With that in mind, it makes no sense from a scientific/engineering perspective to ignore race. No scientist or engineer looks at a situation, sees all of these problems correlated with a single variable, and then decides the way to solve the problems is to ignore that variable.

History will remember “race blindness” with derision. A thousand years from now, people are going to be studying our society in textbooks. And they’re going to say “so they enslaved and then denied human rights to this group of people based on their skin color for hundreds of years. Then, they said they could undo the effects of all that just by pretending to ignore skin color on a going forward basis!” They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”

EDIT: shocked at the number of responses challenging my premise that blacks are equally capable to whites.

Must we? There's another comment here about no one seeming too bothered that the NBA doesn't contain very many Asians. Is it already too racist to believe that there are certainly trends in race, and that everyone is different and should be considered on their individual merits alone?

As a (Asian) friend once remarked, "raise the bar on us and we just jump higher. Lower the bar on the Blacks and they try even less, because they know they don't have to do as much."

Indeed, it seems all that making it harder for Asians and easier for Blacks has done is pushed the Asians harder to achieve even more, which certainly isn't helping equality much. A pretty good demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.

Just think about the racist stereotypes held by Americans towards Chinese and Japanese people during and prior to WWII.

Those stereotypes were not of the successful violin playing overachiever, I can promise you that.

Thus, for anyone willing to look in the mirror, all sorts of implicit biases and stereotypes or prejudices - racial or otherwise - must be called into question if you want to live a life of intellectual honesty with oneself.

When was the last time you heard about african Nobel prize winners? Or african artists/composers? African philosophers or generals?

The asians have Confucius, Sun Tzu, etc. speak for them.

Whom do the africans have?

That's pretty funny. So, are you including Ancient Egypt for Africa or only later? Because, as you know, so much is derivative of that civilization.

Otherwise, slightly more recently, do Shaka Zulu, Ras Mengesha Yohannes, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, count for generals? How about Mandela, Soyinka, and Tutu for Nobel prize winners?

And, of course, for more fun we can reference other categories of "achievement", the value of which is culture-specific, then ask which other cultures have matched those "achievements".

Asians still have advanced countries, on par with the biggest and largest white majority countries, do they not? Modern Egypt is a backwards country that is not even in top 100 countries by GDP, HDI, or whatever combination of meaningful metrics to describe a country's civilization level you might choose.

Peace prize is meaningless since Arafat and Obama got one too.

Literature prize is better (though nowhere near as good as hard sciences).

In Soyinka's case though, you don't have much of a leg to stand on, because he was educated in a British dominion and moved to the UK at the still tender age of 20.

> do Shaka Zulu, Ras Mengesha Yohannes, and Tariq ibn Ziyad, count for generals?

No. The first two were either backwards (Shaka argued for strategies that were essentially a zerg rush vs firearms) or woefully unequipped by the standards of the time. Indeed, Shaka's most known victory featured 10:1 numerical superiority. It was also a pyrrhic victory in the grand scheme of things, as the British sent competent officers later and steamrolled the Zulu.

As for Ziyad, few things are known about him and where's his "Art of War" or "On War"?

First, to throw out comparisons between two "groups" with completely different histories results in facile conclusions and fallacious attributions of causation (i.e. just like yours). Second, the idea that African Americans or Asians each represent a homegeneous group is just incorrect. Third, you don't account for billions of impoverished Asians who have not cleared that high-bar. Indeed, those who make it to Western nations like the U.S. are exceptional by definition.

Likewise, you talk about blacks needing a higher bar to clear as if slavery, Jim Crow, ongoing biases, misconceptions (i.e. like yours here) and outright discrimination aren't high enough. Indeed, by any reasonable acknowledgement of history, African Americans should be extinct. Yet, many are actually thriving. That is self-determination and "bar-clearing" that rivals or exceeds just about anything you can find in this country.

Remember, we're only ~150 years outside of slavery. There are people alive today whose lifespans overlap with those of formerly enslaved family members. And, of course, there are many alive today who lived through Jim Crow--that is codified discrimination. And, implicit and explicit biases are still rampant. Does that give you any sense of irony for suggesting that African Americans simply need a higher bar to clear?

Please stop comparing the African Americans who are struggling most with the exceptional Asians (or others) who have made it to American shores. Please expand your understanding of the real challenges that African Americans have historically faced and continue to face and reckon with the astounding achievements they have realized in spite of this.

Asians have not been systematically denied entry to the NBA for hundreds of years. I do not deny that there are ethnic differences or cultural priorities. But if a group of people has been systematically told for a very long time that they cannot achieve anything beyond being a slave, then that oppressed group would probably not bother to engage in technical or scientific pursuits, nor would they have time to pursue higher education because they were not allowed to do so.

