Unlike applicants whose identities have been affected mainly by their socioeconomic or geographic circumstances, applicants whose formative experiences relate to race or ethnicity would be denied the opportunity to convey their full, authentic selves when competing for admission to selective schools like Amici.
And so we guarantee that millions of Americans will have a formative experience that THEIR race (various Asian groups) are allowed to be discriminated against. Instead of being rewarded if they follow every rule on how to fit in and succeed.
Let's be clear. The schools are literally fighting to let them continue excluding the grandchildren of people who were put in a camp for being the wrong race (Japanese in WW 2). Separately those same teenagers have to deal with a world where hate crimes against Asians just jumped. Locally in Orange county it is up over 100%.
This is just wrong. And that people who support the policy claim to be for "tolerance" is just hypocrisy.
This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway, it's not a good goal. People are different and they're going to have different outcomes, even if only considering chance. But they should have the same opportunities regardless of race, gender, etc. Making policy to address this is tackling the root of the problem instead of the symptoms.
> This is the danger of focusing on equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity. In my opinion, the former is not possible anyway,
For this statement alone the left can label you as far right. In the past 10 years or so, I repeatedly hear a consistent message: we fight for equal outcome. And of course, identity is a critical factor, if not the only factor, in this fight. I'm actually very curious how the American elites reach this conclusion, and how they reconcile the bloody history of people pursuing equal outcome (or in the name of it).
I always thought of myself as quite left of center. Now I find myself on the right, and I don't understand if I became more conservative as I got older, or if the center moved past me to the left.
The center has not moved as much as the willingness of journalists and news organizations to ignore their duties to provide a truthful and unbiased service to their readers and constituents. Allowing their built-in left-leaning biases to affect their mission has given the impression that the population has shifted left.
The next few elections will possibly shake some of this out. I just hope it doesn’t swing too far the other way.
I largely agree, but here's an attempt at a "steel man" of the opposing point of view:
Unjust discrimination is complex, often subconscious, and deeply rooted in institutional structures and culture. It's too complex and elusive to address directly beyond the obvious removal of explicit regulations (desegregation) and finger wagging. Those things have already been done and yet extreme inequalities persist, so addressing outcome is the only way people can think of to go any deeper.
The problem with this argument is it assumes the differences are due to discrimination, but when we try to measure that we almost can't detect the effect of discrimination because it's so small. The differences are not skin deep like that, but usually have deeper roots. To be clear I'm not saying there are no biases like racism, but that it doesn't seem to be the dominant factor causing differences in outcome. Often the roots are deeper, like higher divorce rates, worse schools, differences in parents' socioeconomic status. Between men and women the salary difference is almost entirely a difference between women with children and men and women without.
it's turtles all the way down. people will simply say the roots of the other problems that cause disparities are discrimination. And if you try to disprove that.. you see where this is going.
It starts at kindergarten and before. Minority children should enter schools where they have a chance, with the resources to take advantage of that chance. But we don't. And here in California, blacks graduating high school on average only read as well as 8th grade blacks.
Attempting to create equality of outcome after that is a lost cause.
I can think of a dozen policies that would be more effective at helping blacks than discriminating against Asians at elite universities. My favorite example is that research says that homework provides little net benefit on average, but specifically hurts children in disadvantaged families where parents themselves lack the skills to help their children understand the material. Therefore dramatically reducing homework will help blacks. (And will also make families with teenagers much less stressful places.)
I wonder why reading Anglo-gibberish is a standard?
Does a bridges proper engineering rely on detailed emotional understanding of Shakespeare?
Human language is only 5,000 years old they say. Leaving human intuition for quantity millions of years to fine tune itself; enough food, enough heat, to prevent biological death.
Nothing about human biology is fueled or relies upon grammatically correct English and everything to do with correct use of mathematical measurement.
Deeply rooted institutional and cultural discrimination can only exist if discriminating behavior is acceptable when it done against the right target. Changing which demographic is permitted to discriminate (and hate) against only changes the smallest amount of variable, which is the opposite strategy of going deeper in the effort to eliminate discrimination.
It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.
When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.
To continue the steel manning, here's a thought experiment:
What if a large percentage of people decided to exclude you from everything for some arbitrary reason. Just you.
People know who you are and pass you up for jobs, promotions, home loans, value your contributions less, etc.
The reasons don't make sense. They're impervious to argument. In some cases people deny that they're doing it, or seem genuinely unaware, but they're doing it just the same.
To you. Only to you.
Nobody is initiating violence. Nobody is actively stealing from you or harming you. They're just boycotting you, excluding you, assuming the worst about you by default...
What would you do? How long would this have to go on for you to turn to violence if nothing else made any difference?
First off, I would define that as violence if it came to an extreme. Imprisoning people is to exclude people from everything, including space to move around. Society in general define that as violence. So following this thought experiment we must then enter the philosophical discussion to define what violence is.
Excluding people from everything in modern society causes harm. Starvation, exposure to the environment, psychological harm, atrophy of muscle and body. Excluding people from health care lead to further harm and eventually death. Taken to the extreme and we got murder.
If a majority of people voted to allow murder and violence then the most likely outcome is a civil war, but if in this thought experiment we are talking about only allowing murder and violence towards a single person, the best strategy would be to flee and seek asylum.
If we however limit this thought experiment to an degree which isn't murder and violence, and within the already set limits that government laws has specified (such as the European law of human rights), then if a large percentage of people decided to exclude me from a limited number of things, the best approach would be to political active to make the law even better while at the same time personally avoiding those people. No violence required. Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent resistance is a good model when laws are unjust and need changing.
But what’s missing from your steelman is why returning to racial discrimination will solve the problems of past racial discrimination — rather than making them worse, by teaching a whole new generation to be racists.
Forget making it worse as the primary concern. I am concerned about fascism emerging as a backlash to anti-White discrimination. People are pissed that their society has turned against them and will abandon democracy to fix the situation.
But people love it when the other side gets “pissed”, even if it’s mostly in their imagination. Social media is almost full of schadenfreude, with no system in place to dampen it. On the contrary, any attempts at understanding the other side is called “defending them” or “weakness”.
To go with your analogy, when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms. I don’t see why you would not attack things from both angles.
To understand that, you really have to go beyond the analogy. I think trying to address differences in outcome by discrimination is morally dubious and potentially could backfire and make things worse.
> when I am sick, I want both the root of the problem dealt with along with the symptoms
Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. The analogy of a cytokine storm taking out healthy cells to drive off infection becomes grim when the "healthy cells" are people.
It's not Asians primarily. They are discriminated against more stiffly, but are far outnumbered in the US by Whites, who also get the thumb placed on the wrong pan of the scale.
The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
>The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
Maybe. I think it's because they are a small population being discriminated against heavily, versus a much larger population being discriminated against mildly. It seems far more egregious in the case of Asians when you look at the disparities in test scores required for admissions to these institutions by race.
Yet Asians earn more than all other ethnic groups, even the “mildly” discriminated whites, and Asians are far from a small population amongst those applying to these schools. This is another reason why picking and choosing admissions by race or even just test scores is nonsense.
Create a minimum criteria to succeed in a program and simply randomly choose the students from that pool is a reasonable solution that avoids much of the discriminatory issues and likely results in a more diverse student body.
Because schools withhold a large percentage of their spots for "legacy students", a White kid who isn't rich or well-connected is less likely to get into these elite schools than an Asian kid with the same grades. Half of the White students at Harvard are legacy students [1] and White students make up 44% of the Harvard student body. 50.9% of Gen Z is White [2], meaning that slightly less than 51% of the population is competing for 22% of the slots. The same numbers for Asian students are 5.3% of Gen Z and 25.9% of the spots at Harvard. Now, the proper numbers to use are probably SAT scores or some other "skill metric", but finding the proper stats to use is difficult since College Board locked them down, and in this case the population stats don't affect the conclusion because while more Asians have high scores as a percentage of their group than Whites do, it is canceled out by the difference in population sizes.
Assuming Affirmative Action is still in place, once the current generation of Asian Ivy League grad's kids start applying for schools, this issue will start to apply to Asian kids as well.
Of the 44% white students, about 20% are ethnically Jewish. [1] Jewish people make up about 2% of the population, leaving even fewer slots, if you take that view.
However, nobody is entitled to a slot in a private university.
Public schools should optimize for equality of opportunity, but private schools should be free to use other measures as long as they dont go against civil rights act. This includes maximizing profit or legacy students.
The focus on Asians is because the group that brought this group is mostly Asian-American. And that is true because, as you admit, Asians are being discriminated against more stiffly.
Now it is necessarily true that if we try to discriminate in favor of some group (eg blacks), we must necessarily give them an advantage over another group (eg whites). But the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites.
But there is NO argument for doing what these universities are doing. To identify racial groups that they want to discriminate against because they are too good. I see no difference between policies to discriminate against Asians today and historical policies to put quotas on how many Jews got accepted. And I doubt that there is much coincidence about which universities engaged in both policies.
"the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites."
Although this is what they claim, it's hard to believe sometimes. Look at the meltdown that accompanied some smart alecs putting up posters that said nothing beyond "It's OK to be white". Wokesters went mad and started tearing them down anywhere the posters were found, implying that in their mind it is actually very much not OK to be white.
Of course, the problem here is that the woke aren't actually using race words to mean the actual skin color. It's all coded speech to hide the true target of their hatred - anyone who isn't as far left as they are. That's why they go nuts when they encounter black conservatives, or why you see white people are perfectly OK criticizing things like "whiteness". They aren't engaging in self criticism there, they've just established a convention amongst their community that "white" is coded speech for conservatives.
