"Lead to better outcomes" is going to need a lot of defending here.

Since we're talking about outcomes for various races, I presume that "better" has to be defined in terms of society as a whole. So:

1. What is your definition of "better"? (And maybe also for "outcomes".)

2. What is your metric for "better"?

3. What is your evidence that racially representative cohorts lead to better outcomes?

Some specific research on the educational benefits of diversity [1] ---

White students with the most experience with diversity during college demonstrated:

- the greatest growth in active thinking processes as indicated by increased scores on the measures of complex thinking and social/historical thinking (confirmed in the MSS and IRGCC studies);

- growth in motivation in terms of drive to achieve, intellectual self-confidence, goals for creating original works (confirmed in the CIRP study);

- the highest post-graduate degree aspirations (confirmed in both CIRP & MSS studies);

- and the greatest growth in students values placed on their intellectual and academic skills (confirmed in the CIRP study).

...

Students who took part in the IRGCC as first-year students, compared to a matched sample who did not participate in this program, showed greater growth over four years in active thinking, stronger citizenship engagement as seniors, greater acceptance of difference as compatible with societal unity, greater growth in perspective taking, greater mutuality in orientations toward their own groups and toward other groups, and greater understanding of conflict as a normal, indeed healthy, aspect of social life.

A bit about the legal system and the SAT [2] ---

A 1987 report of the Michigan Supreme Court, reached the same conclusion, noting that "the presence of minorities in the profession increases public perception of fairness." And a 1998 report re-affirmed that position, stating that by "reflect[ing] the diversity of the constituency it serves," the justice system avoids "[t]he appearance of bias, as well as the reality of bias."

...

For example, the SAT measures only about 18 percent of the factors that determine freshman grades. Even that small predictive value decreases over time. SAT scores are thus less predictive of sophomore grades, even less predictive of graduation rates, and even less predictive of professional success.

A warning and a reality check [3] ---

The impact of race-neutral admissions would be especially drastic in admission to professional schools. The proportion of black students in the Top Ten law, business and medical schools would probably decline to less than 1 percent. These are the main professional schools from which most leading hospitals, law firms and corporations recruit. The result of race-neutral admissions, therefore, would be to damage severely the prospects for developing a larger minority presence in the corporate and professional leadership of America.

...

By the year 2030, approximately 40 percent of all Americans are projected to be members of minority groups. More than $600 billion in purchasing power is generated by minorities and more than one-third of all new entrants to the workforce are persons of color. In this environment, a diverse corporate leadership can be valuable both to understand the markets in which many companies sell and to recruit, manage, and motivate the workforce on which corporate performance ultimately depends.

---

The idea here is that postsecondary education is really the gateway to power and prosperity in the US (sure there are other roads, but at a high level this is true). If we only use test scores--like the SAT--we'll shut out racial minorities from the process. The consequences of this is that education will suffer, our businesses and markets will fail to serve racial minorities, and faith in institutions will weaken as racial minorities are barred from the educations that will give them access to economic prosperity and impactful roles in our society. Furthermore, diversity is great for education for every student, not just the direct beneficiaries of affirmative action.

[0]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/

[1]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/gurin...

[2]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/intro...

[3]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/bowen...

What’s the operative mechanism for that “racism?” And how on earth did white people design a “racist” test on which they underperform Asians?

> Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes

I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.

> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.

I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).

> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers. Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.

And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.

> I get this is frustrating for folks when they're denied admission, and I definitely understand to some degree the feeling of unfairness that comes with it being because of who you are (race, gender).

That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities. “Racial representation” for example is something white people want more than anyone else. Listen to “Nice White Parents.” Something you hear over and over is minority parents saying they don’t care so much about race-balanced schools. What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Justice Thomas has said similar things. Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice. It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school. And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment. Prop 16 in California lost every single Hispanic-majority county. But white progressives love racial balancing, and continue to advocate it over minority opinion, because they end up in charge of systems of racial gerrymandering. When a minority kid writes a diversity essay, or a minority academic writes a diversity statement for tenure, it’s overwhelmingly white progressives that will be in charge of evaluating that against their worldview.

And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line. This became glaring to me as someone from a Muslim country during the last few years. You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think. That was mediated through folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, who gained prominence not because they authentically represent what American Muslims want—remember these are folks who preferred Bush over Gore not that long ago—but a version of Muslim identity that flatters and appeals to the white progressives that control the media and platforms.

I'm not a party to this argument, have no dog in the fight about the SATs, and sort of broadly buy what John McWhorter has to say about standardized testing (the last time I was paying attention to any of this, he had written about "the soft bigotry of low expectations").

But the question you're asking incredulously here is easy to answer: you get "whites" designing a test that advantages "Asians" if the goal of that test is not to maximize white advantage, but instead to minimize Black advantage. That's, like, not a historically unprecedented thing for American policy.

I actually just discovered this while researching a different post! Here's a snippet [0]:

"Standardized test scores of minority students must be viewed with special caution as minority students tend to underperform on such tests due to a psychological phenomenon known as "stereotype threat." When taking tests that purport to measure ability, the performance of talented minority students may be undermined by their fear that they will conform to negative racial stereotypes. Stereotype threat persists even among middle-class blacks, indicating that socioeconomic status does not explain their underperformance."

