>That's a great story, how you came up, after immigrating to America from India. However, very important points that you have glossed over is the history of slavery, redlining, Jim Crow (and other laws), voting suppression, etc... of Black Americans who are the descendants of slaves. They (and other ethnic groups) were being shut out of opportunities, and the courts were attempting to alleviate this in some way. The original purpose of affirmative action, was to help those that were being actively and consistently discriminated against.

And not one of those things is in the least bit his fault or responsibility, least of all the fault or responsibility of his son or many other kids in the same situation. It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others. The idea is in fact little better than the implicit punishment-through-bias accorded to other minorities because they or their ancestors were at one time considered inferior. A society can alleviate past wrongs without creating new ones of a similar if softer flavor against yet other collectively defined groups.

>As a more recent immigrant, you are benefiting from laws and polices, which are the result of historical issues, court battles, and actual battles in America. Many Americans fought, died, and were jailed to get laws changed.

And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place? Another idiotic and ugly idea: that a country makes itself better and then is right to foist part of the cost onto people who later come to it specifically because it's supposedly become a better and more just place, as if they'd had a part in its previous wrongs.

That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.

Every generation inherits the debts of the past and a duty to pay it down. Just because I was born into this world and personally did not endorse the use of CFCs or the petrodollar system doesn’t mean I’m absolved of being a participant in finding solutions to the nth-order effects these technologies introduce into the world.

I’m doubtful the majority agree with you on that!

> It's a pernicious, grotesque notion that people with no personal or ancestral fault in a specific historical context should be punished for its existence as a compensation to others.

Yeah, affirmitive action kinda warped into something akin to the biblical original sin IMO.

> And so what? Does he somehow owe a personal debt to a country because it, for reasons of its own, decided to fix and fight against internal historical wrongs that its own people had created in the first place?

Yes. He owes a personal debt because the average wealth of white families is vastly higher than that of black families because they were exploited for 300+ years.

The black student who worked even harder but started much further behind, with far fewer resources, deserves a shot too. Even if they didn't get as far.

You're comparing an ultra-privileged child with a child who comes far behind. So course you need to factor that in!

Otherwise you might as well just look at their net worth and only admit children of the rich, because look, they're so far ahead in life already.

> That you make such absurd arguments shows how much the ideological aspect of affirmative action (vs. its practical, carefully balanced merits) has contaminated much progressive thinking.

You have been contaminated by racism and a lack of caring. You want to live in a world where black people are an endless underclass that you can exploit.

Truly, what the hell? First, the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States. Secondly, many white people in the United States today also managed to build a life for themselves without having done so. Your notion of historical guilt really is more like the absurd religious idea of original sin than a realistic or genuinely fair minded concept of justice and blame.

Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.

Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?

> Why would you completely misinterpret a fairly straightforward argument in the most emotionally charged, simplistic and negative way possible?

Why would you ignore basic facts? White families in the US stole from black families for centuries. Today the average white family has more than 10x the wealth of the average black family.

This must be fixed. It is not a "historical wrong". It is a wrong that is occurring now. Today. To real people. By the wealthy in the US toward minorities who are much poorer.

> the guy in question is from India and isn't an Anglo/European white man who "benefited" from centuries of exploitation of blacks in the United States

What nonsense.

He moved to a country where white people stole from black people for centuries. Then said "Well, we're rich now, and the theft happened a while ago, so.. good luck!". And now he shares in that stolen wealth. He is as responsible as everyone else.

> Furthermore, nothing I said is about continuing to exploit black people or advocating racism. It's specifically about redressing past wrongs against African Americans and other minorities without creating new ones against other arbitrarily assigned groups, particularly if they're immigrants who have also had to suffer for their forward movement and have no personal fault in the past racial tensions and injustices of a country they're not originally from.

How can you redress a wrong against black and native people if it's illegal to look at whether someone is black or native when giving life-changing opportunities?

Come on.

Just admit it. You enjoy your racism and have zero desire to help anyone. Stop hiding behind "I totally want to help people, as long as literally no one is inconvenienced, without any plan, outcomes, or goals." Please.

> Just admit it. You enjoy your racism and have zero desire to help anyone.

Please refrain from senseless personal attacks as per HN commenting guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsgu idelines.html

I cannot help recalling a quote that my grandfather repeated to me earlier this evening: "when you run out of reasons, your argument gets louder."

I think you have an extraordinarily skewed idea of how wealth is usually created, how productivity works and how legal redress should handle these things in a functional society. All this aside from your very emotional, contextually ignorant claims about me being racist and other people being guilty of exploiting African Americans because those other people happen to have been successful in some way.

An immigrant from India (or anywhere really), who arrives to the US and then works hard to exchange some sort of value for voluntary compensation from others is most definitely not making themselves better off by sharing in "stolen wealth" from some previous century. They're doing what all of us (of any color or creed) do every day to stay mutually economically solvent. By your logic, even modern African Americans would be guilty of the same thing because their increased standard of living is a part of the same economic participation in exchange of "stolen" wealth.

Too much to unpack here in further argument, but i'd suggest more carefully considering these positions.

We agree on the big picture but not the details. Instead of race, why not look at economic position? I think the white family living in poverty in rural Appalachia is probably more deserving of AA than the middle-class Black family in Atlanta today. If there's a kid with a lower GPA/SAT than my son, but he's worked throughout HS, didn't have the same resources we have, he deserves acknowledgement and assistance. Colleges should definitely consider that as a factor. But that is irrespective of race.