Scott Alexander has a great essay that examines this in depth:
> a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
This is an argument put forth in bad faith. The thought - agree or disagree - is white individuals in America have systemic advantages that persist due to historical social practices the manifest across many years of education and just existence in life in America. It's not about "deserving less" but about acknowledging they nudges in their favor many had along the way.
I'm not going to debate the veracity of that thought on a forum, but it's not some sort of punitive belief.
How does acknowledgement of favor manifest if not by punitive discrimination? Is a simple admission of favor sufficient, or must corrective action be taken?
It seems that this is simply the argument for why the punitive belief is just.
I had another response to a now-deleted reply, but I'll put it here. Ultimately, there are policies and practices in place that try to mitigate documented structural disadvantages for underrepresented groups using a counterweight of procedural advantage. There is a debate to be had here (though I won't have it online), but the reality is true fairness and justice cannot occur without an intentional efforts to redress systemic structural unfairness because by it's very nature it won't "just work out eventually" for those affected. At least not on a reasonable timescale.
In other words: in some decision-making settings non-White groups have a procedural weight in their favor to minimally counterbalance the way society has objectively and still measurably disadvantaged them for generations. If you want to call that "punishment" because White people "deserve it" then fine. However, I personally think that's semi-dishonest semantics that may be technically correct in the most literal sense of the word, but is not expressed in a way commensurate with the parlance of our times.
Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics. In a zero-sum competition like hiring or admission, adjusting the criteria to give advantage to one is identical to giving a disadvantage to the other. Any denial of this fact taints the credibility of the speaker.
I fully agree that certain individuals face significant structural disadvantages. I actually think that most people, including those seeking social justice, are blind to many of those structural disadvantages because they find them distasteful to admit, and too adjacent to racist talking points.
If one recognizes that structural advantage exist, as we do, the questions become the appropriate methods and timeline for resolving inequity. This last one is particularly complex, and almost never discussed in any context. The reality is that even in the best case scenario, true equality without a hand on the scale will be a multi-generational project.
Regarding methods, I think it is important to note that while racial groups share many similar experiences, suffering takes place at the individual level, and individual circumstances vary widely. Heavy handed policies that treat all blacks or all whites as equivalent to each other will always have a lot of inherent injustice and collateral damage baked into them. A poor white immigrant from Ukraine is not the same as a rich white bankers son. A rich black immigrant is not the same as poor inner city child with the baggage of 200 years of systemic racism.
When folk talk of procedural advantage based on race, what many people hear is "you are acceptable collateral damage".
I think the more the conversation admits who will suffer and benefit from efforts to reduce inequities of birth, the more honest and productive discussion we can have.
> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.
I think this is a semantic distinction of your own making. I don't deny either exist, phrase it how you want. I said "procedural advantage", you can say "procedural disadvantage" if you must. It's "deserve" and "punishment" I have a problem with.
> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.
Agree. And I believe we owe it to marginalized groups to put our hand on the scale. How hard we press I believe can and should be debated.
I generally agree with the rest of your statement. There is no way to have a perfect system, but that acknowledgement is usually used to justify doing nothing vs. doing something and thus reinforcing (and potentially worsening) the disparities.
I don't think my characterization is "merely rephrasing" what you said. If you believe policies and practices people are trying to disadvantage white people in decision-making because white people "deserve" less, you're wrong.
I think you can debate the morality of helping mitigate structural disadvantages (which I hope you acknowledge exist) that many underrepresented groups face with intentional, procedural advantages for those same groups. I won't do it with you, but I think ignoring structural disadvantages created by a history of racism isn't the solution. I don't know what the solution is.
I really don't understand current progressive ideology. Apart from discrimination against Asians, there is also the whole "Hijab empowers women" nonsense. I come from a part of the world where women have to fight for the right to take off hijab. They are shunned socially for doing so. In worse places, they can be jailed or beaten.
Imagine coming from such a place to America, and seeing here women are wearing that symbol of oppression as a fashion statement. It just boggles the mind. Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.
> Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory.
> Most black men couldn't balance a checkbook / But buy a new car, talkin' 'bout, "How my neck look?" / Well, it all looks great / Four hundred years later, we buyin' our own chains
These leftists (there's nothing progressive in them) are the good old priesthood. They invent dogmas that mock logic to control the crowd, and they do it by fear, but they are keenly aware of the real power - the royalty - so when the roylaty wants something that contradicts the existing dogmas, the priests swiftly invent a new dogma.
In the culture wars, it's all about positioning yourself as being of higher moral standing. If you position yourself as being for the downtrodden, you get higher social status. For historical reasons, this can't be done with poverty any more in the US so the playing field is selected race and gender groups.
> Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.
I would point out that chains are indeed a popular fashion accessory.
I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them. It isn't contradictory to believe that telling people that they must wear something and telling people that they must not wear that thing can BOTH be dis-empowering.
So while I think you should absolutely share your experiences and the feelings you get when you see others wearing a hijab, I absolutely do not think you should push for laws that make it illegal to wear one.
> I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them.
Indeed, it does remove power from them. It is also something which every country, every culture, and every religion has in common. They all put in rules about what people are allowed and not allowed to wear. The support for those are also quite high when people are forced to think about them, but since they are such an omnipresence, it like talking to fish about water.
It is a rare event that I find a person who honestly believe that people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear with neither government, culture or religion being able to overrule that decision.
The ubiquity and normalization of dress codes doesn't mean that they are fair or just. There is both a long history and plenty of contemporary controversy over very unfair dress codes.
When a more powerful group imposes a dress code on a less powerful group, it absolutely behooves us to second guess ourselves.
> people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear
It seems pretty evident that dress and style is a form of self expression is is thus part of our right to free speech, and sometimes also protected by freedom of religion.
Both of those "inalienable rights" are subject to abrogation in specific contexts and so is the right to dress how you like, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fundamental human right.
What is a fair or unfair dress code is determine by culture, religion and governments, which simply create a circle. The culture, religion and political majority determine what dress code is used, and the same one determine if it is fair. Unless the law, culture or religion is lagging behind political majority it will always be a minority that will view a dress code as being unfair.
Similar is the specific contexts which such rules may be broken. Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?
We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?
I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks. Fair? Unfair?
Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception. Fair or unfair?
The list goes on and on. Depending on a person cultural, religious and political views people will think some of those are fair and others not. Very few find all of them unfair and want to give people the right to determine that themselves, which is why finding such person is such a rare event for me. Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.
> What is a fair or unfair dress code is determine by culture, religion and governments, which simply create a circle.
This is BS relativism and you seem to be attempting to dismiss any culpability for cultures that impose unfair dress codes that primarily impact those who aren't making the dress codes and are less power or out groups.
> Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?
I think nudist are often treated unfairly, but there are different degrees to that unfairness in different areas. Other there are still default nudist spots in areas where nudism is legal since there are also community aspects.
I think allowing hijabs in some areas only or banning them in some areas only is less unfair than a blanket ban, but is still unfair unless there are legitimate safety concerns and the laws cover the entire class of headwear.
I would say that laws against nudism seem less targeted at a low power out group than laws against hijabs so seem like a greater abuse of power.
> We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?
I think the company should be legally required to allow/offer uniforms that work in the environmental conditions their employees face. I don't think gender based clothing restrictions are ever fair.
> I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks.
Unfair, unless there are safety concerns.
> Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception.
Unfair unless the rule was motivated by safety.
> Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.
I think there are other legitimate reasons to impose dress codes (safety, reputation, etc.) but what those codes are, how they are targeted and how they impact those effected all matter when it comes to justifying those codes.
I disagree strongly with your accusation. I suspect that you simply don't recognize less power or out groups where I see them.
Take nudist. When did you last time hear about a nudist politician that advocated for nudists rights. Would you disagree that being openly nudist would harm a politician chance of getting elected? That to me is a rather clear definition of a less powerful out group being openly discriminated against.
Similar, male buss drivers are a typical lower class worker group. You don't see many of those becoming politicians. Classism is often said as being the biggest cause for discrimination, especially when in combination with racism which itself can be a proxy for class. This is how companies can get away with dress code that actually cause directly bodily harm (overheating).
Some groups receive more sympathy, and which one those are is based one culture. It the same reason why some religions get more respect than others. A common argument I see when people justify this exceptionalism is when the religion is one of the big ones. Majority religions get more sympathy than minority religions, and the smaller a religion is the less their views get respected.
As an example, Muslim cultural behavior get more respected than practitioners of Wicca, Satanism, Missionary Church of Kopimism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How would you rank those in term of power/out group definition?
You don't understand it because your understanding of it is wrong.
The point isn't that the "hijab empowers women." The point is that a woman should be able to choose for herself whether to wear the hijab or not. Autonomy, and all that.
Telling a Muslim woman she can't wear a hijab is just as oppressive as telling one she must wear it.
Nobody is talking about a ban. I'm talking about there being no backlash in America against hijab in liberal circles. A hijab and a confederate flag are equally symbols of oppression but only one is frowned upon in liberal circles. Why?
Again, you're just arguing at strawmen of your own creation.
A hijab is a religious garment. The confederate flag is a symbol of treason and slavery. Liberals leave it up to the individual to practice their own faith as they wish, so it's not frowned upon any more than a rosary is.
A hijab is not "effective slavery" of women. It is a religious garment that a woman can choose to wear, in America at least.
Unless you're also now telling the Amish and Orthodox Jewish communities how they have to dress? While we're at it, Mormons also have religious dress codes for women. And Hindus.
