Many people get out of India to escape this nonsense. Sad to see USA follow the backward path.
Let me guess which caste you think you'll end up.
How does it even work practically? What stops an Asian American from saying they are African American?
Dividing humans into different races just an insane concept that has no place in the 21st century.
I am not arguing that such discrimination or racial categories are valid.
Other countries have official recognized minorities which you get from your parents, or use the birth nationality of your (grand)parents.
Good thing India's only been a multicultural society for decades.
Asians are part of society too, and yet Asian-American children have dramatically different and more stressful childhoods than their counterparts - a constant churn of studying, stress, and pressure, compared to the relatively carefree childhoods of their peers.
It disgusts me that you can say "this is good for America" - are Asian-American children not Americans? Asian-American children have to go through a nightmare to have a chance at opportunities comparable to their peers, simply because of the color of their skin. This is the literal definition of racism.
> You cannot justify holding Asian-Americans to a higher level because "they can handle it."
The person you're replying to didn't say anything like that.
> It disgusts me that you can say "this is good for America" when Asian-American children have to go through a nightmare to have a chance at opportunities comparable to their peers, simply because of the color of their skin.
I agree, but I think I understand what they meant. They're suggesting that the benefit to society of having more diversity in the higher educated (and then higher income, etc) brackets outweighs the harm to society from unfair admissions. It's certainly a way start rebalancing the race distribution of the "upper classes" of society.
I'm not sure why their comments are dead. I don't necessarily agree, but it's a valid point of view.
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/05/brazils-new-problem-wit...
>of sufficiently different populations is just demonstratably wrong.
The difficult lies in translating 'race' to 'populations.' A population of 'people born in India' is extremely well defined and lends itself to stochastic and scientific analysis. Many ideas of race are not so well defined, and can't be put into clearly laid out population of persons. The slight of hand here is your use of the word 'population' when we were speaking of 'race.'
Can you walk me through which DNA algorithm you're referring to that matches self-reported 'race' 99.9999% of the time?
College admissions departments already check to see if applicants are lying about race, e.g. by looking up their social media. Instead of scanning DNA, they could ask for some documentary evidence if they think an applicant is lying.
That's taking it way too far. Genotyping populations identifies variation, and in cases where populations that have been reproductively isolated for tens of thousands of years (e.g. western Europeans and west/central Africans) are now in proximity, there will be substantial variation that is idiosyncratic to each population.
In the US, reproductively isolated populations were suddenly placed in the same territory, and taboos on inter-racial mating persisted until very recently (50% toleration in the mid-1990s). One can accurately tell whether an American is phenotypically white versus black (or mixed) by DNA.
That isn't to say that our ability to predict accurately black-vs-white will remain. The more race-mixing, the less ability to accurately categorize. We'll instead move to a situation similar to the one in which 'white' people find themselves today, where they are mixes of x percent of a variety of populations and not categorically 'Dutch,' 'Irish,' 'Finnish,' etc.
Race is a sociological concept, yes, but it reflects reality in that people are visibly different. These differences are genetic in origin. It just so happens that in some cases, (e.g. two reproductively isolated and visibly distinct populations suddenly in contact with one another), these social categorizations will map to biological ones. In other cases where there is convergent evolution in terms of physical appearance, they won't.
I claimed you can predict 99.9999% of people's self-identified race from their DNA. Is that wrong? How high does that number have to be before you'd call it non-pseudo-science?
I know what meiosis is, that isn't in dispute here.
>College admissions departments already check to see if applicants are lying about race, e.g. by looking up their social media.
Isn't that just checking for consistency? Say I change my mind about what race I am due to it being typically poorly defined. Many children have changing views about race over time, so it seems quite absurd to expect a literal child applying for college applications to fully understand and stay consistent about a topic that is constantly evolving and often nebulous. What you know at age 13 when opening your first facebook may not match your understanding of yourself at 17 when applying for college. And it's not clear to me what objective definition we are using of 'races' to make sure every applicant is following the same standard for determining when the applicant is lying and when they are not.
