Why Asian-Americans feel powerless in New York’s elite high schools
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://quillette.com/2018/06/27/bill-de-blasios-plan-to-pur...
I think it's terrible. It's robbing poor kids of a rare opportunity to get a first-rate education, to make elites feel better about themselves.
If you insist that the racial demographics of the schools match those of the city, a much better way to do it is to keep the admissions test, but simply take the top N% w/in each racial bucket, rather than globally.
Otherwise, if you get rid of the test completely and pulling evenly from every school, you are guaranteed (1) you will not create an environment w/ the truly elite (2) you are replacing standardized tests, which are fair, with the whole teacher-grading-system, which is wildly inconsistent and generally a better measure of who behaves and who sucks up than who is academically worthy.
This would benefit wealthy Black/Latino kids, whose parents can afford test prep. If the goal is to have a more racially diverse student body, it accomplishes that goal. But if the goal is to help disadvantaged kids get ahead, then it's not useful.
a better argument is it's unfair to kids in shit elementary schools. and it is, but you have to try to just make those schools better.
it's a true shame if you don't give the most talented/driven kids an opportunity to go to a first rate school.
standarized testing is imperfect, but it is the most fair system.
However, those higher-performing students get nothing from being in classes with low performers, and get substantial benefits from being tracked into faster-moving classes with other top students. These students languish in mixed-ability classrooms as teachers focus on the slower students, or they’re conscripted to help teach their classmates the skills they’ve already mastered. And these students run in place while students in honors and gifted tracks press relentlessly forward.
The key phrase in the excerpt above is: "These students learn better in classrooms shared with higher-performing students." de Blasio latched onto those same study results and clearly believes that the trade off is worth it. While there may be some merit to your claim that de Blasio just wants to make himself feel better, I'm pretty sure that most "elites" in the city trying to send their children to top high schools are not happy with this outcome.
Note that middle school admissions are also being changed, starting in one district this year, such that top middle schools will be forced to set aside 25% of their seats for incoming students who scored below-average or at the bottom[1] of the middle-school state tests taken in Grade 4. The purpose of the plan is to "increase diversity in selective, high-performing middle schools [...]". A lot of parents in the affected district are upset.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/new-york-top-mid...
Not everyone is going to have equal interests and abilities. Bright kids deserve an educational environment where they can be challenged and develop their full potential.
All kids in public schools deserve that.
It just takes more resources than we as a society are willing to spend, especially when it comes to schools serving mostly poor brown kids in poor neighborhoods.
Teachers and students find it easier to teach and learn in an environment where most of the children score higher on standardized tests and are also generally more compliant. All kids in public schools deserve an environment where they can develop their full potential, but "the system" seems to have a harder time fulfilling that purpose for students who don't score well on tests or who aren't as compliant.
>It just takes more resources than we as a society are willing to spend, especially when it comes to schools serving mostly poor brown kids in poor neighborhoods.
Evidently, NYC spends the most per student than any other city or state in the country[1]. Also, schools that serve mostly poor students in poor neighborhoods are more likely to be eligible to receive additional funds via Title I, although to your point some people believe that the extra $500-$600 per student for Title I schools (i.e. schools where free or reduced-lunch criteria exceeds 40%) is still insufficient to counteract the effects of poverty on student achievement[2].
[1] https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-stude...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-federal-spending-on-d...
By 2050, would it be so strange if the majority of applicants and students of elite western schools would be Asian?
Opinion pieces on this topic consistently misrepresent the situation. Many, many, elite High schools in Nyc are applied to on the basis of a wide variety of criteria. Grades, essays, you name it. These schools have a wonderful mix of admissions processes which allows each of them to capture a portion of promising students that others may miss.
There are exactly 3 High Schools that exclusively use one standardized test. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech.
Even if these schools favor people who are “good at tests” that’s fine! The other amazing high schools can grab the students who are talented in other ways.
Removing those three disadvantages people who might be highly motivated and/or intelligent but have trouble meeting other vague criteria. That’s terrible and discriminatory. It favors conformity in the best case, and quota filling in the worst.
It's great that schools are looking for a better "mix" of ethnicities in the incoming class, but they should encourage the underrepresented ethnicities to do better, in tests or other race-blind admission standards.
They should not put an admission "cap" based on the color of your skin
Tell me where else a poor farmer's kid from Alabama, a child of refugees who spoke no English at home, someone from an unpopular religion, a kid who grew up in the ghetto without a father, someone from the working class who speaks with a regional accent, etc. etc. can compete on a pretty level playing field with wealthy elites?