That is their stated reason, because the only legally acceptable discrimination is for bona fide educational purposes. That is, they cannot discriminate to right historical wrongs, but only because having a diverse student body is part of the education.
I have doubts that this is the real reason, but legally they need to cloak it as that.
I didn't realize college admissions' affirmative action had reached SCOTUS. I wonder what the outcome will be.
Key summary:
> "Today Yale joined peer institutions in stating emphatically that student diversity is essential to the missions of American universities and promotes educational excellence for all students,” President Peter Salovey said. “Our amicus curiae brief makes clear that the way we consider race and ethnicity as part of individualized applicant review is crucial to achieving a richly diverse academic environment that enhances students’ educational experiences and maximizes their future success. Yale stands firm in supporting universities’ established right to compose incoming classes that are diverse along many dimensions and in its commitment to enrolling students from all walks of life."
I wish I had more understanding of the topic. Diversity seems to have two dimensions to it: (1) diversity of thought, (2) diversity of background. Diversity of background would seem to encourage more diversity of thought, which I think is typically desirable, but has this been proven out/quantified? Conversely, governance seems to be a lot harder (i.e. require more authoritarian approaches to get goals accomplished) where there is diversity of thought. Please note I'm not making a normative statement here.
I recently listened to the 5-4 podcast episode "Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1" that covered the 2007 US Supreme Court decision. It discusses using race in public school choice and discusses two different interpretations of the 14th amendment.
"If you take 14th Amendment, or have any sort of class that talks about desegregation in public schools, there are two different ways of thinking about the holding in Brown versus Board of Education. One is that Brown versus Board of Education is an anti-classification case, and the other is that it's an anti-subordination case." [1]
As a member of the public with no background in law, I suspect that this distinction may be what SCOTUS will rule on in these upcoming cases. If you're interested in the topic and enjoy podcasts, I highly recommend this episode.
The Ivy leagues today are anything but diverse in thought, this should be obvious. What actually exists is a repressive liberal orthodoxy, and no dissent is tolerated.
I ought to expand on this since this comment will surely be controversial. I make no comment on which view is right or wrong; but suppose the conservative view were favored, and any disagreement with the ideology got your fired from your job, publicly shamed, made a pariah, etc.? Would you feel comfortable sharing dissenting opinions? There is no open debate, no sense that truer speech will naturally win out over disfavored speech, no sense that people have the right to say and think unorthodox beliefs.
This is pretty far removed from my direct experience with Ivy League alumni and professors (coauthors, colleagues, coworkers). It is a common refrain though. Elements of conservatism are sometimes viewed as being eschewed when they are ideologically based and the evidence doesn't support claims. But this is true generally and a consequence of the academic incentive structure where there are never enough resources to fund.
On the other hand, academic malfeasance does occur (e.g. Alzheimers research in recent decades), so the system is far from perfect, but the risky/rewarding incentive is to absolutely decry the current state as being completely wrong. Consider Nassim Taleb's popularization after the Great Recession as a great example, or earlier Paul Krugman's transaction cost theories.
It is not at all removed from my direct experience. (And I am, in fact, an Ivy League alumnus.)
See https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... for the shocking level of acceptance of Marxist ideas in the social sciences, despite a lack of anything resembling evidence for it. And a tremendous amount of evidence that attempts at implementing Marxism have done insane amounts of damage to the world.
It is evidence that academia doesn't require evidence for left-wing claims. So to the extent that they do that, insisting on evidence from conservatives is discrimination. (I'd prefer that everyone's claims require evidence.)
If the thought in academia which leads to Marxism was actually evidence-based, then it should be easy to cite evidence for Marxism. You'd just have to read what they say and quote their arguments.
But it is not. Evidence for Marxism that I've seen boils down to rhetoric. Evidence against Marxism involves mass famines, low economic productivity, failed predictions, and so on. Therefore a significant fraction of Marxists in academia must support it for reasons other than the evidence.
"Marxism" is a tricky term to use in an discussion because it means such different things to different people. The commonly understood meaning of "Marxism" differs significantly from the socioeconomic theories and models that Marx wrote about.
Even among academics, there are many different schools of Marxist thought.
The evidence against Marx's theories isn't "mass famines, low economic productivity" but his failed predictions of worldwide revolutions.
This may not be fair, but I am going to hazard a guess that you haven't read much of Marx's work and are instead operating off a pop cultural background understanding. That's not a bad thing, that's true of most people. One possible reason for the prevalence of "Marxism" in the social sciences is that I would suspect that they are more likely to have read his work and are probably self identifying as "Marxist" under a pretty different definition of the term than the one used in pop culture.
First, please note that "failed predictions" in my list of arguments against Marxism. My list was, "Evidence against Marxism involves mass famines, low economic productivity, failed predictions, and so on." In other words people who have attempted to apply Marx's theories have created disasters, places which follow his theories do poorly, academics who apply his theories to predicting stuff, get it wrong, and so on. As far as I can tell, any evidence-based assessment of Marxism comes up with a big fat zero.
Second, I wouldn't call myself particularly well-educated on Marxism, but I know somewhat more than the average person. And you're right that a Maoist is different than someone who studies Critical Race Theory, even though both may self-identify as Marxists. (And conversely both may NOT self-identify as Marxists even though Marxist thought has a deep impact on both.) However the "big fat zero" for Marxism includes, as far as I know, all derivative theories as well. But there are enough of them that I know little enough about that I won't recommend being particularly confident of that stronger statement.
Can’t you say the same for capitalism? Much of the support is rhetorical mentioning freedom and rational decision-making while the evidence against capitalism involves mass homelessness, poverty, poor healthcare, imperialism, militarism, bad predictions, and huge imbalances in the distribution of wealth and opportunity.
Yale is the epicenter of the woke mind virus attempting to destroy civilization.
Paul Graham's immediate chime of support shows it isn't just a piece of random silliness on Elon Musk's part. And other things I've seen (eg the harassment of Amy Chua) certainly fit.
This amicus brief speaking up for racism and discrimination (as long as it is against those funny looking Asians) is a minor piece of the general pattern.
The lawsuit that they are filing an Amicus in was brought by an Asian-American organization for the purpose of getting Harvard to stop specifically discriminating against Asian-Americans.
Therefore the brief is arguing for racism and discrimination against Asians.
What is particularly galling is that the argument in the brief is defending the university's ability to pick students who have been affected by their race. Thereby implicitly arguing that Asian-Americans have NOT been affected by their race.
The purpose of affirmative action policies is to help under-represented groups. Asians aren't under-represented at Yale, they are 19 percent of the student population, while only 6 percent of the American population.
So asian students are being punished because other asian students did too well?
Back in the early-to-mid 20th century, universities had limits to how many jewish students could join each year, with the argument that if they didn't, jews would make up the entire university population. Are you in favor of bringing back that policy, as well?
There are other policies universities have established to create a student body that is somewhat reflective of America -- they discriminate based on geography(multi-regional), on socio-economics (first generation students preferred), on sex (males preferred), athletic ability (the strong and fast preferred), age (youth preferred), and on veteran status (veterans preferred). Conservatives, being who they are, chose to focus on race.
I will answer your question with a question:
If the Supreme Court requires universities select their student based solely on standardized tests, and consequently this results in our top universities being made up of primarily of foreign nationals (there are billions of Chinese and Indians, and it is illegal to discriminate based on national origin), would you favor that inevitable outcome?
Really, are you also more likely to be athiest as well?
Because I mean Donald Knuth is pretty darn bright and a devout Lutheran. And when we say evidence and science are we talking about the evidence and science that guided our pandemic response?
If reality has such a hard left bent to it why do so many communist nations end up massacring their people through famine when trying to implement their ideal utopian leftist solutions?
But please go on telling me how your people are so much smarter and more intelligent than the other group of people you don't like.
Actually I'm convinced we need to do something about these dangerous conservatives, their dangerous racist, deadly views are killing children and limiting women's rights. We need to do something to stop them and help them understand reality as it really is, they just need more education. Clearly however the current model isn't working maybe if we setup special camps for them to all go to so they can be really educated, re-educated for short.
Of course there will still be people that will resist, we'll need some sort of final solution for them....
> why do so many communist nations end up massacring their people
I always assumed it was because Communism/Leninism/Maoism countries as implemented were authoritarian rather than democratic and encouraged "Animal Farm" type power distributions. Adoption of communism probably doesn't make people smarter, causally. But rejection of evidence-based worldviews can certainly have consequential results for individuals and communities.
The more education you get, the overwhelmingly less likely you are to be conservative.
This is false.
You can find data at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideo.... In 2015, college graduates saw a higher share of those who are mostly or consistently conservative than any other strata of education. Those with a postgraduate education are more likely to be mostly or consistently conservative than those who didn't finish high school!
What IS true is the people in the middle mostly disappear among more educated adults, and overwhelmingly became liberal. Which is not surprising considering how liberal academia is.
It is also true that conservatives tend to go into some professions more than others. If you're an engineer (not "software engineer", actual engineer) or are on Wall St, you'll be surrounded by educated conservatives. If you wind up in a humanities department, you probably aren't.
That's because you learn critical thinking skills and how to recognize bullshit.
There is an irony to your having just demonstrated your own lack of critical thinking skills.
It's very unfortunate for conservatives that reality has a hard-left bent to it.
And yet the people who have to deal with the hard reality required to make your bridge not fall down, are most likely conservative. The most liberal major is women's studies.
It’s group think. Or in Reddit terms a circle jerk.
Bunch of people surrounding themselves with like minded people and driving away anyone who disagrees.
Try being a professor on some of theses campuses and claiming that men can’t get pregnant. A position that was the norm for thousands of years until what 5-15 years ago?