Think about that: a group of people have been systematically given a chance to prove themselves, while another group was systematically prevented from doing the same. It's a systemic issue that requires a comprehensive solution. It must start with assuming the very assumption that you are questioning, since how else could start from a clean slate?

(1. And no, race blindness is not starting from a clean slate, it's denying the systematically-imposed disadvantages that already exists. 2. Your examples posing asians against blacks and asians rub me the wrong way, a bit like race baiting although I don't know you enough or the tone of your explanations to say for sure.)

But I did just fine, there was plenty of opportunity to succeed in other ways. But would the schools have benefited with a single person from my state or city, instead of more people from a big city prep school on the west coast? My family was much poorer than the typical white rich legacy at an ivy league. But i was white. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference and I'm fortunate, I doubt it hurt me.

I don't feel like I had a bad experience, but I'm just throwing this out there for the people complaining about prejudice because they are asian. My current company is full of successful, well educated asians, yet there were almost no black devs at google. Same for women. It was partly because there weren't any to interview or hire.

As an Asian who've experienced discrimination first hand, I am saddened that necessary differences in the gravity of error correction, as applied to group discrimination, is not obvious to everyone. Correcting the effects of slavery is much more important because its effects are much more pervasive. Getting rejected by a top school is not as dire for a group as a while, especially for someone in a group that is not even a minority at those schools. But I could see how someone could say what you said (but hopefully with at least a bit of explanation to back it up?).

Although the "denial of opportunity" seem systematic in both cases - Asians applying to Ivy League schools and enslaved African Americans in my examples - the latter is not due to space constraints. In contrast, Asians have not been or are under-represented. To me, that fact justifies a top school's effort to make access fairer to historically under-represented groups, whose cultural tendencies have been shaped long-term by outright denial.

Uh, source?

You're just making an arbitrary value judgement. Who are you to compare the effects of racism-against-blacks against the effects of racism-against-asians? You're making an arbitrary value judgement and then using that value judgement to justify systematic discriminations against Asians.

You're also ignoring the fact that Asians were enslaved too in Japanese internment camps -- and what's more that slavery was more recent than African-American slavery.

Weird to see you throw your own ethnicity under the bus in your haste to agree with the racist value judgements of elite bureaucrats tbh.

The way I see it, one group is arguing from a place of historical hardship, and the other is arguing from a place of privilege. I don't mean someone growing up poor in Appalachia as being privileged simply because s/he is white; to me, that historical background definitely counts towards raising diversity. I'm just trying to put myself in other people's shoes. It's not necessarily about race or ethnicity or recentness of oppression, it's the compounded interest of those oppressions and inability to rise out of that enforced debt. Our institutions have to factor that historical indebtedness.

Unless you really put yourself in another person's shoes, I honestly don't think this discussion will go anywhere. I mean, imagine growing up poor in a single household family, going to lowly ranked high schools, being disproportionately more likely to be stopped over and imprisoned for minor offenses, and getting questioned about academic abilities constantly.

You make a very unemotional, well reasoned and logical argument, I see.

I honestly think if we met in person we could laugh about this, and I would back off the emphathy angle a bit. It's just that the original question that I replied to was "must we" with regards to another group of people, and it's hard to explain why we must do so without looking at it from the other side.

"... I bet you cry during political speeches ... half-assed ... can't even believe ... " You make a very unemotional, well reasoned and logical argument, I see. I honestly think if we met in person we could laugh about this

Hahaha I totally agree. Well played my friend. Sorry for trolling ya so hard you just got my goat with the emotional rhetoric lol but I see you were just responding in kind to someone else. Have a good night man. :)

I find this comment goes deeper when I followed Jeremy Lin's progression into the NBA. I suggest anyone who is interested in your comment should read too. Lin wasn't systematically denied entry, but the kind of stuff he faced and endured based on his race - which was admitted to by a coach, was pretty bad.

And I feel this type of behavior that he faced - when your race is in the minority of the place you're trying to get to/be at - can be applied elsewhere. Like Black people thinking that others might think that they got there based on affirmative action and not by merit, or Asian Americans thinking that others think there are "too many Asians" here or the likes.

In some situations, minorities aren't being outright denied by law/whathaveyou but they are put in potentially "hostile" environments where they might feel like they don't belong, which can be akin to being denied socially.

Having said that, I still hope that the difference in priority and importance is obvious between: (a) correcting the impacts of hundreds of years of systematic outright denial of opportunity in all aspects of life, and (b) a top school's rejection of an applicant who do not belong to an under-represented group and who will likely get admitted in another top school or another very good school.

