only right way, as Zerubavel says in my citation.Learning about people themselves is secondary, I agree. But that's not what my point was; learning about the world, Reality, and Truth should be up front and the main focus of our lives, because that's what is inherently human; making meaning of the world and trying to assess it. That's why we have physicists, astronomers, philosophers; they are all trying to assess the nature of Reality. Having people that have a different map than us trying to assess the same things may lead to different outcomes that appear more True than the ones that we have; and this is necessary to flourish.Learning about the nature of Truth outweighs a lost job of two different people that are only differentiated by their discrimination level (not test scores, etc), because that is what is inherently human; getting a job in front of someone that is discriminated against at large is not the purpose of humanity. It is the purpose of the continuation of our culture and ethnocentristic properties; not the purpose of US.Further, pro argues that people of different cultures don't need AA to be accepted, as shown by Asian Americans. But there seems to be a problem here; in R2 he says that many Asian Americans are not able to get into the workforce because of higher "AA" (not really AA) guidelines. This means that there should be less of them in the workplace because of the higher guidelines, but he is arguing that there are actually more of them in the workforce. This is a contradiction, and thus we must say that he concedes that this isn't true.The crux of my argument wasn't that there exists a white vs. minority dichotomy in culture, or that no minorities get into the workplace at all. The crux of my argument is that we need to actually confirm our maps of Reality with others in order to have humanity; confirming our maps with those that are the same as us doesn't actually revise our maps, just reinforces the notion that our maps ARE Reality. This is not what the search for Truth is about; this is what the perpetration of ethnocentrism is.Contention 2.You seem to have missed the point. My argument was that AA did help and can continue to help millions of people get into the workplace; that was just 20 years ago and as we all know, there still exists discrimination against women in the workplace (the ol' 77 cents to a man's dollar ring a bell?). This means that it has helped women immensely, in turn helping the economy, because women were highly disadvantaged in the workplace; now, they are still disadvantaged and this can still help them.The point of my argument isn't that in this year we will have 6 million new women go into the workplace and everything will be fine. The point was that AA has and will continue to help people, because it is still necessary, and that it can help the economy at large.Contention 3.You again misunderstand what AA is actually about. There doesn't exist a dichotomy of all minorities vs. integrated (majorities and minorities) in education; what there does exist is a disadvantagement for minorities that do want to get into the school system. That means that we can only actually ensure that people will get into college, if they are a minority, if we allow AA. Let me explain it like this: P1. Being disadvantaged means that you are not as likely to get into a workplace based on your discriminated status. P2. Affirmative action lets those that are disadvantaged in the workplace to get into it by rewarding hard work. C1. Affirmative action ensures that those discriminated against get into the workplace. You haven't shown that minorities in general get into colleges exceptionally well; that is a misrepresentation of your actual arguments. All that you have said is that Asian Americans are being discriminated against and they are getting into the workplace; as I said in my argument, there is a sharp decline in the amount of black students when AA was taken away. That's not minorities doing exceptionally well; that is them failing because of their race and discrimination.In my second subpoint, I say that UC Berkeley and UCLA had a decline in the amount of minority students when they took away AA. You say that this is baseless because there is no direct correlation that this was the decline. But, that's exactly what correlation is; when one number goes down so does another one. Your only objection is that there is no correlation, but there is; the thing you should have advocated for is that there is no causation. But you didn't, so I don't need to cite the countless studies that say that a lack of AA causes less minorities getting into university. Just because you disagree with the patterns of a study doesn't mean that the study is baseless. That's ignorance.I know there isn't a law banning black people from University. That's not what my argument was about. It was that AA ensures that minorities CAN get an education if they work hard enough; without AA, they cannot get into University even though they have the same amount of work.I don't think you have understood the larger picture of any of my arguments. That's fine, but instead of calling them baseless in order to maybe win points in an online discourse debate website, I think that you need to step back and think about what these arguments actually mean. Anyways, I really did appreciate this debate. I learned that I am more in favor of AA than I was before; this started as a devil's advocate debate and now I am persuaded that AA is beneficial. Thank you.