You’ll be burned at the stake for disputing the “science” now.
Libertarian, the conservative ideology, or classical liberal, the much more diverse group of folks?
Both are funded by Kochs and others at the end of the day, but having attended meetings by both groups my experience has been that classical liberals are very intellectually honest (and absolutely the smartest folks I've met) even when we agree to disagree. Libertarians, by contrast, usually are just incorrigible and recalcitrant.
Could you clarify the distinction between libertarian and classical liberal? I know many libertarians treat these terms as synonyms, and I know there is a diversity of attitudes within the libertarian camp, but I'm not sure how they match up with what you are saying.
Classical liberalism overlaps in politics with some of the Libertarian party. The little (l) libertarians in the US are, recently in the age of Trumpism, conservatives embarrassed with the GOP as a conservative party and their support for authoritarianism/traditionalism. They adopt big (L) name, but typically aren't informed on a lot of classical liberalism thought and history.
Classical liberalism is a large umbrella and incorporates principles from the left and right. It's defining characteristic is eschewing authoritarianism.
For a very casual introduction, check out the Political Compass [0]
Ok, I think I follow. If I might rephrase, you are talking about the difference between philosophical libertarians vs. reflexive "don't tread on me" libertarians, correct?
> The little (l) libertarians in the US are, recently in the age of Trumpism, conservatives embarrassed with the GOP as a conservative party and their support for authoritarianism/traditionalism.
I find it interesting when people associate Trumpism with authoritarianism, when it was the pre-Trump GOP establishment that brought us a great many foreign wars and the Patriot Act.
Trump is a populist, and there's a long history of friendly relations between libertarians and populists (e.g. the Rothbard/Buchanon alliance) though I recognize many libertarians also despise populism. The Mises caucus, which is currently in control of the Libertarian party, follows in the Rothbardian strain.
Equating Trumpism with the Southern Strategy makes little sense. Trump won a larger share of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since Goldwater.
I don't think it's possible to have meaningful diversity of thought without diversity of background. That spans many attributes—race, economic status, where you grew up, etc. Race is obviously an important one, given how much it changes many people's experiences and perceptions.
I think diverse racial representation is important, but is maybe better viewed as an indicator of success rather than a metric to optimize. Especially at a university, diversity of thought and academic talent should be the primary factors (imo).
I think I tend to agree. The place to put the thumb on the scales is pre-k-12, especially early on.
If we look at purely merit metrics at the bottom of the funnel at university, then based on the approach these universities are taking, Asians will have the best merit metrics, and Blacks the worst. I fail to see how this could possibly promote a good social outcome. People are going to notice and stereotyping is going to kick in.
People of the same background can vote for two very different political parties, which seems rather meaningful in term of diversity. Even people within the same house hold can vote for different parties, and its fairly common to hear people complain that other family members do not share their views about the world.
I would suggest to give this task of measuring diversity of thought to social scientists. If universities want to go by that metric then a rigorous and measurable definition should be the first step.
Social science on a global scale determining a rigorous and measurable definition?
If you can't measure success then you can't evaluate it, and if you don't write it down then you can't critique it. Right now they use a few single bits of information, a person race, to determine diversity of thought. That would never be accepted in a scientific research looking at diversity of thought from a rigorous definition.
If they are truly looking for diversity of background, they can do that without race. If Yale focused on admitting smart, low income students they would have a much better diversity of backgrounds.
> The median family income of a student from Yale is $192,600, and 69% come from the top 20 percent.
This point isn't really relevant to the identification of a "runaway Supreme court" overthrowing precedence with politically outcome-motivated reasoning.
As well as "redlining existed in the lifetimes of the student's parent's generation, limiting intergenerational wealth and transfer to a degree that, all else equal, limited the opportunities for that group in many more ways that other groups did not experience."
Be sure to include the outcomes of racially motivated structural policies into your assessment and you will shortly recognize "the soft bigotry of low expectations" is a different metric altogether (one that PG has spoken on, where the average performance in-group is much higher than overall average, indicating you only hire cream of the crop from that group).
Yeah, but it leads to absurd results, where the black daughter of two doctors, with 500K+ in annual family income is given preferential treatment, while the Chinese-American son of a janitor is discriminated against.
Do you have any proof of that being the case? If the Chinese son makes it clear to the admission team about the hardships he overcame, surely that would be to his advantage.
Completely anecdotally, but I had two Asian colleagues from poor households. One got a full ride to Harvard and the other to MIT. Whereas, the smartest person I've ever personally known was accepted to Harvard but not given any financial aid. He was a white male with a drug-addicted mom raised by his grandma in the slums.
“If the Chinese son makes it clear to the admission team about the hardships he overcame, surely that would be to his advantage.”
It is definitely not an advantage, since the janitor’s kid is unable to pay tuition and unlikely to donate money to the school. These schools are primarily focused on maintaining their huge endowments and their over-hyped reputations.
You're advocating an arbitrary system over a rules system. Who decides whether the sob story the janitor's son tells is sufficient? Is having two drug-addled parents better than one?
In a rules based system, you get in or don't based on your qualifications and prerequisites. You can predict how the system will act in restricting you. It is fairer.
In a system where everyone must be judged, it leads to exercises in capriciousness, which is what we're seeing now. "We have too many that look like you, we need a different assortment of appearances." That's arbitrary. "Your story made me sadder than his story, you get in." That's an awful way to run a system.
That's how you get aristocracy with arbitrary power. It's what every monarch of the old systems lorded over the peasants. We're just recreating it in technicolor in all of our non-governmental systems, and it just seems so utterly foolish. The claims for why we're doing it seem noble, but they always seem that way. What this arbitrary mechanism always achieves is the opposite of its stated intent.
I think this was excellently reasoned. Wish there was something I could add, but it’s all there.
This has been my argument against “post modernism” and “my truth” nonsense. You can’t have a legal or social system that is selectively applied because of a story or your feelings.
My understanding of people claiming privilege is that, under ceterus paribus ("all else equal") assumptions, certain groups have worse socioeconomic outcomes than others.
or perhaps the upper class seeks to divide and rule the working class and so therefore initiated racial discriminating in hiring and admissions in order to further the divide and rule strategy?
The racism narrative is so flawed in America. Go back and look at how Chinese were referred to in early American literature and news. They were not considered equals either. But they performed disproportianately well wherever they went, and so they overcame whatever innate aversion Americans had towards them. Now there's a positive discrimination towards them.
It's been a similar case for Eastern European Jews, Russians, Indians, etc.
I don't understand why Hispanics should get a leg up in admissions just because they haven't gotten into schools in a high enough proportion. It seems to me the issue is supply side. You need to change the number of qualified applicants by convincing more kids to focus on college admissions.
Remember Abigail Fisher's case against UT in 2016? Thomas, Alito, and Roberts wanted to strike down UT's race-based admissions policy then. Kennedy and Ginsburg, two of the pro-affirmative action voices from that case, have been replaced with much more conservative justices. This might be where we finally abolish race-based admissions.
The main issue with meritocracy is how do you measure the level of merit? How does this singular focus upon a predetermined measurement and comparison of people affect society as a whole or social organizations within society?
I believe it can result in hiveminds of similar people, since meritocracy is so focused on measuring and comparing based on a limited set of criteria. Over the long run, narrow groups of similar people do not make an innovative society.
they hate it because it doesn't produce the results they want. And instead of introspecting they want to blame the system itself.
most arguments i see for affirmative action are on the face not logically consistent. but it feels more like the type of policy where people choose what action they want ahead of time and then desperately scramble for any justifications possible.
Law of large numbers. Plus, getting into medical school is not sufficient. A surgeon cannot fake his track record and experience after residency and working.
> A surgeon cannot fake his track record and experience after residency and working.
Fake? No. Fudge? Yes, easily. Besides, you can be competent and still substantially worse than a gifted surgeon would have been had they been given an actual "equal" opportunity like the comment I replied to claimed to care about.
In a purely meritocratic system, the result is the same as well due to the effects of crowding. If you have 100 applicants for a position, 90 of them from one background and 10 of them from another, the odds are that under a pure meritocratic position that all of your hires will end up being of one specific background.
Which results in a downstream effect of other perfectly good candidates being filtered into lower quality institutions due to no reason of their own.
Seems like the justification for group-based preference would have to be a well-defined final outcome, like socioeconomic improvement years post-graduation, than simply being representative of the population as a whole.
Ivy league schools have finite space for new students, you can't really fix this with more money. In the first place these schools don't need more money, they're some of the richest institutions in the country and only growing richer: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-17/ivy-leagu...
Why not be honest and outright auction those slots for highest bidders. Pay x number of millions and we guarantee access to Yale for x number of years.
The same reason they don't do it the "honest" way for affirmative action. It would significantly decrease the prestige and legitimacy of degrees awarded to people who fill those slots.
If they ended the legacy system they could kiss all donations from millionaire and billionaire alumni goodbye. In the first place, this whole "racial diversity" thing is a diversion in order to maintain their legacy system. Can't accuse them of being elitist and exclusionary if they regularly admit a quota of non-legacy applicants deliberately selected for racial diversity.
Thus it's the downfall of their academic strength, weakening the collective intellect of their student body in two different ways (50% even?). Now, for new fields like Computer Science, 5 out of the 10 top US Comp-Sci universities are public and 8 out of 10 non-Ivy. It's even worse when you account for the fact that Ivy's like Columbia are egregious offenders of attempting to fraudulently boost their US News rankings and are soon going to be absent consequently.
Admission because of donations isn't really as bad as affirmative action. Each possibly undeserving rich kid admitted probably funds many deserving but poor ones.
