Comment by siosonel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siosonel | Hacker News Reader

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I am an Asian. I am against systematic denial of anyone. I say let anyone attend the school of their choice, using online access to overcome space constraints.

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.

>Correcting the effects of slavery is much more important because its effects are much more pervasive.

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.

And someone who insists on absolute racial blindness is not making a value judgement? Isn't the issue mostly about which group to feel sorry for, why, and how? And you want a literary or published source for that empathy? Or are you saying that it is not self evident that a group, one that has been enslaved for hundreds of years, is not disproportionately poorer, grow up in single-parent households, or experience incarceration? Is that pattern even possible without a history of systematic, long-term oppression?

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.

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