(b): under-represented because of the monolithic term Asian given to them. A lot of which are in poverty but seem to be overlooked based on being Asian. Someone else also mentioned the supposed under-represented group of Jewish people who stand at 1% but account for 40% of the cohort. Whoever gave those numbers was on this thread too - although I do believe a ratio similar to that is the real figure anyhow.

Says you. The whole concept of race is an aritifical construction, a barbaric vestige of the past that should be rightfully recognized for what it is, and cast off.

>Today, black people on average make 1/3 less income than white people. Even if society were totally race blind, some of that disparity would remain—it would be the legacy of when society wasn’t race blind. You can’t fix that injustice by ignoring race.

Of course you can. The issue is economic equality, not race. In your paradigm, just making a whole bunch of white people a lot poorer would be a fine solution, as there would be no economic disparity between "races". We need to strive towards a society where everyone has economic security and prosperity regardless of the tone of their skin or any historical prejudices their ancestors may have suffered at any time.

>I think history will remember “race blindness” with derision.

I think history will remember those who clung to the barbaric vestiges of the past with derision and as an impediment to social progess. We need a society that aims to lift all people out of poverty and powerlessness, not just the ones whose ancestors were discriminated against. Clinging to the injustices of the past and codifying racial polarization into law is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to evolve as a society.

You would have to deny evolution and genetic inheritance to think that different groups of people living apart for tens of thousands of years in vastly different environments didn't result in selection via external forces to better survive in those environments. Just look at the body type difference between an eskimo and a sub-Saharan african.

Yet the "idea" that we can create distinct categories based on geographical heritage is not only not-misguided, it's obvious. You're making a straw man argument because you're the only one isolating skin color alone as the sole determinant in race — albinos exist so obviously you're right. But geographical heritage (ie whether your parents came from Asia or Africa) not only creates distinct categories between people, but it's dishonest to say they don't.

You really telling me that the racial makeup of the NBA has nothing to do with geographical heritage? FOH lmaooo

Instead if we just introduce quotas, the system is not going to improve. Having 50 more blacks admitted to Harvard does not change anything for millions of African Americans who get lower quality education. This is just the easy way out for politicians.

That's what is happening here, but with Asians. Imagine you're Asian but not from a privileged background. Now not only you have to claw yourself out of that, not only you have to deal with not being white, but you also have to fight against the school's racial quota.

Odds aren't great for you. Worse, its' not just some society bias, it's not just people's racism...it's literally a rule. We're in 2018. Let's not have rules that screw over underprivileged people by race just because some subgroups of those race might make the statistics look in their favor.

No that is wrong. It’s not some elite white subgroup. According to the BLS: “Among the major race and ethnicity groups, median weekly earnings for Black men working at full-time jobs were $723, or 72.5 percent of the median for White men ($997).” That’s not even counting large differences in employment rates.

Put another way, if whites took a pay cut so they made the same as blacks, $1.6 trillion of national income would disappear, a number comparable to the total income of the entire top 1% ($2 trillion).

We’re not talking about elites. The median white person is much better off than the median black person.

Blacks are less than 10% of population in California and about 33% of population in Alabama. That it self will skew numbers in certain way.

http://www.usacityfacts.com/al/economy/

Your assertion that difference in American black/white incomes is largely due to differences in geographic distribution is wrong.

Isn't this how that is expected to look if the difference is due to elites? The total difference is equal to the amount made by the elites, almost all of whom are white. And that's assuming the "elites" are only the top 1% and not e.g. the top 20%.

Or look at it from the bottom side. The population of white people who make less than the median black person in the US is larger than the black population of the US.

Think carefully about if racial equality is truly your end goal. I agree that in a perfect world, there would be racial equality. I also agree that there were, and are, forces pushing us away from racial equality and that those forces are harmful.

Consider two children, one black and one white, who are in an approximately equal position. Why is it beneficial to give advantages to the black child just because his condition was caused by generations of discrimination, instead of, say, crappy parents. Perhaps it would be easier to consider the population of "low class" people [0]. Under what theory is it beneficial to discriminate in within this population?

This is not to say that, from a practical perspective, affirmative action is always wrong. For instance, if you have a white applicant and a black applicant that, by all available metrics, are equal; it is entirely possible that the black applicant is actually a better choice for reason that statistically exist, but which you fail to capture in your metrics. But, unless you are arguing that there are actually meaningful differences between the races, you are simply using race as a proxy for some measurable property(s). It would be better if we could measure that property directly (although, we often cannot).