Kind of. There is a fair criticism to be made about tests being unintentionally culturally slanted towards the people that make them, often white Americans.
Of course, in this case, your point is correct, since the people that are overindexing on the tests are Asian-Americans.
If a test contains questions that favor a particular race, then that is an outright problem, and schools should stop that.
In this case, it's actually the opposite. When a test is in English, often Asians have to learn English, which is often not their primary language at home. So by default, an English-speaking race taking a test, has a HUGE advantage over an Asian test taker.
Which is why the stereotype is that "asians are good at math". Asians are NOT particularly good in math. It's just that in math tests, it's mostly numbers. The language barrier becomes less of an issue, the playing field levels out, so you suddenly notice Asians tend to get higher scores.
I suspect it would be the same for, say, geography tests, if the same test was translated to an Asian language. Suddenly "Asians are good at geography". Not really.
If anything, tests in English are culturally slanted away from Asians where English is often not their primary language.
"Singapore is routinely ranked at or near the top in global comparisons of mathematical ability and boasts one of the most admired education systems in the world. In a league table based on test scores from 76 countries published by the OECD in May last year, Singapore came first, followed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The rankings, based on testing 15-year-olds’ abilities in maths and science, reinforced a sense that western children were slipping behind their Asian peers. The UK was in 20th place and the US 28th in the table. "
I thought that was always a bullshit excuse, especially considering that these test scores closely track IQ scores.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/03/05/these...
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e7a0/dfdee8ad5b91e1d179e9e2...
If intelligence is at all heritable, you'd expect to see this. If educated parents tend to push their own children to become more educated, you'd expect to see this.
I wonder what the chart looks like broken down by where parents went to school or some non-financial metric. I would bet the children of well-educated college professors or journalists also score well, despite growing up with a more middle class household income.
You do not intervene after the test. At that point the learning process for that material is already over. The student has already "missed out" on the learning opportunity. You would just be giving a good grade to someone who doesn't know the material.
Yes we need to help folks who are intergenerationally poor. But, you do that by helping their kids learn better and meet the testing bar.
You are not helping them by lowering the bar for them. Giving the kids better grades even if they don't know the material, would actually hurt them.
But you are helping underperforming students by placing them into top schools, comingled with better students - lots of research shows that. So lowering the bar for admission really does help.
I think the open question is how that balances against the cost of having fewer slots available at those top schools for the very best students.
But I am pretty sure that if, say, a student can't pass a multiplication test, but you give that student an A+ anyways, and then let that student into a "top calculus class", that's going to hurt the student more than it helps.
Ya sure the student gets to mingle with better students. But what you would usually get is, the student would end up being someone who mentions a lot of buzz words like "fractal integrals" just to fit in, but have zero idea what is going on, or what is being taught in class.
This policy change is exactly that - an attempt to encourage poorly performing students to do better, where a large majority of poorly performing students also happen to be underrepresented ethnicities. The NYC Department of Education has and continues to try many actions to increase educational outcomes for their students overall -- de Blasio is trying to accelerate the process before he's out of office.
And why is this bias mostly helping Asians, a minority group, who more likely to be learning English as a second language?
And indeed, the definition of "best" in this context is circular.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you can't be certain you're right.
On most of these tests, you have to solve math or logic problems, or read passages and synthesize information. It's hard to imagine someone could do exceptionally well answering those questions quickly & accurately and not perform in a classroom, or be unable to do those tasks yet excel academically.
It's entirely possible to have the latter be true without the former.
As for your "It's hard to imagine..." in my career teaching I've met both phenotypes.
I agree that the effect is small if anything in today's society, however.
I remember dealing with it as a young child growing up in the Midwest as a Japanese-American whose grandparents were interned in California. I didn't come to "appreciate" the level of systemic, acceptable racism baked into society against Asian-Americans until much later in life.
My feelings on it now are kind of whatever. It is what it is and I don't see it changing much. I sure don't see white activists taking up the Asian banner, though.
Mostly the numbers. The "Asian" population in America is relatively small, and thus (perceived to be) easily managed. If one looks at demographic shifts, immigration policy, etc., over the course of the European expansion in to what is now America, the game should be pretty clear. Actually, Brazil is also a good example, if you look at their post-slavery immigration plan/policy.[2]
Anyway, I'm linking to an old post of mine from the Harvard discussion.[1] I highly recommend checking out Prof. Frank Wu's comments in the referenced video.