I think a lot of people who defend "affirmative action" [1] are misinformed about the extent of it. It's not about preferring the more "diverse" or less privileged candidate among roughly equally qualified candidates.
It's a direct attack on the concept of merit. Some of its ardent proponents aren't too shy about this fact either. [2]
This chart [3] by the Economist is illuminating: In Harvard undergraduate admissions, a person of the wrong race with top 10% academics has a chance equal to that of a person of the right race with bottom 40% academics.
In an equally balanced society, one would expect college admissions to largely reflect the makeup of that society. By the numbers, datausa.io says Yale is 43.6% "white", 5.67% "black". 13.7% "Asian". US population appears to be 59.63% "White alone, not hispanic or latino", according to census.gov. 13.6% "black" and 6.1% "asian". Datausa doesn't specify "non-resident Alien" by race, which makes up the missing 23.7%.
So whatever the policy does, the outcome is actually heavily weighted in favor of Asians vs. the share of the general population. Now, why is that? I would suspect a large share of second-generation immigrants in the pool (many immigrants I know push their kids much harder than average at academics), but I don't really know. Both "white" and "black" are underrepresented at Yale, but it looks like that is largely because of the non-resident students (who probably pay full tuition, helping to subsidize everyone else, if it's like the state school I attended).
I find it odd all the accounts suddenly interested in the outcomes for minority share races, but only for ones that are actually over represented (and therefore more likely to get into Yale than average, by the numbers).
How does this kind of race-based admission actually work in practice when it comes to “mixed race” individuals? (Scare quotes because I’m not even sure mixed race is a coherent concept). How far back in time can you go in search of an advantageous ancestry? This whole area seems rife with absurdities.
If your goal is equal opportunity you can look at socioeconomic class without considering race. Fundamentally the idea that race must be considered to achieve diversity is an inherently racist idea - you don't believe some races will get in without help.
In the US, race is very much tied to socioeconomic status and class.
It's not a 100% indicator, but its essentially what the quoteunquote CRT in schools was meant to show.
Many black communities are not poor simply because they're poor, but of on-the-books policies of redlining, discrimination, and overpolicing that enabled a wealth gap to form in the post-war period. Many white families were able to buy houses, build generational wealth, etc while many black communities were prevented from buying homes, getting loans, all the way to their neighborhoods being wholesale demolished for highways, malls, power plants, etc.
Being colorblind has the byproduct of ignoring real material policies and historic events that contribute to modern conditions. It is a fact that generational wealth enables rich students to afford SAT prep classes, have parents that can take them to extra curricular activities, and have the ability to not need a job during their teenage years.
Race-based affirmative action is meant to equal out these factors to an extent. Whether it works as intended is another matter.
Cases of "Working hard" and "picking yourself up by the bootstraps" is statistically negligible in the grand scheme.
In this theory where do Asians, South Asians and Jews fit in? Most do not come from generational wealth. Many are recent immigrants to the US, and actually supporting family members from their homeland (basically the opposite of generational wealth).
> In the US, race is very much tied to socioeconomic status and class.
Great! So looking at socioeconomic status will also address socioeconomic status caused by racial discrimination. Glad you understand and agree with the parent.
Every social research paper must more or less identify and classify socioeconomic status in order to do proper science. What ever social concept a researcher is studying, the first thing people will ask is: "did you account for socioeconomic status?"
How do you identify race? After all, it's just a social construct. We're not DNA testing and doing the one-drop rule are we? Its' self-reported. At least with socioeconomics we can look at household income and tax returns.
No, it's far easier to determine socioeconomics. After all, if you're going to favor a specific race, how do you prove their race? What percentage of their bloodlines needs to be from that race? We really start getting into yellow badge territory eventually, and at best all it does is create racial animosity and resentment, which we see now: https://news.gallup.com/poll/318851/perceptions-white-black-...
Meanwhile, everybody pays taxes so we have the data we need to not use racial discrimination.
This little argument is a great summary of what's going on in our society: the rich are shifting the public attention from their wealth to skin color of the poor. "Weath is hard to quantify and we should stop talking about it, while skin color is very apparent and the Social Justice Book we've given to you clearly states that skin color is more important than money."
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. You can't do that here, regardless of which politics or ideology you're into. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Then how do you explain immigrants who within two generations begin generating wealth? What the economics show is that they come here with nothing. They scrape by, working whatever jobs they can. They make sure their kids do well in school. Their kids go to college and start businesses, become doctors, become lawyers... all in the same system you're claiming is holding people that look just like them down.
Something about the assertions made by CRT must be incorrect given what we see of the facts.
It should be noted that neither class nor race is a reindeer-style glowing red nose. There's an recent trend in England of people faking lower-class roots to take advantage of targeted programs, and there are indicators that white Americans are pretending Native ancestry for college admission.
I can imagine the political cartoon right now, a school administrator boasting that 98% of the student body is from a minority group, to a room full of white male students who lied about their ethnicity on the college admission process.
People will try to game the system any number of ways, from faking scores to faking backgrounds. You don't say your criteria are broken b/c people are cheating - that's affirming the consequent
Ignore that background too then. Just use parental or individual income and have some sort of scale, done. This isn't rocket science and the fact that we have to argue about blatantly obvious racism and favoritism just shows how much we've been gas-lighted, and we've had our good intentions twisted and actively exploited by those that benefit from this.
Many years from now, we will be holding these black people accountable for the generational harm and un-earned benefits they've stolen from our current generation's youth.
> Many years from now, we will be holding these black people accountable for the generational harm and un-earned benefits they've stolen from our current generation's youth.
The problem is that the wealthy and powerful can fake socioeconomic class. In fact, they already do for financial aid. I recall two of my classmates got accepted by Harvard. One was the son of a doctor, and the other was the daughter of a lawyer. The doctor's son said that he was turning down Harvard because they didn't give any financial aid. Meanwhile, the lawyer's daughter said she actually got a lot of financial aid from Harvard even though her family was much richer.
I don't think it was fraud so much as loopholes. I'm not sure how she did it, but a common strategy is for give custody of the child to a grandparent, who on paper is poor and has 0 income.
Then I would say the Ivy League is doing something very wrong. When California and Washington passed ballot initiatives prohibiting race-conscious admissions, demographics shifted a bit but black admissions were nowhere near zero.
In CA at least, there is a large gap:
Despite those changes and others, the proportion of freshmen from underrepresented racial groups, including Blacks, Latinos and women, attending the UC campuses, averaged 20% before Prop 209, then dropped to 15% in 1998, then slowly increased over the next 20 years, reaching a peak of 37% in 2016, according to the system. However, the percentage of underrepresented students graduating from high school had doubled to over 56% by 2016.
Source: https://edsource.org/2020/students-at-californias-top-tier-u...
The analysis checks out (excepting the "women" part, which I assume is some kind of typo), but the "underrepresented racial groups" framing hides important parts of the story. Both black and white students are accepted in proportion to public school demographics; Hispanic students are the single largest ethnic group despite being underrepresented. (https://apnews.com/article/education-race-and-ethnicity-79f7..., https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/ad/ceffingertipfacts.asp)
So unless you take the perspective that colleges ought to engage in direct racial balancing against local graduating classes, it's very hard to tell a story about diversity or implicit bias here.
Yet when people look at precisely this (class rather than race) they are still called "enemies of excellence" and racist against asian people and sued to high heaven (see the ongoing challenges for the TJHSST admissions changes).
Let's see if I understand the argument. Many people's ancestors didn't own slaves. But, because of social construct, they have a leg up (+advantage) in the present because of skin color in the present society of the US (not because their ancestors were abolitionists or slave owners). Which is why people argue against current racism, not solely historical racism.
So even if you didn't benefit from past injustices directly, the ongoing inertia in society results in your net benefit or detriment as an immigrant on average due to skin color.
(Note, I'm trying put the argument into perspective with a steelman, not dismiss your experience as you've described it.)
Or worse yet you came from someplace like South Africa, where you were abused for racial reasons and then after coming to the US you get blamed for historical action of some plantation owner physically abusing others. Double points if you're Palestinian or something and barely made it here with the skin on your back.
The difference is that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action are wealthy black people and African immigrants, not the ones who were the hurt most by slavery and Jim Crow.
You and I probably agree on the principle. I just want to call attention that this sort of snipe doesn't communicate well, in my opinion. I feel like the term racism has been split between race-based bigotry (which most people argue when they say "I'm not racist!") and supporting systems which encourage systemic preferences for certain groups. As I mention in another comment, I wish I understood this topic more, because the latter definition appears to be where folks are complaining about affirmative action since the end-state metrics aren't well defined (or maybe they are, but aren't well communicated?).
> supporting systems which encourage systemic preferences for certain groups
The newest definition is "systems that do not ensure equal outcomes between ethnic groups".
I'm sure you can discern the dark side of that statement. The idea is that we should ignore the problem at the source - injustice, unequal treatment, real racism (by your first definition) -- and instead correct it via racial quotas wherever there's supposed to be an objective, impartial test of one's fitness for a role.
One of the USA's great mottos used to be "equal opportunity". Not anymore, sadly -- between nepotism, promised donations, and racial quotas it's become nigh on impossible for some otherwise highly qualified but poor kids to go to an ivy-league school.
I get your confusion on the topic. But your approach fails to consider that the removal of privilege of a socially preferred group feels like discrimination to members of that group. This means the nuance is a distinction with difference.
But yale was one of the institutions that was doing the abusing, right? Shouldn’t they be the ones who are punished? That isn’t what’s happening though, they are punishing “non-diverse” (see: white and asian) students instead.