If we simply force racial equality without address the root causes of the inequality, then we have two problems: The first problem is the harm caused by the initial racism. The second problem is the harm caused by the racism inherent in our method of forcing equality. There is also the benefit caused by incidentally addressing the root cause of the inequality; but since that is not what we are measuring, it is not clear how well we are doing with that.

[0] Yes, in general low class whites are better off than low class blacks. But the curves have enough overlap that it is possible to construct a population where the expected value of a white person is equal to that of a black person. That is the type of population I am talking about.

Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years. Look at rap music videos, thug culture, single motherhood statistics, etc. Meanwhile recent immigrants (asian americans) are passing them.

Culture is incredibly powerful and we don't all have the same culture.

I suspect you would hesitate to judge the entirety of white american cultural progress on e.g. Kim Kardashian, sporting event riots, and Nascar.

For anyone interested in a less monolithic assessment of black american culture, this is possible. https://nmaahc.si.edu

This is entirely your own subjective opinion and a very racist one. Except you can provide definite proof that show that rap music, jazz music etc somehow lead to 'self-destruction' (or even that single motherhood is some deliberate part of the culture) all you're doing is revealing your personal dislikes and biases. It is also a very selective statement - no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.

1)Prostitutes (And pimps and promiscuous sex and STDs that go along with that)

2)Guns (And you can bet those aren't being used for self-defense against wild animals when you travel to your remote cabin in the woods for a weekend)

3)Drugs (These are self-evidently bad, so no need to elaborate)

4)Money (Often obtained as a result of illegal use/exploitation of some or all of the above)

And even absent all that you can often hear lyrics about the performer singing about how he (or the song's protagonist) "couldn't make it in a white man's world": Afroman - Palmdale.

That type of depressive, often criminal culture seems to fit the description of "self-destruction".

> no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.

Neither rednecks nor hippies have any significant influence on how an average white american behaves. Most people would struggle to name any names.

Yet it's trivial for people to name a few prominent gangsta rappers. Heck, those who achieved cult status were shot in mid 90s.

Meanwhile uber-violent and hyper-sexualized mass-market movies, outright pornography, and death metal are largely produced by white people/entities. Should we discuss the influence they have on how ”average american whites” behave? For that matter, much of "gangsta rap" has been produced by white-owned entities.

In short, you provided the "four cornerstones of gangsta rap music". For each, we could just as easily plug in widely consumed, top-grossing films or other products of "white culture".

Meanwhile, back in the real-world, mass shootings seem to be the near-exclusive purview of white men. Shall we also opine on the destructiveness of white culture based on that?

The point is that racist generalizations don't help anyone.

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

2016: 38,658 2015: 36,247 2014: 33,599 2013: 33,636 2012: 33,563 2011: 32,351 2010: 31,672 2009: 31,347 2008: 31,593

Which year have mass shootings by whites amounted to at least 1% of total gun deaths?

As for Death Metal bands, how many of the performers in this genre have been arrested for gun-related crimes?

How many were killed by guns and went on to achieve cult status?

> are largely produced by white people/entities.

Jewish, not white. Jewish culture is distinct from generic white culture. You can get away with a lot with Jewish privilege, like Bill Maher's casual N-word use on television. A random white John Doe's career would have been done right there.

edit - Also by making that distinction btw 'jewish' and 'white' culture you're very plainly showing where you're coming from.

edit - I just took a look through your profile and now I'm not surprised at all. A very common theme emerges lol. You can disregard everything I said above since it won't make sense to you either way

I'm not white, I'm a minority in the country of my birth.

Do you have any arguments or are these ad hominems[0] all you got?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Can you even read? Go away race troll. Anyone can look through your comment history and see what you are. Not even American pffft.

* Also please monitor this user's posts. He has a history of posting fact-free racially inflammatory comments that would be more at home on a forum like 4chan. It would be nice if someone kept an eye on this account. A few examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071344

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jogjayr&next=1744780...

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gspetr&next=16069082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624778

A difference in outcome by itself in no way lays a requirement on society to 'drive that disparity to zero.' This is a baseless, indefensible assertion and leads to utter chaos when applied across society in the myriad ways one may analyze 'inequalities of outcome.'

Secondly and more to the point, there is no reason to privilege race over any other of the millions of filters with which to slice up society to find inequalities of outcome. And even if there was, showing a correlation between one of those filters (race) and an inequality does in no way show injustice 'based on race' no matter how emphatic the assertion.

People with different hair colors, or heights, last names, pet types, and sibling orders on average don't have identical outcomes. And these differences in outcome by themselves are not unjust, are mere correlations, and therefore do not require fixing. Just read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut; it's not long.

