Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

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> pales in comparison

It's not a competition... To acknowledge one problem does not mean ignoring others. There is very real discrimination against people of Asian heritage in the US college system, with very similar parallels to discrimination against Jewish people in the past. To pretend this doesn't exist does all of the real individuals who've experienced it a disservice, as it would be a disservice to pretend that the extensive, institutional racism against black people is no longer an issue today when it clearly is. These are all problems worthy of attention.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/opinion/is-harvard-unfair... "A similar injustice is at work today, against Asian-Americans. To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white peers."

Edit to add: I don't know what the solution to this is, or what should be done. I just know if I was one of those people rejected, I'd feel pretty bad. And as a privileged majority, I want to be judged on my merits, I don't want to benefit from racism or xenophobia, if someone is better than me then they deserve my spot. And I've got to speak loudly about it (even though I'd much rather stay out of political discussions online), because to do otherwise is to passively accept the advantages given to me by this institutionalized racism, which is almost as bad as explicitly endorsing it. We've got to acknowledge it, talk about it ...

Second edit: One very actionable thing is to make clear issues of access and discrimination are important issues when your college comes calling for donations. Ask them for their statistics, what their plans and intentions are. If enough people did it, this would matter. It would make a difference.

The discrimination against Asians is in some cases arguably not that much worse than discrimination against Whites, or even sometimes data shows Whites are discriminated against more.

Looking at LizzyM scores, for the most part Whites and Asians receive similar acceptance rates with similar scores, but in some cases Asians receive preference. You can see this w/ scores about 520 and 3.8(1).

However, Asians are admitted as a far greater proportion of their race than Whites. Asians are about 5% of US population, but can make up over 40% of incoming classes in med school, while Whites, who are over 60% of the US population, were only 37%, in this typical example at Northwestern(1).

Blacks, through affirmative action, enjoy a relatively equal proportion of matriculants as Whites, even though Blacks score on average many standard deviations lower than Whites and Asians. In many cases, a majority of Blacks are accepted with scores that Whites and Asians have, as data shows, a 0% chance of acceptance with.

So what is fair? Right now, it is hardest to get in to med school as a White, but that is so extremely politically incorrect that no one dare say it.

www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/admissions/how-to-apply/class-profile.html

https://schools.studentdoctor.net/lizzym_score

> So what is fair?

Isn't that the toughest question? I don't know what the answer is. I don't know where I stand on affirmative action: in any given instant, it seems unfair, but in a historical context it seems necessary that affirmative action should happen until the point where the damage done in the past has been undone, and we can have equal opportunities. LBJ's words resonate with me on this:

> That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society--to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.

> But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.

> You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

> Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=27021

It's difficult because these injustices did actually happen, and were terrible, but they are not happening today.

Meanwhile there is enough injustice in the world right now make any good-hearted person's head spin.

I really believe the real problem was not fixed. We need to not just ensure, but try to maximize opportunity for all people, and not limit any group to it.

Instead, everything is focused on tail-end adjustments that are neither fair nor optimal for maximizing opportunity and prosperity.

I wanted MLK's idea of a colorblind world where no one is judged based on your skin, but we've gone so far down this rabbit hole that what we are in fact doing is this very thing! Yet no one dare say it as it is so incredibly politically incorrect to discuss it with honesty.

If you want honesty, look at banking, government, academia, and media, and see which race has orders of magnitude disproportionate representation.

> I wanted MLK's idea of a colorblind world where no one is judged based on your skin

I still believe this is possible, I just think we're one or two generations behind. I'm encouraged that the coming generation seems to understand fairness and equality much more naturally and intuitively than my own generation.

Where I still feel like I need to be vigilant against racist thought creeping in (simply from conditioning, stereotypes... I don't consider myself racist, but it's so easy to become tribal without realizing it), for people just a few years younger than me it seems it's just that much easier for them. And the next generation after will hopefully be better still. I have hope.

When you think about it, humanity went very quickly from largely homogenous, semi-isolated communities, to a global community, with lots of movement. It’s going a while for the system to equilibriate. And while there may be many little racist Maxwell’s demons running around doing damage in the short term, I have faith that in the long term we will get there.

You're effectively saying that white people should pay for the sins of their ancestors. Instead of making this about race I wish that they would make it about socioeconomic status.

How is it fair that I, a white guy from a poor family with no college connections, should have a harder time gaining entry to college solely because of the color of my skin for things I didn't even do.

For the record, I’m also a white guy from a poorer family with no college connections.

And we don’t bear the sins of our forefathers. That doesn’t mean we don’t benefit from them. I worked hard, I got lucky, but I can’t pretend my priviledge doesn’t also exist. That a minority with my background wouldn’t have had to work even harder.

I’m not saying it’s fair. As I said, I don’t know where I stand on affirmative action. I think there’s a fundamental tension there. But what LBJ said in that speech feels true to me.

Seriously. This is the invisible knapsack writ large. As a white dude from a family with no college connections, I was still basically allowed to half-ass my way into a career where I make $150K a year through a college that was all-too-happy to accept me.

"Privilege" is an uncountable part of that "luck" everybody in our shoes needs to recognize exists. That's why the concept is a thing in the first place.

> Asians are about 5% of US population, but can make up over 40% of incoming classes in med school

Isn't this because foreign students pay higher tuition?

The part that gets missed in most affirmative action discussions is the value of constituting class that is diverse goes beyond the value to individuals that are chosen despite lower objective selection criteria (GPA, SAT, etc). It also benefits the majority students who do get admitted.

University is a time to develop your thinking and students learn from their classmates arguably as much as they learn from their teachers. Studying slavery in an American History course was substantively different, for me, because I had African-American classmates that were able to comment on the lingering legacy of slavery from a perspective that I or any other white person could never get on our own. Had I only had white an Asian classmates, there would have been a far greater uniformity of thought and I would have had fewer of my preconceived notions challenged.

I will say that I find coarsely-grouped ethnicity to be a terribly reductionist way to achieve that diversity. That we group East Asians, South Asians and Southeast Asians together makes very little sense to me since I know these groups to have vastly different backgrounds, perspectives and opportunities. Grouping an American white person together with someone raised in Russia is also, similarly, nonsensical in my mind, as is grouping African-Americans with people born and raised in Africa. Genetic diversity is not the same as real diversity. But if Universities allow their enrollment to become 1 or 2 dimensional, they do a disservice not only to people who are disadvantaged by systemic challenges (the ones traditionally seen as the beneficiaries of affirmative action) but also to those in majority groups that would receive a more sheltered education.

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