Also, it's worth noting that generally speaking, public schools are not considered to be elite. Elite schools are generally the exclusive ones where politicians, captains of industry, and the like send their kids to help them socialize with 'the right kind of people,' and maybe a smattering of common folk. I've been to those (as one of the common folk) and to elite public schools; the difference really is night and day.
This whole thing is just more divide and conquer. It pains me to see people continue to fall for it.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/is-neymar-black-b...
That's typically true but not of the NY high schools. These schools are truly elite high schools.
I suspect this will change in the very near future. The center-right has realized, very belatedly, that they have an opportunity with stories like this. White writers from places like The National Review have been pushing stories about Asian discrimination whenever possible over the last few months. It is a way for them to rail against "Liberal PC" culture under the guise of supporting a non-white race and achieving social justice, both of which are effective attributes when arguing with liberals.
It will be be interesting to see if the Republican party overall will move towards courting Asian-Americans, especially those of East Asian descent. In addition to stories like the OP, Asians tend on average to have more traditional views which more closely align culturally with conservatives.
Of course, the Republican party continues to hurt their future by taking every opportunity to alienate non-white voters. In places like Canada, which is culturally similar but in which the conservatives are less concerned with race and more concerned with ideology, the conservative party has built a strong coalition with Asian immigrants. This is largely unthinkable in modern day US, but it is something we could see in the near future.
You need to help that student get better, so he/she can achieve the higher grade on his/her own.
If a student can't do multiplication in a test, you don't just "give more points" to that student, for "equality" in the classroom. You need to teach that student to learn multiplication.
You need to bring that student "up" and not everyone else "down".
On Affirmative Action in specific, here's a great interview from Sowell about the unintended consequences that arise from the awful policy:
The impossible standard mixed with the conflicting doctrines of Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact mean that every major company has to settle diversity lawsuits for hundreds of millions or into the billions of dollars, no matter what their policy is.
In that situation, the parents of a child who might be considered academically bright will need to contend with the additional burden of trying to motivate their child to be different (i.e. higher test scores) than the rest of their peers who, for various reasons, don't test as well.
Peer pressure is a thing, and is sometimes seen by parents as a blessing if it gives their child an incentive to study.
I don't say this out of self-interest, I'm not Asian. If anything, these quotas help people from my background. I don't care. They are deeply unfair and antithetical to the American values of equal opportunity, fair competition, and not judging people on their race, gender, or creed.
And the students being pushed out by these rules are not rich or privileged. The rich and privileged kids in New York are in private schools that cost more than a luxury car for a year's tuition. Many are children of first generation immigrants.
However, the decision came with a plethora of other decisions, some probably fair, some more reminiscent of the Asians-have-bad-personalities trick à la Harvard.
We're eliminating demonstrated interest as a consideration in our admission paradigm. We'll no longer encourage supplementary submission of materials, including resumes, research abstracts, writing samples, multimedia demonstrations of talents, and maker portfolios.
https://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/eliminating-demon...
These articles misrepresent the situation. There are only three schools that use this test, and they often get the “I studied really hard but I was bad at homework and class participation” student. Luckily there is a mechanism (for now) to catch some of the potential of these students.
There are plenty of good professors in non-elite schools, many undergrad classes are approachable enough that a self-motivated student could absorb a lot of content with little supervision, and a lot of schools make their material available through online platforms. All these are great for learning but replicating the signaling part is more difficult.
Then in 1994 Ho v. San Francisco Unified School District happened, and race-based admissions got thrown out.
If you look at the racial demographics of public high schools in San Francisco it is pretty interesting. Of the 10 major schools only two of them have over 10% white students. Those are the only two that only admit students that meet special requirements. One is Lowell (academically the best) with 15.2% white, the other is SOTA (an arts school that requires auditions) with 41.3% white. Lowell is 56.7% Asian, while SOTA is 19.0% Asian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_High_School_(San_Franci...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Asawa_San_Francisco_Schoo...
In a sane world, this kind of legislation would be shot down with cogent arguments from smart and knowledgeable lawmakers. The only reason such ill-conceived ideas become law is because our republic is essentially a popularity contest, and people will apparently vote for a politician who, without thinking things through (or indeed thinking at all), will gladly push legislation rife with feel-good buzzwords and catchphrases of the moment. All that matters is getting (re-)elected, fairness and justice be damned.
It’s no wonder these folks are marching. This is naked social control from ideologues. Fight against it!