Actually it seems that trying harder in case of Asians is being punished. They have highest meritocratic scores and are being punished for it... That from engineering view point seems just insane.
It is not racism, as for it to be racist it would have to support the idea that people of one race are inherently superior in some form or another to another race.
Adjusting representation is not making any claim whatsoever about ability around members of any race, it's attempting to adjust for those kinds of claims that have already (falsely) been made.
Nobody who is implementing these policies in any of these Ivy League schools thinks Asian students are smarter or that non-Asian students are dumber.
>as for it to be racist you would have to believe that people of a certain race are inherently superior in some form or another.
I don't think that's the standard definition, I think treating people differently because of their race is usually considered racist, even if the discrimination is of the "separate but equal" variety. Especially if the difference in treatment is due to stereotypes and prejudices.
>People want different treatment as a result of their different values and life experiences that they gather from their cultures
Yes exactly. A white kid adopted by someone in a village in Kenya isn't going to want to be treated like an Englishman, and a black kid who grew up his whole life in a Montana country town full of white people with white parents (probably) doesn't want to be treated differently than the rest of the people in the town even though he's an entirely different color. "Colorblind" is a good policy in these circumstances.
If someone wants to be treated differently purely on their color I will wait for them to tell me (individually tell me, not someone else of the same color to tell me) and presume not otherwise.
> Racism is the belief that one race is superior in some way or another
What's going on is discriminating and prejudicing on the basis of race.
We can call that racism or anti-racism or peanuts & bananas, it doesn't change what the thing is. A person being advantaged or disadvantaged, being treated differently, on the basis of the race, something they had no control over nor consent to.
> Everyone is better off if we live in a society where you can do well and be rewarded for it, which is what affirmative action supports
Affirmative action is sins of they father by another name. It's judging people, and sending the message that it is okay--even righteous--to judge people not on who they are, but on from whom they are born.
It also creates justified racial animus between ethnic groups anew, and does so in a motivating way: by harming, or even just creating the perception of harming, their children.
> Why would you want to make education more elite?
Because we're defining an elite based on a mangled construction, where the kids of an Angolan dictator are given precedence over those of a refugee in the name of fairness. That's the construct of race. Meanwhile, the descendants of the slave owners get admitted on legacy.
The fact that you think the source of the racial discrimination is college admissions and not centuries of violence and hatred is sad, but unsurprising.
You are not immune to history, what happened before you were born does matter, and it effects/hurts people all the time. Affirmative Actions is just one way we can try and figure out how to heal that immense damage. It's not the only thing we can do, but it is something, and it can be done in a way that helps everyone.
> the source of the racial discrimination is college admissions and not centuries of violence and hatred is sad
They're both acts of prejudice on the basis of race. There's a view that there is some dimension of racism where racism in "one" direction can be negated by racism in the "other" direction. But this relies on a stable concept of race across time and space, which doesn't exist, because people mix and move and change how they identify.
> what happened before you were born does matter
I wasn't born in America. Neither were my Asian friends. Isn't it convenient that they're asked to bear the burden of America's heritage of slavery?
You're not bearing any burden, as there are a lot of schools who aren't Yale that will accept you. This isn't the case for those who are benefiting from Affirmative Action.
For some, Yale is their only shot, due to the inherently racist nature of American society. Those people should get priority over people for whom this isn't the case.
If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at the racists in American society that make these programs necessary. If it weren't for the objective fact that many minority groups in the US suffer on nearly every level when compared to others, these programs wouldn't be needed, but they do so they are.
> not bearing any burden, as there are a lot of schools who aren't Yale that will accept you. This isn't the case for those who are benefiting from Affirmative Action.
I went to a state school on a merit scholarship, so I'm pretty far outside direct impact from these decisions.
If someone thinks their only chance of going to college is Yale, they're wrong. Fixing that lack of institutional knowledge makes more sense than twisting the scales to fit a race-based ideology. (To the degree I bear indirect burden, it's in living in a society that seeks to create a racial hierarchy. Also, being young enough that the obviously predictable backlash will be a problem in my lifetime.)
We have a legacy of wrongs against Black Americans. It's on all of us, including those who didn't commit the atrocities but benefit from the system built on them, to address that. Creating racial pools in college admissions is not the way.
> If someone thinks their only chance of going to college is Yale, they're wrong.
They're not wrong, that's literally the lived experience of many, many folks. This is exactly the problem; you're not taking the perspective of people who actually are discriminated against in America.
And I didn't say "of going to college". This isn't just about college, it's about opportunities for a high degree of success in a person's life. Yale doesn't represent "college" it represents "prestigious college that will open doors for the rest of their life".
Some folks get one of those shots. Yale doesn't represent that to you, but it represents that to some folks, and if they're qualified for admittance, it makes perfect sense to prefer them over people who will get other shots at a highly successful life.
> This isn't just about college, it's about opportunities for a high degree of success in a person's life. Yale doesn't represent "college" it represents "prestigious college that will open doors for the rest of their life".
Why is Yale the only shot for the child of a wealthy, well-connected person of one race but not the poor, unconnected child of another?
> makes perfect sense to prefer them over people who will get other shots at a highly successful life
This is the assumption that rightfully grinds people. Why do we assume because someone is Asian they will not face those barriers? And again, how convenient that the actual descendants of slave traders have reserved seats, too, at these prestigious institutions.
Yale is often the only shot at a high level of success for poorer, less educated racial groups. I'm not sure you're understanding me if you believe what I'm saying is designed to support wealthy, well-connected people generally.
And there is no assumption about Asian success, there's cold, hard data about the comparative lack of discrimination in academia and in life outcomes.
But it does sound like you're laser focusing here on Asian kids, and ignoring the many white kids who are also being bumped out of these programs. Odd...
> A person should be advantaged on the basis of their race
I read your entire comment, and understand that it contains more nuance than the first statement - but that does not diminish the fact that this position is explicitly racist.
You can either want people to be treated without regard for their race, or you can try to use racist policies to "push the needle the other direction". They are mutually exclusive perspectives.
It's not racist as it does not support the idea that one race is superior or inferior to another.
A "racist" idea would be that one race deserves more than another because of some inherent flaw or virtue.
The idea of affirmative action is the objective fact that racist policies have already been created, and to decide to "go colorblind" would be de facto support for those racist policies that are already in place.
The position you quoted is explicitly antiracist, because it suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences.
The word 'racist' is overloaded and refers to multiple different things. 'One race is superior to another' is a racist belief.
Discriminating based on race is a racist action.
Fixing an inequity is not racist, the racism is the creation of the inequity.
This is like saying it's unfair to help someone with a broken leg because it takes time away from people with other injuries. The problem is that someone broke the person's leg, not that their leg needs attention from a doctor.
They're both racist!
What you're doing is breaking the leg of some other guy who looks like the original leg-breaker to "make everything even". There were two problems, originally: someone was going around breaking legs, and someone had a broken leg. Now you're cheering on the next leg-breaker, and there's more broken legs in the world.
Your justification for being racist doesn't prevent your actions from being racist.
They're not both racist, and no; giving a qualified person a spot at a prestigious university is not "breaking the leg" of "some other guy", when that "other guy" has many, many other opportunities to excel in their life, whereas the qualified student being admitted to Yale may have no other opportunities at the kind of life a Yale graduate might receive.
Going to Yale is not the focus here, it's "being granted chances to excel in life."
You continue to ignore the actual problem here (that minorities are disproportionately failing to excel academically and in society), and I'm beginning to wonder if you even see that as a bad thing...
You can’t say this after claiming someone “admitted to Yale may have no other opportunities at the kind of life a Yale graduate might receive.” What evidence do we have that this is uniquely enabling for a person of one race and not another? Yes, it may be uniquely enabling for the affirmative action candidate. But that doesn’t rule out it being uniquely life changing for someone else.
> I'm beginning to wonder if you even see that as a bad thing
I can absolutely say that Yale being the only opportunity for some folks makes this bigger than “going to Yale”, in fact that’s exactly what I’ve been saying this whole time. For the affirmative action kids, Yale is a big deal, for the kids AA bumps out, Yale is not nearly as big of a deal.
And yes, we’re dealing in aggregate. Trying to cite specific counterexamples to the statistics is a waste of time because the whole point is that it’s, overall, better. Nobody is arguing that it’s strictly better 100% of the time… but you knew that, and made your argument anyway.
Fundamentally, do you care that certain minorities are massively underrepresented in many aspects of prosperity or not? There’s nothing self defeating about wondering if you’re one of the many people on the Internet who don’t care. You’re acting a lot like you don’t care, so the question is valid.
> A person should be advantaged on the basis of their race, if a racist's perception of their race has been the cause of centuries of disadvantage already.
I do not agree, although there is also the consideration if the centuries of disadvantage continues even today, or not. If it does continue today, then it should be worth to mitigate such disadvantages, in order that such a disadvantage should soon be stopped, but that is not necessarily meaning that you should need to gain more advantages too.
Even so there is different way to be grouping, by race, by what language(s) you can speak/write, etc. But, you are individual person too. Don't be forced or group into something if you did not do it just because someone else does (e.g. people who have the same name as you, or with similar skin colours than you, or religions than you, etc).
They should have diversity, but the method for doing so should not be to force it, or to require certain quotas, etc. But, they should let them in. After that is happening, then you can see what is the result, I suppose.
You should not judge something that you do not know, before it is done; otherwise the judgment cannot be possible. This is the case whether it is racist or not. Unfortunately they too often ignore you because it is something that is not as they say is "normal". Sometimes this is legitimate but not always and so you should not make the early judgment, instead the late judgment is going to be better.