A second point above which needs addressing is that it simply does not follow logically that differences in outcome must be a result of 'social inefficiencies and failures.' Culture and biology are some other obvious causative factors, but there are others. There is no reason to adhere to a reductionist view in which everything is caused by social pressures.

There aren't massive systematic factors working to negatively affect specific slices of those population groupings. It's not a good comparison.

That's not to say that Harvard's approach is necessarily the best way to tackle this issue. But it's very difficult to argue that there isn't an issue at all.

Yes there are massive systemic factors working against people disadvantaged in those factors, and yes it is a good comparison. Look up the average height of CEOs sometime and then tell me height discrimination isn't a thing.

Just saying that height, facial attractiveness/symmetry, weight etc all could (unquantifiably but obviously) easily outweigh race in terms of societal privilege and it's just absurd to cherry pick the issue of race as the determining factor of privilege rather than something even more basic such as height or facial symmetry.

And that's not even accounting for the fact that (according to many academics at schools that ironically factor race into admission) race doesn't even exist while height and facial symmetry inarguably do exist.

TLDR I agree w u dude.

EDIT: HN won't let me reply to ur reply so let me say -- no my argument is very coherent. If you want to say that "it's not settled if race exists or not" then I agree. And I agree with your assertion that discrimination based on perceived racial characteristics is also obviously possible. I also never said that ppl who argue that race is only a social construct also are arguing that racism doesn't even exist, I don't even know where you got that from tbqh dude. This comment thread is weird to me because you're disagreeing with a ton of things I didn't even say and that I disagree with as well. I don't know why you're so hell-bent on disagreeing with straw man arguments you project onto me because all your points are solid bro and I agree with them all, except for your nonsensical assertion that I don't agree with u. Uhhh trust me bro, yes I do lmao. :)

Outcomes are what they are, all you can do is make the process fair and let people do what they would like to. There are infinite groupings you can make of people (race just 1 aspect) and no matter what you pick, you will see group A be better or worse on some metric than group B.

Wanting to equalize outcomes based on random aspects is a recipe for chaos. Even if we reset the world tomorrow and gave everyone exactly the same resources, the inequality would appear within minutes. Therefore there is no purpose beyond emotional feel-good to say that everyone should be the same at the end because it only leads to misery by all.

The premise is flawed - beyond wishful thinking, do you have any reasons to believe in equal capabilities across e.g. all racial groups for any given activity? Because there is vastly more research showing the contrary.

> They’re going to see “race blindness” for what it is—an attempt to sweep under the rug generations of oppression because it’s uncomfortable and we’d rather pretend “we’re all good now, right?”

Because at some point, we're gonna have to move on from this perpetual oppression and victimhood mentality. What solutions do you propose to correct "generations of oppression" that do not oppress other racial groups?

And yes, the only way to remove discrimination is to eliminate it completely. Anything short of that is still just discrimination by a different name.

Reminds of the "I Don't See Race" skit by CollegeHumor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qArvBdHkJA

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

That's not really accurate. If you look at the Coleman report, the main study that was done in the run up to school desegregation and forced busing, it showed a bunch of negative impacts to changing the racial balance of institutions too quickly. That research was largely ignored, which in part lead to white flight, inner city gangs, and a bunch of other issues we still haven't really recovered from to this day.

Contrast this to the integration of gays in the military, which was done over a few years rather than all at once and went much more smoothly -- you didn't see any major issues or society-wide backlash as a result.

The point is that policies that ignore race often make racial issues more salient and pronounced as a result, rather than leading to a society where race isn't a factor or whatever. That's not to say that Harvard isn't doing anything wrong, but it's naive to assume that ignoring race is going to lead to some sort of post racial society.

C.f.: http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/0400web/18.html

It's actually still one of the biggest studies ever done and probably that ever will be done, because it was conducted before they really understood the math behind representative samples and statistical significance, so it had way more participants than were actually needed.

White students (the vast majority) targeted the black students, who then formed gangs to protect themselves. There is a good multi-decade ethnography of the effects of various changes in public policy and society on one particular high school here: https://www.amazon.com/World-We-Created-Hamilton-High/dp/067...

The high school is anonymized, but iirc it's somewhere in Syracuse, NY.

Note that (at least afaik) that's not directly where our modern national-scale gangs come from, although White flight and the collapse of cities surely did contribute there also.

I'm not defending it, just recognizing discrimination is not an end for them but a means to what they consider a just society.

Suppose administrating Harward requires high economics and management skills. Only say 10% if total population has those skills and 1% is black... How do you know if the input is biased? Easy, check it. Then fix the problem at the source if possible.

Edit: I'm not pretending to be obtuse here - I'm actually questioning why an elite university should be representative of US demographics rather than the world.