Higher Ed has been struggling with this for awhile. It's not clear that a major emphasis on test scores isn't just putting a quantitative spackle on a biased system, and then declaring the job done.
Especially in a system with such a complicated background as public schooling.
You never hear talk of this idle class ensconced in inherited privilege and luxury. However, a few decades after Americans were lynching those of African descent, blowing up their little girls while they're going to church, executing them for voter registration drives etc. - a few decades after that if an attempt is made to push blacks at Stuyvesant above the 1 in 45 mark, in a city where 1 in 4 are black - then, only then do we hear about the need for meritocracy and so on. From the mouth of a man who got a "small loan of a million dollars" from his father, with his son-in-law who, according to Daniel Golden, bought his way into Harvard.
When am I going to see the articles about legacy admissions to the top colleges? I won't hold my breath.
Luxury for the idle class at the top, the rat race (with some national oppression of Africans, Lakota etc. thrown in) for everyone else. No thanks, I'll keep my sickle sharpened for a higher target.
But I'm a bit less skeeved out by a school administrator judging someone as an individual, even if it's for a crappy reason like dad being a donor, than having them admit or deny someone just based on the color of their skin.
Just as I would rather work for a boss who hired his buddy from the country club, but harbored no prejudice, than one who refused to hire blacks, Jews, Asians, etc. who met the job requirements.
Prior to 2007, gifted and talented classes were skewed towards white and asians and the admissions process was criticized for allowing "favoritism and discrimination"[1]. A standardized test was then implemented for 4 year olds going forward, but over subsequent years people realized that this resulted in even lower hispanic and black enrollment into the coveted G&T programs[2].
de Blasio is pushing for a more ethnically diverse mix across all schools. Based on the K G&T admissions changes made in 2007, he is fairly sure this change will achieve his objective. He firmly subscribes to the idea that while certain elite schools will be by definition diluted in terms of academic achievement and excellence, the overall NYC school system will benefit. He fervently believes that trying to increase the global median achievement at the expense of a lower academic peak achieved by a tiny minority of students is worth it (aka YCMAOWBE[3] or TANSTAAFL[4]).
While I agree with the sentiment that one should try to fix the entire pipeline and not focus on the end product (too little too late), critics lambasting de Blasio's plan need to understand that he's simply making different trade-offs during his last term in office as mayor.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/nyregion/26gifted.html
[2] https://hechingerreport.org/as-new-york-struggles-to-make-gi...
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_make_an_omelette_...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain%27t_no_such_thing_as...
"It's not due to racism or the to the manor born gift of idleness - these 'gifted' 4 year olds are high achievers"
What every liberal person who read this article with disgust needs to realize is that THIS IS THE LIBERAL END-GAME AND THIS IS WHAT A MAJORITY OF LEFT-LEANING DECISION-MAKERS SUPPORT.
They don't care about merit, or fairness, or making the most out of a scarce resource. All that they care about is enforced "equality," no matter how many people suffer as a consequence.
Not that we should completely give up on fairness and let political power decide everything but I feel a bit exhausted reading these arguments going in circles for years..
Better schools and maybe fewer school shootings...maybe. America has never much cared for its children so yeah. shrugs
The idea that this one school can make or break one's future is either absurd or terrifying, and I'm not sure which is actually true.
It makes complete sense that wealthy-to-middle class Asians would displace white students to a lesser degree and other communities of color to a higher degree in closely located Western countries with strong schools and favorable immigration policies.
By 2050, would it be so strange that the majority of applicants and students of elite western schools would be Asian?
Other communities will be forced to attend less prestigious institutions until Asian schools hold stronger apppeal with the wealthier citizens in their countries.
At a basic level you need teachers who care, books and decent accommodations. If those basics aren't being met, then spending will help. And if those needs are met, it certainly helps to have really great, special teachers who push students a little further.
But I believe if you took the kids from a selective school and swapped them with kids from a school with frequent violence and truancy, the kids from the selective school would still have far better life outcomes, and find ways to succeed despite run down classrooms, less inspiring teachers, and dated books. They would succeed if you put them in an 1800s one-room schoolhouse, or didn't even send them to school at all. They had to pass a high bar for intellectual ability and their parents care about education.
I actually wonder if the internet will magnify cultural differences over time. So the children who are motivated (whether intrinsic, parents, or culture) will get even further ahead by taking online courses, while the children who are not will fall even further behind.
Bronx High School of Science? How about instead Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton?