> Say I change my mind about what race I am due to it being typically poorly defined.
But it isn't poorly defined. Your race is the combination of your parents'.
You're trying to use some college definition of race, and I don't know what sort of indoctrination made you that way, but that's not what people actually mean by race.
Like, middle easterners who are Republican might call themselves white, while politically involved Democrats might call themselves "people of color". I know two siblings who probably split down this divide. But even if they do, they're actually the same race, because they have the same parents.
>But it isn't poorly defined. Your race is the combination of your parents'.
This is circular reasoning. My race is a combination of my parents' <race>. So my race is my parents' combined race? The fact that you resort to this fallacy makes a great case that race ISN'T well defined.
Using your own (recursive) definition (which eventually recurses all the way up to the first reproducing organism from which we came), if humans all have a common ancestor (such as some single-cellular organism), then we're all the race of whatever that common parent is. Following our 'parents' all the way up, we should finally come to the first organism(s) to exist. We'd all be the same 'race'.
>You're trying to use some college definition of race, and I don't know what sort of indoctrination made you that way, but that's not what people actually mean by race.
I'm trying to understand how I can determine what race someone is. You mention 'middle easterner.' How can I determine with 99.9999% accuracy who is a 'middle easterner.'
Your comment about 'college' 'indoctrination' is purely ad hominem fallacy, specious anti-academic attack designed to negatively portray something perceived as an educated opinion. This is coming completely out of left field and seems to be a lashing out for some sort of internal axe you have to grind.
>Like, middle easterners who are Republican might call themselves white, while politically involved Democrats might call themselves "people of color". I know two siblings who probably split down this divide. But even if they do, they're actually the same race, because they have the same parents.
This comment seems to work against the notion that self-reported race is 99.9999% predictable by DNA.
> OK, so define to me then the algorithm
Lol, like I'm going to waste my time doing that. Trace back ancestry until the family trees circle in on themselves. Identify and pick out the clusters and subclusters as finely as you think appropriate.
> Your comment about 'college' 'indoctrination' is purely ad hominem fallacy,
Are you not regurgitating something you learned in college? Then where are you regurgitating it from?
It's fair to say you're regurgitating indoctrination because virtually everybody else, unlike you, knows their racial background in an objective sense.
What statement are you referring to me 'regurgitating'? I'm college educated but in the field of engineering, I don't recall having a discussion of this sort in college. Your statement is coming completely out of left field and frankly perplexing, again it seems you have some weird axe to grind about higher education.
>It's fair to say you're regurgitating indoctrination because virtually everybody else, unlike you, knows their racial background in an objective sense.
If I can 'know' my 'racial background' (which seems to mean race, otherwise this is just a red herring statement) in an 'objective sense', why would the bar be whatever I 'think' myself to be (your first sentence). Objective would mean my own opinions and personal feelings are irrelevant, thus someone else can make the call equally as well as myself with same available facts. Otherwise you would put the word 'subjective' here. What 'objective' facts are we using to determine my race?
That is:
>They would be correctly identified as their middle eastern ethnicities that they think themselves to be.
Contradicts
>virtually everybody else, unlike you, knows their racial background in an objective sense.
The second thing I learn from your first statement is that you seem to be saying race is what you(they) 'think themselves to be', and race is determined by self-selection. I honestly don't know what my race is from an 'objective' sense, that's why I'm asking you to provide a clear definition of what the races are and how to place each person in those buckets in an objective and fully defined way.
>Lol, like I'm going to waste my time doing that. Trace back ancestry until the family trees circle in on themselves. Identify and pick out the clusters and subclusters as finely as you think appropriate.
When pressed you clearly fail to either cite an algorithm that predicts self-selected race with 99.9999% parity, nor are you going to 'waste your time doing that.' So it's a completely unsubstantiated claim, along with virtually every other subjective opinion you offer. Presenting completely unsubstantiated claims as fact and then refusing to cite evidence nor 'waste your time' creating it, is precisely why I believe persons such as yourself are engaging in 'pseudo-science.'