They say that "diversity encourages students to question their own assumptions, to test received truths, and to appreciate the complexity of the modern world", and yes this is necessary too; you can question anything. It is true if you have diversity or not, but being diversity can be helpful. However, you will have diversity whether or not they are visibly difference by race, etc, although that is one thing being diversity too it is not the only thing.
But, if Yale wants to accept certain people, they can do so, as long as it is not a monopoly then they can be accepted into other universities hopefully. (Whether or not they should reject certain people is a different question, though, than if they can be allowed to do so.) If nobody will accept them, then it is a real problem. If course materials can be copied, then it is helpful then you should not need to be accepted everywhere if you can read them anyways; but, unfortunately there is too much copyright and other thing, which can also be a problem.
> Beginning to repair that inequity is not racist.
Yes I agree, it is not inherently racist. But, that does not necessarily mean that none of the methods for doing so might be racist.
> What is racist is to think you're inherently better than them, which is what many people who want to end affirmative action believe.
Do you have the citation about it (as someone else asked, too)?
> More people, overall, get elevated to the highest levels of academia as a result of these programs.
OK, then that will be good, but does it result in any excluding people? It should not exclude someone for reasons that are no good, though.
You say "for the kids who get bumped out of Yale, many other doors remain open". If that work, if there are enough other university in that area, which are of a good quality (for the specific kind of courses they wish to take), then it is good, but as I mention above, such things as copyright can still be the problem too.
The statistics also must be considered properly. You must consider the correlations, including the variables you know and those that you do not know. The reason why they result certain things also should be considered, like any good scientific experiment ought to do.
Some people in other comment suggested other policies, e.g. dramatically reduce homework, it can help black people too. Well, if too many homework is not helpful (actually, from my experience in school, I agree that too many homework is not helpful) then I do think that it would be helpful to be reduced, whether it specifically helps black people or not; as long as it is not harming black people (or other people).
> Beginning to repair that inequity is not racist. What is racist is to think you're inherently better than them, which is what many people who want to end affirmative action believe.
Note that in this case they are allegedly "former KKK". But, whether they are KKK or not, it is not the criteria to evaluate how good any of their proposed policies are (or the quality of art, music, mathematics, books, etc); they should be evaluated by themself instead.
They say, "My bill only says that in cases when you hire or promote someone, you have to do so on the basis of their ability." It seems good to me, but there are other considerations that must be made, including all of the extra details that the bill might say. Sometimes they try to hide things, but even non-hidden things must be considered properly. For example, how do they intend to enforce it? Even, should it be enforced, anyways? (Maybe, or maybe not.) Some methods of trying to enforce it are not going to be good, regardless of what your intention is, I think. But, enforcement is not only issue, there are other things, too. The statement seems to be simple, but such things are rarely that simple. Note that they mention promotion as well as hiring. If you promote someone they should be competent for the job they are being promoted to, rather than for their current job.
If we're using association with the KKK, then note that your favored organization the ACLU also has backed the Nazis and KKK on many occasions [0]. It's almost as if association with the KKK is not enough to impugn a policy.
It is 404 error. However, I added a few letters on the end of the URL and then it works.
They defend their right of freedom of speech, and I agree that they should have the right of freedom of speech, regardless of if I or whoever else agrees or disagrees with the some or all of statements that they will say.
Like they say, you must defend free speech of everyone (whether you agree with them or not), instead of risking the government arbitrarily decide what is, or is not, acceptable speech.
(It is like the quotation misattributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.")
Also, the Civil Rights Act was passed in a time of extreme racism (necessarily, otherwise the laws wouldn't have been needed), society has advanced substantially since then, as has our thinking about what racism is and how it affects society.
That's vendetta of mafia clans: "You don't know me and I don't know you, but your grandpa offended my grandpa a century ago, so today I'm going to offend you."
I was gifted a book by that guy for my child. I opened it up and it literally told my child to "confess" her "racist ideas." Why is Kendi calling out for my two year old to confess to her racism? She has caretakers of every race and I've never seen her react to them differently based on perceived "race." It's almost as if he's trying to program her to be racist. Needless to say I never read the child the book.
Perhaps Kendi can take a visit to Africa and witness that there are more slaves today in Africa than any other continent, food for thought for a target audience while he writes his next book.
Enjoy some of the earlier writing of Kendi while he went by his previous name (Rogers):
>Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world’s population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they’re facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far. This is where the murder, psychological brainwashing and deception comes into play.
>Nevertheless, other than not wanting hate to be the weed that stunts my intellectual growth, I don’t hate white folk because I’m a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are? Similarly, how can you hate a turtle because it won’t keep up?
> Perhaps Kendi can take a visit to Africa and witness that there are more slaves today in Africa than any other continent, food for thought for a target audience while he writes his next book.
He's too busy on the high-paying-racist-grifter-speech-circuit to do that.
> We discriminated against blacks in the past, so whites and asians deserve to be discriminated against in the present. Is this your position?
White people took everything for hundreds of years. Then, they turned around and said "Oh look, we own everything but let's just forget about skin color now".
Discrimination resulted in massive inequality. The median net worth of a white family is $200k. The median net worth of a black family is around $0. (goes up to $20k if you count recent immigrants, it's $8 if you only count people who were shipped here as slaves).
My position is that, white people took it all. Now they need to share. It's not discrimination to say that you need to undo stealing for hundreds of years and start on a level playing field, before you forget about skin color.
The counterpoint is probably going to be something along the lines of, what if the median wealth of one family is that way because dad and mom were working 100 hours a week each, fed the kids ramen everyday, and the kid got no attention at all. Then you're comparing that to some family that ate cavier on their yacht everyday while their parents worked 20 hours a week in their medical practice and devoted the entire rest of their time to the kids education and taking the kids on bullshit "volunteering" trips to make the kid look like mother Teresa for his college and med school application.
Same family wealth, but clearly cavier kid had the leg up. Maybe better to compare full time wage or something? Personally I would dispense with both race and wealth as metrics.
What did Asians do? Were they involved in this taking of everything or should they just be clumped in as white because they don't meet the narrative that discrimination means you will be poor?
That's a interesting form of tribal mentality, that a group of people sharing a common trait has some persistent identity, a "hive soul", that commits crimes and can be held responsible by punishing any member of that tribe. That hive soul replicates itself by producing members with the same apparent trait, competes for resources with other hives and so on.
I don't believe such tribe souls exist, but one thing I'd agree with is that the moment a man makes a decision to benefit from some organisation or nation, he becomes entangled with it, like a bus passenger gets entangled with the bus, and faces consequences for the deeds of the organisation, whether it's "fair" or not.
I hear Liberia is nice. They speak English and persons of black color have held key political positions for over a hundred years. Former slaves held a great deal of the power there so that should be a great leg up for anybody who can't wait for the slow movement of the wheels of progress stateside. They've also codified white people can't be citizens, so that's one less worry in ways white folk can upset the country.
Why not? While Asian immigrants certainly face discrimination they have also certainly experienced much less than black Americans have over the last 300 years.
>Why not? While Asian immigrants certainly face discrimination they have also certainly experienced much less than black Americans have over the last 300 years.
Well .. you have to be careful when talking about groups, because at the individual level it's not clear that this is true. In fact, it isn't true.
For example, Ilhan Omar, a Congresswoman from Minnesota, is a black American. Her ancestors didn't suffer American discrimination. She was born in Somalia to a well-connected, upper-class Somali family. Her personal experience still had trials and tribulations that was unique to her, but it was different than the experience of other black Americans.
Couldn't we give a 'hand-up' to the people that need it by focusing on class, instead of race?
I think this is a reasonable argument, but I also see the other side. Having a racial underclass is bad for society. It leads to children of the race subconsciously believing they aren’t capable of achieving their full potential. Empowering black people is a worthy goal in my opinion, even if they’re rich, because the optics can make a big difference in the lives of children who know believe in themself.
What about empowering all kids that for any reason subconsciously believe they aren’t capable of achieving their full potential instead of focusing on race?
As an added bonus, the black kid will then not feel like it needs some kind of special care as opposed to its white mates, because it won't be reminded all the time that it needs special care just because it's a black kid.
It's racist thinking to group people into a collective and think that each member of that collective is the same.
It's also a super American racial lens you've got. As if one hundred percent of Black Americans have a tougher family background than the descendants of Chinese coolies or Vietnamese war refugees. Come on, take off that collectivist worldview and view people as individuals. Collectivism is attractive because it simplifies people into one dimensional avatars, but it leads to wrongs such as the racism on display here.
The problem is that it's inherently wrong, which I don't expect you to understand given your twisted moral compass.
Perhaps it would help you if you knew that ADOS are pretty upset that Yale keeps admitting the sons and daughters of wealthy African immigrants instead of them.
That doesn't make a difference to a morally upright person. But for a racist such as yourself, maybe know that the policy of racism you're advocating for doesn't even help the group you wish it did.
Admitting rich people is basically the biggest value add ivy’s provide. Ambitious people realize that having a network full of the rich and soon to be powerful is incredibly valuable which is why they want to be in school with them. Given that ivy’s will be admitting large amounts of rich people either way how is it worse to accept some rich minorities instead of just rich white people?
No one deserves anything. Things happen anyway. Clearly everyone has their own definition of fairness. Seems to me that someone at admissions office for the ivy’s has read kendi and was reasonably convinced that his take on reverse racism is correct. You can disagree, but since fairness isn’t a concept that even make sense metaphysically it’s hard to say they’re wrong.