How to do that? Well, big secret (don't tell anyone!): How do professors at research universities stay up to date so that they can do leading edge research? Do they take refresher courses at the Bronx High School of Science? Not likely! Do they take courses at all? Essentially no.
So, what the professors do is just study the best materials and go to some seminars. In simple terms, students can do much the same starting with, say, high school ninth grade material and continuing on. If get very far in academics, then just MUST work and learn fully independently or nearly so, so might as well just start doing that ASAP, especially to get around all the terrible struggles of K-12.
Bluntly, nearly no US K-12 teacher knows any material that is worth any student struggling over. So, get THROUGH the K-12 material and get on to college level material, ASAP.
So, for a student who wants the best education in K-12 and later, first, get the basics, the prerequisites for college material, and then study the best college material. "The basics" are just high school math and science together with good skills reading and writing English. History, belle lettre literature, music, etc., maybe fun and nice but for academic success close to irrelevant.
So, in K-12 years, ASAP get into fractions, exponents, compound interest, areas and volumes. Then do first year algebra, plane geometry, second year algebra, trigonometry, solid geometry. Do general science, chemistry, biology, physics. For the science, will do it all again and much more thoroughly again anyway, essentially several times more, so don't get all perfectionistic for the first pass.
Then start on college material -- first up, calculus of one independent variable and then several independent variables, heavy on intuition, light on proofs. Watch the best Internet lectures -- IMHO, Khan Academy is NOT good enough. Use several of the best regarded texts; to find those, ask some college students, TAs, or profs or look at the Web sites of calculus courses at the best universities and see what texts they are using. Likely buy the texts used -- calculus hasn't much changed in decades, highly recommended old texts should be fine and cheap! Do the homework problems and check answers in the back of the book.
Maybe wander onto a college campus or have a family friend who is a college prof and get the tests for the calculus course, take those, and beg a calculus TA or prof to grade the results.
Continue with math and science the same way -- best materials, with some informal contact with a college.
Once get to college junior level material, at some research universities, start attending public research seminars. Typically won't understand more than 10% of the material but WILL get lots of keywords that can motivate and direct studies. Maybe meet a prof or two who will volunteer to grade some homework, say, in math, physics, maybe let you have some copies of tests and grade your solutions. Also many graduate school departments publish their qualifying exams -- they are good and important sources of exercises.
When have good reason to feel confident, take the SAT aptitude tests and the STEM field subject matter tests AND then the same for the GREs. Right, still in K-12 but taking the GRE to show that you are ready for graduate school.
If really want to seal the deal, blow away the college admissions committees, publish some papers, a few should do, in good quality peer reviewed journals.
Then apply to college, maybe using some of the contacts you got from attending the research seminars. So, a friendly prof might just contact the college admissions committee and ask that you be admitted with full scholarship.
So, you enter as a college freshman but start on your Master's and maybe are a TA or research assistant for a prof.
Look, for academics, the real goal is likely not very visible at the Bronx High School of Science or any K-12 place. The real goal is in three words, research, research, and research. For that, get into a good research university, do well learning the prerequisites, attend seminars to see what some of the current research topics are, work with good profs, and do publish some good research.
If want some additional concentration on bio-medical and get an MD, fine. It's also possible to go for a law degree. Or can continue in main line STEM field academics and be a professor at a research university. Or, sure, can do what, say, A. Viterbi did and go for entrepreneurship and, then, get your name on an engineering school!
Does independent study work? It certainly did for me: I got a Ph.D. in applied math and was a college prof. Starting with first year algebra, class time was mostly a waste of time, and I learned nearly all the material, especially the good material I learned well, from independent study. My preparation for the graduate school qualifying exams, my Ph.D. research, my other, published research -- all from essentially just independent study. That's what research professors do -- learn what they need to know and then do their research, both essentially independently.
At least at one time, the math department at Princeton stated on their Web site that no courses were offered for preparation for the qualifying exams, that the courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, and that students were expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own. So, the Princeton math department regards independent study as essential.
One of the best lessons I learned in math was in high school plane geometry: The teacher was the most offensive human I ever saw. So, in class, I just put my head down and slept. Then after school, I read the lesson material quickly and then looked at the exercises. I started with the last, most difficult ones and did them all until I got to the trivial ones. Then I turned to the back of the book for the more difficult supplementary exercises and did ALL of them, never let even one go. So, on the state test, I did well!
I continued to learn math that way: E.g., I never took freshman calculus, instead, got a good text and taught myself, much as I learned high school plane geometry and for a course started on sophomore calculus and did well.