Are you actually arguing some banal argument about taxonomic groupings in the edge cases or is it something else, where people can just make up their race?
Please explain why a professor had to resign for "lying" about being black: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/professor-who-lied...
Please describe the algorithm that makes her non-black.
I'm unable to come up with a number with a complete lack of evidence that points me towards one. And apparently, neither are you.
>Are you actually arguing some banal argument about taxonomic groupings in the edge cases
Edge case of _what_? We haven't even figured out where the 'edges' are, or even the centers. You've talked about 'objective sense' of 'racial background', so we need to know objectively what you are saying these groups are and define them in a way we know where the edge even is from a factual objective viewpoint. How many races are there anyway, can we list them? Does everyone fit or self-select into a certain list of races, and if not how can we factor that into admissions? What happens during admissions if they're unable to truthfully say what race they think they are?
>They would be correctly identified as their middle eastern ethnicities that they think themselves to be.
You've implied here race is what they 'think themselves to be.' It's not clear to me whether that means they can make up their race, but either you're imposing some races on these people or they are indeed coming up with the race for themselves. Seems to be at odds with your flippant remarks about a circumstance 'where people can make up their race.'
>Please describe the algorithm that makes her non-black.
I never claimed that there was any way to determine 'race', which is such a nebulous concept that it borders on absurd to include it in determining college admission or employment decisions. It's not clear to me that 'black' (in the context of 'race') is objectively defined, but if it is please educated me.
>Please explain why a professor had to resign for "lying" about being black
To determine whether she is lying about being 'black', I would have to know how to define (in context of 'race') 'black.' Is black a race? What determines if someone is black? Is it that they merely consistently say they are black? Is it lying to change your mind about what your race is? Is it lying if you state you are black, while actually being black, but believe you're not telling the truth? If someone looks 'black' but says they are 'white', are they lying? Making hiring and admission decision based on these factors just seems absurd.
The best argument I can find for firing this person is if they were acting maliciously or unprofessionally inconsistent, not because of a racial component. People shouldn't be fired because of their race.
>Please describe the algorithm that makes her non-black.
You're the one who made the claim race had some stochastic parity with self-selection. I personally can't say what 'non-black' even means, neither to you nor from some objective definition. This is a question for yourself, since you've made the assertion 99.9999% parity of DNA with self-selected race (which in one of your early sentences, you did indicate race is self-selected at least for 'middle eastern ethnicities'.)
Strange, most black guys could.
Special admission can benefit marginalized low income communities if one of their students gets a step up. For example, a student of low socioeconomic status (or from under representative race). Let's say they qualify for a special admission. They train hard for years to become a doctor. It may be advantageous to have a doctor that can look back at where they grew up, hopefully putting resources in future to help others in their community.
Not only that, those marginalized communities can lose trust in the system, so seeing people who do 'make it' can be a motivator for others.
I do understand the predicament though. It's a shame we can't increase the number of spaces available. At some point there has to be a cut off. a hard decision to make.
India has had caste based reservations for a while. There is no going back. Now sometimes 60 to 80 percent of government jobs or higher education seats are reserved.
A sad joke.
There's your problem. Not the fact that there's affirmative action, but that it doesn't reflect society. Affirmative action should always result in outcomes that reflect society. So 60% is fine if 60% of the population are dalits (or whatever the protected class is). Basically you review it every few years so that it always reflects society.
I feel like you've taken this position as a fact without having any evidence supporting it.
Well, one difference between America and Malaysia is that majorities of every American racial group oppose racial preferences [1]. There is support for affirmative action in the sense of removing barriers and leveling playing fields, but racial preferences are quite unpopular. Even supermajorities of Democrats oppose them. They are only popular among Democratic elites.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...
I don't think ignoring the impact of the British being in charge and how that advantage flowed on to the Indian population, that they imported into Fiji to work for the British, is helpful at all.