Let me put it another way: the bulk of the abolitionist movement sought to end slavery because slavery was cruel and evil. It wasn’t to reverse the flow of a cruelty and it’s consequences back towards a subset of them or redirect the flow towards a different group of people but to end the cruelty altogether. Fairness is irrelevant here because as you rightly point out, life isn’t fair, but since we legally bar discrimination on the basis of race—a form of law I happen to agree with—Yale should be held accountable per our laws.
If they want to change our laws, they should go ahead and meet up and see if they can’t put together a good case for bringing back racism as a legal practice. Seems that’s what they’re trying to do actually.
That said they should also be prepared for the consequences of success because that would give implicit license and justification to a much larger and more powerful group of people in their own country to start discriminating on the basis of race again. Or put another way: there isn’t a world where “reverse racism”—an oxymoron by the way—doesn’t lead back to “anti-reverse racism”, aka “racism”.
We can stop being cruel or not, but we can’t justify bigotry in one direction without giving license to bigotry in the other direction. You would have to convince people to stop looking out for themselves and their children, which is like asking people not to be people. It’s an insane proposition to start with.
And this is called the crab mentality: "My family struggled so much in my childhood, so I want you to struggle as much. I'm miserable and you too should live in misery." People with this mentality really want some company, but this is turned into the crab mentality by their sick minds.
> Asian immigrants are not struggling to escape the clutches of centuries old intergenerational poverty
The children of people we put in concentration camps or accepted as refugees from e.g. the Khmer Rouge should be punished so the daughter of a hedge fund manager can get into a university named after an executive of the British East India Company? Give me a break.
I am pretty sure a lot do. First, a lot of immigrants came to pursue the "American Dream", trying to break free from poverty, or oppression, or both.
Then you have specific instances of Asian people (systematically) being mistreated in the US. Chinese railroad construction workers come to mind, who were basically treated as serfs and whose lives were considered "expendable". People with Japanese origins were put into concentration camps during WW II, along with societal repressions against anybody who "looked" Japanese, on top of the general racist stance of the time.
Asian-Americans were effectively as segregated as Black Americans for a long long time. While the Asian-American population might not have experienced slave-labor to the same degree, Asian-American communities certainly were for a long time pushed to the edges of society, usually even physically segregated, systematically and ideologically denied access to upwards social mobility, and so on.
But I believe plenty of Asians feel the pain of racism, right? And let's not forget about interring Japanese-Americans during World War II. Sure, the Japanese experience in the United States didn't begin with slavery, but let's not assume they do not suffer the effects of racism.
Many Asians are dealing with intergenerational poverty including multi-century. Much of the discrimination before the 1900s were in other countries, but Asians have frequently faced discrimination.
In the US there has been discrimination for over 100 years.
You are suffering from the same optimistic delusion that the Supreme Court suffered from in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003):
> In her majority opinion, O'Connor wrote that "race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time," adding that the "Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
AA will not permit anyone to escape intergenerational poverty. By the numbers, it hasn't done anything to combat it.
>Why do we suddenly have a problem now that it's advantageous?
Something about judging someone based on the content of their character, and not color of their skin.
I never really understood why we couldn't reach our societal goals by simply focusing on class, instead of race. A poor black American has much more in common with a poor white American, then with an affluent black American, especially as it pertains to access to academic opportunity. Put another way, it isn't clear what problems we're solving by focusing on race, that we couldn't solve better by focusing on class.
We can look back at history and come up with a thousand reasons to support any cause that exists today. Asians were discriminated when they were brought in to work on the railroads, are we going to factor that into the admission process too? So in the end, is it just going to be a battle of which race had the worst time in history?
The point is, instead of chasing the fool's dream of finding who was hurt the most in history, we can just make sure everybody has the opportunity to be successful. It's not perfect today but it is still better than hurting one group of people in order to boost another.
Because our society has also agreed that using race as the sole reason to determine an outcome is a bad idea. Hence, the civil rights act which "makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of race".
Why should we now fly in the face of that in order to advance one race at the expense of others?
> Because our society has also agreed that using race as the sole reason to determine an outcome is a bad idea.
Except it didn't actually, as demonstrated, not by words, but by drastically disproportionate representation in every single major institution in the country. This is all an attempt to combat that fact. If that fact ever changes, then this stuff can all go away. Until then, the incorrect argument you (and most of HN it appears) have given is just holding back attempts at progress.
There might be good arguments for why affirmative action is a bad approach but this argument isn't one of them.
No, you see, some races are okay to discriminate against, and others aren't. Seeing the entire world through the lens of race is morally preferable as long as it leads to the right outcome.
I think considering race is fine, depending on how you use that information. If you use it to make the group less diverse, that is bad. If you use it to make the group more diverse, that is good.
Does that mean that some students with higher grades/income/whatever get excluded? Yes. However grades shouldn't be the only factor in this decision. It seems that the schools are taking a holistic approach to admittance, and I support that. Granted with the Loughlin situation, school admittance practices should certainly be scrutinized. However it seems they might be on the right side at least on this one specific issue.
False choice. The article is about racial diversity, as is my comment.
Economic diversity is important as well. You don't have to have one or the other, you can have both. Unless the school is only admitting one person per year, as in your scenario. Please don't try to distort the issue.
First, schools have a limited number of admissions so they may very well have to choose in a situation like this.
This is not strictly about racial diversity. The article also mentions ethnic diversity so it is clearly more than just race.
They explicitly mentioned socioeconomic situations as well.
> In their amicus brief, Yale and the other schools said that during their admissions processes, they obtain and review extensive information regarding each applicant’s life experiences, accomplishments, talents, interests, and goals. That information includes an applicant’s socioeconomic background, parental education level, whether languages other than English are spoken in the home, educational experiences, military service, leadership skills, “and all the other intangible characteristics that are crucial to ascertaining how an applicant will contribute to the university community.”
They are clearly also looking at socioeconomic situations along with race.
Maybe you should take your own advice: "Please don't try to distort the issue."
My argument is if you want to help disadvantaged people you can't look at race. The race of a person does not determine how good their life is and doesn't tell you anything about their privilege.
A black person with a large amount of wealth is almost certainly in a more privileged situation than a poor white who is addicted to fentanyl. Why should the white person be put at a partial disadvantage because of his skin color? Looking at his skin color will do nothing to tell you about their situation.
I believe you may have missed the term "all else equal" (or ceterus paribus) somewhere along the way.
Your point is "well, duh" because your comparison is not valid. The way you are proposing, it compares apples and oranges.
To my understanding, the folks that study these kinds of things would split the situations you are describing into two groups, then compare group outcome statistics outcomes by race. Racism exists when the partial correlations are significant even when controlling for the other factors for a specific group.
So here, the poor person addicted to fentanyl has it worse when they are black. The wealthy person has worse outcomes when they are black. When that is consistent, then there is evidence of systemic racism.
There really is no value add comparing apples and oranges, which is what is happening when you make the comparison here. I recommend you reconsider your argument approach if you feel strongly that this comparison has merit as you've written it.
I don't believe there are any situations that are equal, except perhaps twins. No other situation can have "all else equal". This may be the crux of our disagreement.
Black people may have worse outcomes as a whole, but an individual black person may not be worse off. You cannot assume an individual is identical to the group. Black people commit more crimes. Does that mean if you see a black person you can assume they are a criminal? I don't think you can, but it sounds like following your reasoning you can.
You're mixing correct things (individual outcomes aren't representative of a group) with incorrect things (therefore we can say nothing about average outcomes for a group).
I am not saying we cannot say anything about group averages. I am saying if you take a random black person you cannot determine if they are well off or not based on race alone. You can say they are more likely to be worse off than if you took a random white person.
I am fundamentally opposed to giving benefits to people just because they are in a group that typically does worse.
> Mind explaining why the black boy is more diverse?
Because of the US History of subjugation of African Americans that includes the horrors of slavery.
> Is race the only thing that makes somebody diverse?
Nope, but is this context of elite US university, race is the only factor for diversity to undo past crimes on black people and their exclusion form only only these elite universities but all universities.
It seems to me that a rich black person is less diverse. They grew up in a good area, had two parents and are wealthy. Isn't that a huge chunk of the existing Yale demographic? The only difference is race.
In 100 years after more and more whites and Asians are denied positions they rightfully earned, should we reverse the races that get rejected due to their race? Blacks can then be rejected or do blacks get preferential treatment forever?
I have a few other comments in this thread on this. Can you define what you mean by diversity (background or thought or something else)? Also, how do you measure its improvement?
My speculation is that, because these are hard terms to nail down but easy to say, this becomes a perennial topic.
I would define diversity as a representative sample of the population and time in which the organization is situated. In this case, the US 2020 census. If it's good enough for the US Constitution and for Congressional representation, it's good enough for Yale. Maybe this was difficult to nail down in 1791 but not so much today. It doesn't have to be perennial. Once every 10 years is sufficient.
Unlike applicants whose identities have been affected mainly by their socioeconomic or geographic circumstances, applicants whose formative experiences relate to race or ethnicity would be denied the opportunity to convey their full, authentic selves when competing for admission to selective schools like Amici.
And so we guarantee that millions of Americans will have a formative experience that THEIR race (various Asian groups) are allowed to be discriminated against. Instead of being rewarded if they follow every rule on how to fit in and succeed.
Let's be clear. The schools are literally fighting to let them continue excluding the grandchildren of people who were put in a camp for being the wrong race (Japanese in WW 2). Separately those same teenagers have to deal with a world where hate crimes against Asians just jumped. Locally in Orange county it is up over 100%.
This is just wrong. And that people who support the policy claim to be for "tolerance" is just hypocrisy.