E.g., as a senior, I got a famous, challenging text in topology and gave a prof a lecture a week, for each chapter, one lecture on the material and one more with solutions to the exercises.
It's not just me: Bluntly, if go very far in academics, just MUST be good at independent study. So, might as well get started in high school material, and if do that then can f'get about all the struggles with Bronx High School of Science, Dalton School, etc. Again, the K-12 teachers don't know anything worth struggle. Want to struggle a little? Okay, on YouTube, watch the lectures on quantum mechanics from MIT. Or, for a mathematician giving an introduction to bio-medical research, watch the Eric Lander lectures -- on YouTube, from MIT.
Bronx High School of Science? F'get about it. Again, get the good stuff from, say, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, etc. Done. Any questions?
Let's not kid ourselves. The asian students doing well on these tests are born into cultures that value academic achievement more than the average black or hispanic family. There's nothing inherently different about the different groups aside from their cultures.
Keep the tests, and encourage a culture of academic excellent to take root in different communities where it may not currently exist.
2. Let's stop being so obsessed with race. Racial quotas make people think more about race when our goal should be to make people think less about race and more about individuals apart from the color of their skin.
And there's a chute that's been feeding twice as much sand to one side, for hundreds of years....
What do you do to balance it?
a) Distribute sand equally to each side
b) Distribute substantially more sand to one side
c) Make like the imbalance did not happen and ignore it.
Nigerian Americans are some of the most successful immigrants[2]. Asian Immigrants, Hispanic Immigrants, Indian Immigrants, Eastern European immigrants, all tend to do decent well. What do they all have in common? They are immigrants! Immigrants that don't have the baggage of hundreds of years of oppression in their new country. They used to be disadvantaged in their own country. But coming to a new country does something... a new start.
I should know, my parents where such immigrants.
And yes, nitpick my points away, the underlying issue is still valid.. immigrants tend to do well in a new country, imbalances can't be corrected by neutrality going forward, and historically disenfranchised people tend to do bad in the country they are disenfranchised... see poor asians in asia or in india...
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=balancing+scale
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-12/africa-is-sending-us-its-best-and-brightest
[3] http://indianyouth.org/american-indian-life/poverty-cycle
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Ethnic_Placement_ActEspecially the immigrants, who had nothing to do with any of it.
PS: Not that I should be indulging your vague references... but actually, we do it quite often. Did Bernie Madoff's kids/wife get the spoils of his crime? Has not pretty much every war had a form of "reparations"?
The issue in America has been and still is why are blacks doing so poorly?
Dressing it up as anything else does no one any favors.
If nothing else, enormous income differences? See the top graph here:
https://www.financialsamurai.com/income-by-race-why-is-asian...
It's hard to educate yourself well if your family is poor, I hear.
Culture does.
Have a look at the incomes of immigrants to the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
The top 20: Ethnic Group Income in US Home country GDP PPP Ratio
Indian American $110026 $7,174.00 15.3367716754948
Taiwanese American $90221 $49,827.00 1.81068496999619
Filipino American $88745 $8,229.00 10.7844209502977
Australian American $81452 $49,882.00 1.63289362896436
Israeli American $79736 $36,250.00 2.19961379310345
Russian American $77349 $27,890.00 2.77335962710649
Greek American $77342 $27,776.00 2.78449020737327
Lebanese American $74757 $19,486.00 3.83644667966745
Sri Lankan American $73856 $13,001.00 5.68079378509346
Croatian American $73196 $24,095.00 3.03780867399875
Latvian American $72690 $27,291.00 2.66351544465208
Lithuanian American $72605 $31,935.00 2.27352434632848
Austrian American $72478 $49,247.00 1.47172416593904
Iranian American $72345 $20,030.00 3.61183225162257
Slovene American $72272 $34,063.00 2.121715644541
Swiss American $71418 $61,360.00 1.16391786179922
Bulgarian American $71331 $21,578.00 3.30572805635369
Romanian American $71230 $23,991.00 2.96903005293652
Scandinavian American $71190 $70,590.00 1.00849978750531
Italian American $70726 $37,970.00 1.86268106399789
How do you explain the differences in income when you have some groups earning 15 and 10 times (!!!) what they did before emigrating and others between 2 to 5? These people were poor, not just "I can't afford an iphone poor", "I can't afford antibiotics for my children" poor, yet are now the richest ethnic groups in the US, out earning local Americans by 40-100%.