The British turned up, imported a bunch of Indians, and fucked up the local social structure.
The 26% and 10% have a culture of striving, and they typically aspire towards business and/or the professions.
The 60% (the majority) are indigenous and had civilization that stretches back centuries. However, they did not (and do not) have a achievement-oriented culture and therefore are not given to striving (at least in comparison to the former groups).
For the longest time, the 26% and the elite among the 10% controlled the economy. This all came to a head when racial riots broke out, after which the government introduced affirmative action favoring the 60%, for exactly the reasons you outlined -- to create racial harmony and to quell the racial resentment.
In a sense, it worked. For decades racial strife was low, at the expense of marginalizing the capable 26% and 10%.
The problem is that once you introduce affirmative action, it becomes a political tool for staying in power, and no government can ever remove it without risking losing an election.
Affirmative action is a short term band-aid. If you keep it on for too long, people depend on it and the entire system degrades, especially when it applies to a large enough number of people. People lose the incentive to strive to do better, and the standards go down to accommodate the lowest common denominator. Affirmative action in my country has led to an overall decline in competency in many fields, and a brain drain of the people who are marginalized to neighboring countries and beyond. With every passing year, my country is surpassed by other countries in the region.
The feedback loop of stomping on meritocracy (where ascribed qualities like skin color or race are elevated over competence) is self-reinforcing. Our politics has gotten worse, we're getting less and less competitive by the day, and competitive forces are eating our lunch. We may have a more equal pie, but we got there by pulling everybody down so our pie is smaller. The society feels stagnant and continues to degrade. This is my lived experience.
The country next to us has also achieved low racial strife, but they adopted much more directed and -- I dare to say -- more social darwinist policies. They are economically much more successful than we are, and much more dynamic than we are, even though we both started out with similar initial conditions.
I do think we need to have a society where everyone has an equal shot at social mobility. However I also believe that affirmative action is too blunt an instrument for achieve that and it is one that creates vicious feedback loops that are politically difficult to get out of even when it's clear its usefulness is over.
So no, I'm not a big fan of affirmative action as it is conceived here in this article. To achieve a more equal society you cannot merely force equality by tweaking the gates, because (1) there's irreducible variance among humans that you quell at your own peril, (2) some of those gates are important -- remember Chesterton's fence. It's clear to me that a more thoughtful approach than affirmative action (or even a more thoughtful kind of affirmative action) is needed.
At the same time, you forget that this reverse-discrimination is usually justified under the guise of "perpetual" repression by the other group. It's a mess all-around and we're just adding additional layers of complexity and blame to go around. I.e. now you're punishing completely innocent people and breeding resentment, whilst telling the other group that they have essentially a repressive enemy. That is Not good for society.
I honestly don't know how we convinced ourselves that this entire thing is good. We will be judged by our future generations.
They're in a wonderful place. Your argument seems to be that the "rat race" is the optimal human condition. I disagree. Better themselves? That implies that there's something wrong with them in the first place.
> now you're punishing completely innocent people and breeding resentment, whilst telling the other group that they have essentially a repressive enemy. That is Not good for society.
Nobody is being punished. Student of X culture has to work hard to get a scholarship. He is competing with everyone else in X culture. Student of Y culture has to work hard to get a scholarship. He is competing with everyone else in Y culture. Everyone gets a chance, and if they fall short they have nobody to blame but themselves.
However based on the evidence presented, the admission policies at Harvard (and other schools like it) were absolutely appalling. The systematically lower "personality" scores for Asian applicants and the dean of admission's testimony about "geographic" diversity[1] paint the picture of a school that did not ask Asian American applicants to make a sacrifice in the name of the great good, but rather told them they did not deserve a spot on merit because they were boring, foreign grinds.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/opinion/affirmative-actio...
So what exactly does my anecdata mean? Exactly nothi g. But So does your "argument" (you didn't make one except touting a statement full of subliminal racism in the context of this discussion).