I don't know how anyone can come up with a racial quota and call it fair.

Harvard has roughly 20% international students, whereas the US as a whole has about 0.6% lawful non immigrants[1].

[1]https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Nonimmi...

The percentage also rises with higher degrees - people often finish their undergrad in their home country, then go to the US for their graduate degree. But undergrads are the bulk of college student bodies.

So overall, most college students in the US are from the US.

Harvard and the other Ivies don't want to keep out asian people. They want to keep out boring, myopic applicants who spend all day studying to achieve the grades and scores they have and show little sign of interest in contributing to the outside world beyond getting a well-paying job as a lawyer or doctor and raising a family comfortably.

The Ivies get thousands and thousands of applications like this: with incredible academic credentials but nothing else to recommend the applicant. They could fill their entire classes with just applicants like this. And this cohort of applicants just happens to be very very very asian.

In a way it's not dissimilar from how VCs want to invest in founders looking to go big. Founders working on lifestyle businesses are not worth their time. Ivies want to turn out a lot of professionals yes, but they also want to turn out artists, politicians, bankers, military officers and so forth.

I'd say a university's doctoral programs are designed to "expand horizons and channel the talents of hard-working people toward productive and fulfilling ends". Their undergraduate programs are to perpetuate a base of influence and financial prosperity across as many spheres of society as possible and their masters programs are to print money from selling credentials to middling corporate people looking for a leg up.

Highly recommend people read (about) the following book by Jerome Karabel: The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion At Harvard, Yale, And Princeton.

Would also recommend Daniel Golden's The Price of Admission.

Prof. Frank Wu's insight might also be useful here (from ~1:10 onward): https://youtu.be/PrDbvSSbxk8

Forgive the question, but that is a general statement to a specific case, and I am having trouble seeing the clear path between your statement and the article. Can you elaborate?

Are you taking the position that any and all attempts to shape admissions into universities based on race are misguided and regressive? The specific case here being discriminatory or not seems to be more related and less vague, you've generalised the article into a statement that is kind of hard to elaborate on.

Regardless of whether racial quotas (hard or soft) are a good thing or not, I would certainly think it is an important data point, and at the very least demonstrates a weakness in society that merits attention.

If one race is by far receiving admission over all others, then I do think there should be moved being made to ask why, and how to fix the problem.

The specifics of this particular incidence seem more pertinent to this article rather than a statement on racial quotas as a whole.

Besides that, parsing your logic, I think you completely missed parent's point.

The way I wrote that is because on issues like this, people get quite charged one way or another, so I wanted to avoid anything personal and just hear the specifics. I'm definitely putting myself into the deep end on this stuff, so I want to hear more on the arguments from both sides - and also the specifics on this case because a lot of it slides past my understanding, and I'd like to know how off base I might be (or not be).

I'm kind of sad I'm getting downvoted, and not really told why - I can't halt my opinions if I don't know why they're so against the grain (or against rules or something).

What is the parent's point that I missed?

I suppose I should have front loaded the comment, I was basically saying there was too wide a net cast by that comment so it was difficult to get into the grits of it.

Fair call.

What about other clearly obvious racial biases. Is it a problem that the NBA lacks Asian players?

No, just one way that arguably is a place to do it. I don't believe there is a silver bullet.

>What about other clearly obvious racial biases. Is it a problem that the NBA lacks Asian players?

There are some parallels to think about here, but on the whole no, and I think the main reason there is because we view Physical pursuits differently than mental ones.

We know that different races have generally different physical attributes, as well as a culture surrounding a specific sport, however I think as a society we view work as a mostly purely mental pursuit (that is arguable too of course), and we do not view it to have a restriction based on race as no particular race is smarter than another. NBA has a base requirement of a certain physical element, which is hard to overcome with the mental side, and if your particular race is known to be taller as a whole than you'll get more people being good at it.

I don't think it is as simple as that (culture and race intertwine a fair bit here...) but the low and the short of it I think is that. Culture plays a part in grass roots numbers of people picking up the sport and going with it of course. And there is argument there about whether it should be promoted more to other cultures/races specifically.

I don't have an answer though, I don't know much about NBA.

And Harvard's admissions aren't just about selecting the best collection of individual students. It's about selecting the best cohort of students. It's not just teachers that educate students, it's other classmates and a diversity of perspectives benefits all students. A good chef doesn't just choose all the most expensive ingredients, they try to balance flavors. Admissions departments should do the same, since their goal is to maximize the post-graduation success of the class they assemble, not to capture as much pre-admission achievement as possible.