So, like so many other complex systems, this wasn't designed or intended at all. It's an emergent property. There are other emergent properties, like White families are more affluent so they can afford SAT tutors, their children are less stressed so they are less likely to be cognitively impaired by their home life, etc. etc.

> I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.

I dug into this in a sibling post, but it's far from pop psychology. Dig into the University of Michigan's work for some meaty research on the benefits of diverse student cohorts [1].

>> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.

> I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).

There's pretty good evidence for this [3] [4], but you can just start from first principles:

- Racial minorities have higher poverty rates than Whites in the US

- AA policies lead to more racial minorities getting into and graduating from universities

- University degrees boost income

- This happened to millions of people

Re: Vietnamese etc., that might be a consequence of California's Prop 209 (1996), which forbids its public universities from considering race, ethnicity, or gender during admissions evaluations, and 40% of Vietnamese Americans live in California. The numbers don't seem high enough to explain everything, but it's definitely a big factor. For half of your 50 years 40% of Vietnamese Americans haven't had the benefit of affirmative action from CA's biggest (pretty good) universities.

>> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

> That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers.

I don't know that millennials are well-represented in board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, or in the million dollar club. I mean, definitely not the Supreme Court haha. If you've got a cite here I'm interested, but this seems like a stretch.

> Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.

This seems incorrect [4]. Question 10 "Do you generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities" has 72% favor from Blacks and 66% from Hispanics. It even has 57% favor from Non-Hispanic Whites. Those are big margins.

> And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.

I'm a White male SWE, whose demographic represents the majority at FAANG and nearly everywhere else. I believe that's not great, and that our society would be healthier if that weren't the case. It's not hard for me to believe there are Asian SWEs (etc.) who think the same thing, for one because many of them have told me so.

It's possible, and many times even advantageous to care about a collective, societal interest more than your individual interest.

> That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities.

Not to be too cheeky here, but that's exactly what race-aware admissions are trying to combat: we want to give members of racial minority groups the tools to determine their own destinies. It would be cool if we had more Asian judges and Supreme Court justices, or congresspeople, or senators, or a president, or generals, or solicitors, etc. This generally goes for all racial minorities, and that's what creating racially balanced university cohorts does: gotta get 'em through school first.

> What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school.

They are chronically underfunded, this is true. Although studies show that improving diversity can be be more effective than extra funding (and is pretty great overall) [5]. I don't expect parents to buy these arguments--we should fund their schools fairly--but I think doing both is the best option.

> Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice.

This is generally because their schools are junk because of underfunding and defacto segregation. Democrats would like to fix this but it's a hard problem (tax bases, balanced budget amendments, blah blah).

> It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school.

Not just that, but it balkanizes educational standards and funding, and is usually a stand in for "fund religious education". It's just a bad policy.

> And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment.

Employment yes, admissions no. Again, Gallup.

> And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line.

This is seemingly the Asian version of "Democrats take Black voters for granted", with some extra "propaganda" allegations thrown in. But throughout your posts, you haven't shown any such propaganda. Your argument is, summarized, "white progressives' focus on racial balancing will harm Asians, and they have to do a lot of work to keep Asians from noticing".

If our goal is to secretly undermine the AAPI community, we're doing an laughably bad job of it. Again:

- our policies have lead to racially representative cohorts in universities, which is a huge success

- we're open about this being a goal and proud of achieving it

- we're lobbying for more funding to be able to expand the number of students we can accept

- we're trying to make it free so poor students (e.g. poor Vietnamese students) have fewer barriers to higher education

It's true that this means that many Asian applicants are denied admission to elite institutions, disproportionately so. But that's the unfairness we've chosen in order to create racially representative cohorts. The other unfairness is to retrench racial inequities. We're choosing a fairer society at the expense of a less fair to Whites and Asians admissions process. Is that right? I think so, but I also think we should probably talk about it. I don't think it should be decided solely by admissions boards.

> You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think.

I will say first that the groups are pretty diverse, and as you get further into the generations their members usually become liberals (you'll see a lot of religious conservatism in 1st generation immigrants, but that tends to fade). So there's nuance here that you're not capturing.

That said, I understand where you're coming from here, but this is because White voters really don't like this stuff; e.g. they're generally OK with a Christian prayer before school, they're very not OK with Muslim prayers throughout the day, etc. This isn't a "Democrats are exploiting racial minorities" problem, it's an "America has a long way to go re: pluralism" problem. Democrats recruit diverse candidates to run for office, but then they have to appeal to diverse groups of Americans, many of whom have some pretty weirdo ideas about stuff. There's a constant tension to try and drag the electorate into the future, whether it's on gay rights, marijuana, education, race, guns, abortion, whatever, and our candidates almost all want to do it, but they'll all almost certainly lose if they do (tptacek is correct here). Your argument here isn't with Democrats/progressives exploiting racial minorities (or other historically marginalized groups), it's with the American voter. Which, of course, I deeply sympathize with haha.

[0]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/intro...

[1]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/

[2]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/sizing-up-the-measurable-g...

[3]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286031992_The_econo...

[4]: https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/247130/190226AffirmativeAc...

[5]: https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_16...