I don't think you are seeing the historical context. Race is very much a part of it. America had to overcome slavery, redlining, Jim Crow, etc... These were based on race, not economic position. Affirmative action is an attempt to rectify the long standing American issues of discrimination based on race and other attributes (sex, color, etc...).

Economic position or being at an economic disadvantage is a different argument than what you had originally presented and the attack on affirmative action. America did not develop as, and still is not, a society blind to race, color, or sex. Better that you had made that argument, which would possibly be along the lines of better loans, scholarships, free education, etc...

From what I understood of your comment, a black person in a rich neighbourhood should get preferential treatment over a white person in a poor one? Because historically black people were mistreated?

What if white people are, in the future, treated as second class citizens, should AA then be for white ones?

IMO using racist policy to fight racism is just not going to end well.

Ideally yes, the economic situation should be taken into account as well. But what's the use of enforcing this at college level, when for underprivileged kids (any kind - wrong race, low class, bad neighborhood) the ship of chances sailed away already when they couldn't get through a proper primary school? The OP situation will happen again and again, kids with lower scores will get pushed ahead so the average "smartness" of that school will decrease. Because what is good for one individual can be detrimental in general, and what is positive in general can be detrimental for one individual. Just about any policy will have holes through some people will fall, and even if I propose a quality education starting from grade 1, I'm sure some people will point out somebody getting a hit from it.

In my opinion, a possible solution would be to get rid of district based funding for schools and instead fund schools mostly based on student amount. One problem of that model is that it can result in teachers avoiding certain schools because that school having a bad rep and thus that school having to pick worse teachers.

Another solution I could see working is making it much easier for students to go to other schools than the default one assigned to them. Altough, that runs into issues of areas where there isn't any "wealthy" school nearby.

I get that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve and that, tbh, I don't really have much of a clue how to solve it either. So the best I can do is throwing ideas at the wall to see what is workable, while opposing policies I see that I deem to be actively harmful.

Thinking more about my ideas, I think there is a link, altough can't really argument that one atm, behind "no child left behind" and "bad" schools getting worse.

The problem with getting rid of district-based funding is that the worst schools often already get the most per student funding because the state (at least that's the case where I am!). Ultimately the problem is that more money doesn't necessarily result in better outcomes

I have no idea of specific numbers but this does not seem to fit the anecdotal experience of my city. :/

It is a complex multifaceted situation that might differ based on region, but in my moderately large mid-west city, the difference in curb appeal of the public schools in the wealthy suburbs vs the more urban schools closer to where I lived was wild (and I would expect curb appeal to be the easiest needle to move with just money). Forget the academics and the student environment. The suburb districts were best-in-the-state experiences while some of the high school kids I worked with from the more urban schools just wanted to make it through the day without a knife fight....

In my city, the curb appeal of the wealthy suburbs with good schools is absolutely there too. But the inner city knife-fighting schools actually get more total money per student (because the state makes up the difference and then some). That translates into generally newer school buildings in the city, but generally worse outcomes. Which points to the fact that money isn't everything. Good administration matters. Teacher-student ratios matter. Home life matters. Without those things, more money doesn't solve education problems! Money helps on all those fronts, but it in itself isn't sufficient without good execution

You need to remove insane policy of funding public schools from local taxes.

Are we sure that we wouldn't have the exactly same discussion in that situation? Because your son would be - again - pushed aside, just by a different underrepresented group.

>That's gaming the system, for personal benefits, and contrary to the purposes for which affirmative action was created

It should have been abundantly clear to anyone that I mentioned CollegeVine to show how the system works, not that we intend to apply as another race. Sheesh.

TL;DR: According to you, an Indian teenager born in the 21st century should be treated as less desirable during a college admission process, because of things that some white people did to some black people in the 19th and 20th century.

Sorry, this is textbook bigotry to me, and I am dismayed by the fact that this way of thinking infested the American academia and half of its political system.

As a young guy in the 1990s, I knew a few old bigoted Polish Catholics who disliked the Jews because they "killed Christ". Being naive, I was thinking back then that this kind of heritable guilt was on its way out. Nope, I was wrong. The ideology that you describe is arguably even more nonsensical, classifying totally unrelated ethnic groups as "white-adjacent" and assigning them the same or even greater level of malus points.

The most absurd thing about your argument is that OPs ancestors probably lived under British colonial rule more recently than American blacks under their masters, and approximately at the same time when Jim Crow was rampant. And in 2022, white liberals treat them as undesirables once again, and once again for racist reasons; only the details have changed, but not the principle: Sorry, there is too much of your people on the campus already. Begone.

> According to you, an Indian teenager born in the 21st century should be treated as less desirable during a college admission process, because of things that some white people did to some black people in the 19th and 20th century.

Nowhere did I state that. You are putting words into my mouth and making up fake arguments. You are doing a classic straw man. Just stop, with that, and argue actual points that I made.

For the record, I have zero bias against young smart Indian Americans trying to get into college, nor against their parents who have done their best to raise and provide for them.

> Nowhere did I state that. You are putting words into my mouth and making up fake arguments. You are doing a classic straw man. Just stop, with that, and argue actual points that I made.

But that is exactly the result of your preferred policies. You don't just get to push for a policy and then walk away from the consequences claiming they have nothing to do with you.

If you defend race-based affirmative action that lowers chances of Asian youth to get into certain spots - and this is what current affirmative action obviously does - you are fine with the larger picture, even without stating it explicitely.

You cannot disawow the consequences while supporting the mechanism that produced them. It is like saying "I hate reeducation camps and cultural revolutions but I support Maoism".