For me, college was a time when I broadened my perspectives greatly. I can remember a discussion on, somewhat ironically, affirmative action in admissions, in which an African-American student said he didn't support it. His reasoning, which was eye opening to me at the time, was that he had no way of knowing whether he actually belonged there and worried that people looked at the color of his skin and assumed he got into school because of his race and not his intelligence. Up until that moment, I'd always looked at affirmative action as benefiting minorities at the expense of more deserving students. But I'd never consider the emotional toll it took on minorities. And that moment also drove home the fact that I'd never have gotten to hear that perspective if he hadn't been in that discussion group and, therefore, my education had been improved by his presence. After I made those points, it seemed to hit him that his presence there was valuable to the rest of us and not just the more limited way he'd seen it before. It was a bit of a kumbaya moment and several students remarked that their views of affirmative action had become more nuanced and (pardon the pun) less black and white.

The one area where I do agree with you is that I think racial categories often lack the nuance necessary to have that broadness of perspective in a college class. Lumping Southeast Asians, East Asians and South Asians together, for example, feels wrong to me. Similarly, lumping American caucasians with Russians, Scandanavian or Spanish people feels equally reductionist. Within the overly-broad racial categories, there's a lot of diversity that isn't necessarily recognized.

This. Logged in just to upvote your comment. The broad racial categories we currently use are just idiotic. It's like using nothing but a blunt mallet for every household repair job. Some more nuance in racial categorization or even just doing away with it altogether and using something else (place of origin, ethnicity, economic circumstance) would probably be a good thing as a whole.

Can you explain what's your definition of "post-racial"? I have seen it defined at least 2 ways: (1) Past the period the anti-racism laws were enacted (2) The period when the effects of racism are over. There are many ways to measure it. One possible way is to check if races that were victims of racism have proportional representation in jobs.

- don’t explicitly consider race, gender, etc., while you make a decision about a cohort of admitted applicants. That is, only use other “performance” criteria (grades, essay, recommendations, etc).

- ensure that post facto, the observed distribution of demographic properties of your cohort of admitted students fairly reflects the natural distribution, within a societally acceptable margin of error.

The problem is that these two goals are in conflict for at least two reasons, one big and one small.

The small reason is that a person’s most salient “performance” metrics might involve direct relationship to their role in a religious community, race-related organization, etc., such that it is impossible to treat it like a truly demographic-blind process.

The big reason is that for whatever performance criteria you pick, like grades, test scores, essays, community involvement, etc., there is endemic and generational discrimination and privilege issues that can mean even if you truly did not want to make decisions based on race, religion, nationality, etc., you inadvertently did just by using proxies for societal scale discrimination or disadvantage in those categories.

So in the end, you can see why a big organization or corporation is terrified and would rather use quotas to explicitly control the relative ratios and acceptance ratios on a category-by-category basis.

I’m not trying to defend it. I think it’s a bad thing.

But what do we do? It seems like a lose-lose.

- If you ensure perfect decision blindness to race, religion, nationality, etc., you’ll end up admitting a cohort of students that greatly favors basically wealthy white people, because whatever proxies you do use will encode longterm privilege deeply enmeshed in them, way beyond whatever we are consciously aware of.

- If you do explicitly consider race, religion, nationality, etc., to try to manually control rates of admission per each possible category, you can ensure the admitted cohort has the overall demographic statistics you want, but only by explicitly making race, religion, etc., as major driving factors that are explicitly and consciously weighted into the admission decision.

Agreed. However, it seems to rest on confusing race for class. How about we just focus on class and get all the benefits (pick up the poorest; policy that attempts to correct those suffering generational discrimination) without the negatives that come with race based policy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c...

Some of the stats are on rankings based on race are here [1]. I suspect its not as cut and dry as the lawsuit alleges: (pg 36) [1]https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/diverse-education/file...

Also for that report:

"These data show that even if Harvard wanted to admit every student with elite academic credentials, it could not. Harvard admits roughly 1,800 domestic students each year, yet thousands of applicants have impeccable academic qualifications.9

For example, based on the statistics in Exhibit 2, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect GPA, it would need to reject at least 6,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants. Similarly, even if Harvard sought to admit only applicants with a perfect Math SAT score, it would need to reject nearly 2,000 such applicants and all other domestic applicants."

( I didn't go the Harvard, but I do work there)

I would claim that this score would strongly suffer from racial bias. A cohort admitted based on this score would look like a cohort where certain racial groups historically disadvantaged would appear to have been directly disadvantaged by the admissions choices, despite the process being fully race-blind.

And the same for religious affiliation, gender, able-bodiedness, and various other designations.

