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.