So while nobody consciously evaluating admission criteria would have ever considered e.g. race, it nonetheless would have been a major determining factor in the decisions.

The question is if society does not want that outcome, then what steps is the university allowed to take to fix it? It seems explicitly considering e.g. race ahead of time, to ensure an acceptable cohort demographic distribution, is not OK. So then what else?

>>“A university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness,’” Justice Kennedy wrote, quoting from a landmark desegregation case. “Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission.

>>“But still,” Justice Kennedy added, “it remains an enduring challenge to our nation’s education system to reconcile the pursuit of diversity with the constitutional promise of equal treatment and dignity.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court...

I guess being transparent about how you are doing admissions is probably the best way forward, but it leads to lawsuits when the data doesn't look like expected. Expect statistical analysis of this data from both sides saying what they want.

How long can elite bureaucrats play games of selecting winners and losers before we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt?

Barriers to entry to competition will always be deleterious to results. Especially when those barriers to entry are based on financial incentives and racism.

And let's be honest, anyone familiar is fully aware that at the very least, you can quite easily coast through Harvard if you don't care about your GPA or major.

The discussion should be about 'what's stopping us from giving everyone open access and opportunity,' not 'we must reject thousands of qualified candidates, let's have a law suit to decide the correct number of Asians.'

Is it a factory for high GPA? A community? Some other thing?

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, and your disposes bureaucrats have a point. My parents left the big city and moved to the country when I was in middle school. I went to a big public university. I’ve seen a few perspectives of these matters and I’ll tell you straight out that the culture in the melting pot urban environment of my youth was more vital and functional than the mostly white farm town or 90% south/east asian sciences programs that I attended in college.

University should challenge your view of the world, and a community of rich suburbanites and tiger-mom kids isn’t where that will happen.

We should attack the discrimination of employees based on university pedigree — that’s the nasty thing that enables bad behavior, and the thing turning colleges into the monsters is education/entertainment/branding machines that they have become.

It did always use to be like that. In the 70s and 80s there was a focus back on individuals regardless of their race, gender or origin. This trend to put quotas goes with the wave of political correctness that started pretty much in the early 90s.

All of those subjective ratings should be heavily correlated, as they are all trying to measure the same things.

I wouldn't go so far. If your measures always correlate, why have separate measures? The point is when one measure disagrees with the others, it should say something meaningful. In this case, the disagreement appears to say "this student is Asian."

The application process becomes a strict meritocracy when all of these points (race/name/need) are blocked, which works in a perfect world but does not work when you consider that socioeconomic disparities tend to impact minority races the most. Strict meritocracies are favored in the bay but are substantially out of favor everywhere else precisely because so many minorities are born directly into a disadvantage.

To encourage the leveling of socioeconomic success, race-aware admissions will probably be necessary until we as a country start seeing success in moving the odds of economic success closer to the center rather than in favor of white males.

Anyway this isn't really a commentary on this specific lawsuit so much as it's a response to the suggestion of blinding multiple other categories out.

Access to education has been one of the best thing to happen to minorities, and Asians are a good example of that. Most came from poor immigrant families and in the space of 2 generations they made it to top universities. So what exactly were we doing wrong? Seems to me the system is clearly working as a social escalator.

(circa 1998) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...

(Circa 2015) https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-ed...

(Circa 2017) http://college.usatoday.com/2017/03/07/report-the-race-gap-i...

The overarching theme is that non-asian minority populations may be disparately affected by adverse conditions continuously perpetuated on them such as single-parenting.

And before we conclude that single-parenting is the fault of the parent -- no, not generally. It's generally the fault of the society that disparately targets adults of a given background for separation or incarceration.

If we're being frank, neither white majority nor Asian minority populations have had to deal with imposed inadequacies in family structure.

TL;DR: Asian immigrants are more likely to have support networks similar to the majority population, something frequently deprived from other minority populations in the US.

If I remember correctly the US government kind of encourages single parenthood through several incentive schemes instead of promoting families, and this has made ravages in black communities since it was implemented. Time to repeal bad policies?

Thomas Sowell on this very topic: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/07/slavery-didnt-cause-t...

People tend to forget that minorities being born directly into a disadvantage include Asians/Asian-Americans.

So by penalizing the whole band of Asian races to even out admission, a whole bunch of materially disadvantaged Asian populations end up less favored than their African counterparts.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs.

I think this sometimes gets overlooked - no matter what form it takes, the system of college credentialism is in itself fairly arbitrary and removed from actual merit. It shouldn't be surprising that such a system tends to run into a lot of problems.

under pressure to deliver a target mix of ethnicities sounds more like, we do not have a hard quota but we have a wink-and-nod quota.