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Your assumption is wrong. Even if there is no legacy based admissions, even if every school district in America received proper funding for everything, Black students will still have significantly low educational attainment and achievement. It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_102.20.a...

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I think you need to source the claim "There is no educational / societal intervention that can reverse its impact on Black kids' education"

Consider, just as one example, the paper "Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Increase Achievement Among the Poor? Evidence from the Harlem Children’s Zone" (Dobbie and Fryer 2011) https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/are-high-qual...

Here is the abstract:

"Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. The effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial achievement gap in both mathematics and ELA. We conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. Community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient."

When I made that claim, I meant at the national /societal level. Of course I didn't mean there is no single successful education experiment.

On the contrary, if you search through education literature, you will see countless successful programs, but why don't we see their effects at the societal level? Because it almost never scale. Education program is not something you can duplicate easily, it is almost always extremely localized.

In education, it is very difficult for a successful experiment / program to scale vertically (expand to all grade levels) or horizontally (expand to other schools, districts). Also treatment effects are difficult to retain after students left the program, or after the experiment ended.

Interestingly, Taleb just made a twitter this morning: "What works on a small scale almost NEVER expands to large scale." https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1035121052886728704

Great point and I'm glad you brought this up. Like I mentioned, America has many gaping wounds which I believe can be traced back to institutional racism. When talking about the prevalence of black kids raised under single family homes we have to take into account why these kids may be raised that way. Is it a character flaw of black families? I don't think so. I'm black and familial ties run DEEP in almost every family I know: especially those with Southern roots where most of black America still resides.

I think the answer to this question can be found in looking at incarnation rates. Right now there are about 1.5 million black men who are "off the grid" because they are locked up in prison[0]. How many of them have kids? How many men who were previously locked up were incarnated while their child was of elementary school age, and could not be there to provide the stability that is so crucial in the first five years of a kids life for them to succeed? Even if they came back into their kids life at 7 or 8 years old they missed out on kindergarten, which many study have shown that kindergarten performances correlates to school performance later in life.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missin...

This article/issue is about non-white applicants (Asian Americans) who are being discriminated against in the admissions process. And not just at Harvard but other elite schools, med schools, etc.

It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group who is being discriminated against under affirmative action because their superior test scores would otherwise leave them hugely overrepresented vs. other groups.

Are we supposed to trace back how Asian overperformance is due to a history of institutional racism against whites in the USA? Or is the fact of a non-white group outperforming whites and then being discriminated against so counter to the narrative people want about race and affirmative action that they just go back to talking about Jim Crow? What are these Asian applicants supposed to do, just accept that they are held to higher standards than any other group? If Asians would just stop doing so well on the SAT we wouldn't have to discriminate against them ...

Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.

Solid point, I really feel for Asian kids and parents who are being discriminated against. The reason why these discussions usually end up in a discussion of black v. white is because (in my opinion) that "struggle" affects every aspect of American life, whether or not you are aware of it or have any influence.

Colleges like Harvard and companies like Google want a more diverse population and are willing to shape policy based on that; if America was truly a place of equal opportunity they would not need to bend their policies to reach out to marginalized groups at the expense of others who should qualify based on merit. If we want to remove the need for Affirmative Action we need to solve the underlying issues which made it seem so viable in the first place.

Many proponents of AA may admit that things are near fair now, but they used to be much worse. so AA this is just reparations for the past injustice. If that is the case then fixing underlying issues would have less of an effect than we would expect.

It makes sense because if most black children grow up in poor fatherless homes (and that is the cause of the majority of inequality), its not because white people are discriminating but maybe because that is just the state the black people are facing.

A good (race agnostic) way to solve it is just account for the fact the someone is fatherless and they come from low income households. Totally eliminates race.

Blacks will still be helped but unfortunately asian individuals will still have a large hurdle[0]

0 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

> Asian incarceration rates are also lower than that of whites, another fact difficult to explain through the prism of institutional white supremacy.

It was almost impossible for Asians to come to the U.S. before 1965. Wait another couple hundred years and check back on whether there is a reversion to the mean.

These are crime rates, independent of total population. 1.009% of US Asians were arrested for any crime in 2016. 2.782% of US whites were arrested the same year: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Less than half the arrest rate.

It is in fact not difficult to explain carceral inequality through the prism of white supremacy, as "whiteness" is a fluid concept largely defined in specific opposition to "black" people; historically, it's adapted as needed to embrace formerly "non-white" people (the Irish, Italians, Jewish people) in solidarity against encroaching black people (for instance, during the Great Migration).

A useful thing to keep in mind is that "black", as in "African American", actually is a sort of synthesized ethnicity (their original cultures having been stripped from them in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)... but "white" is not. There are Irish people and there are Slavic people and there are Sicilian people, and their cultures are not in fact all that similar. "White" just means what it needs to mean.

All you need to add to your mental model of "white" and "black" to fit low Asian American incarceration into it is the idea that Asians will soon attain "honorary white" status. That's not a message board concept; the transition of Asians from "model minority" to "white people" is much discussed in the real world as well.

White is still very synthesized as European Americans generally have mixed ancestral origins.

I don't foresee Asians being seen as white people. Their origins are much different than the Irish, Italian and even Jewish cases.

Perhaps certain people such as yourself would do so as an adjustment to allow you to continue viewing through your same prism rather than getting a new prism.

People such as myself and everyone who's written a scholarly article or magazine essays about when and how Asians have/will become "white"? Because, like I said, this isn't my idea.

I never claimed it was your idea. It's just people who think like this want to claim that every successful non-white group of people are white to continue viewing reality through a faulty prism.

That depends on what you think the definition of "white" is. The one you prefer --- "of various European origin" --- is not the only one, and is in fact ahistorical: several European ethnicities were not "white" until relatively recently.

I think people need to come to grips with the fact that there are definitions (obviously not the only ones but not the least important ones either) of "white" and "non-white" that boil down to "human" and "subhuman". That's not a thing I'm making up as message board rhetoric; it's a simple fact.

Advance TLDR; See previous post from a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335887) or continue below...

> It's bizarre how many comments here are focusing on traditional white vs. black issues when this is entirely about a non-white group...

Actually, it's not bizarre at all. In fact, the long unsettled distraction of "black" vs. "white" is entirely what this whole dust-up is about. And while the particular case being litigated involves "Asian" students, the people/group funding the suit are non-Asian, IIRC. In fact, I believe they(the funders) actually did something of a casting call to find their plantiff(s), which isn't altogether uncommon. This case, ties into the previous anti-affirmative action cases that did not deliver the desired death blow. I don't have time (or interest really) to dig up old articles and such, but you shouldn't have any difficulty validating what I'm saying here if you are interested in doing so.

Also, there isn't much concern about Asian students who perform well on the requisite tests outnumbering other groups. The concern is about their outnumbering one group. W/all due respect, this should be pretty clear to anyone who understands the historical mission(s)-- which aren't all that different from those of current-- of such elite institutions. It's even clearer if one reads a little history (of the schools or broader society, your choice).

With respect to your question(s) about institutional racism, I'm not sure if you ask in earnest or are being rhetorical, so I beg forgiveness in advance. The simple fact of the matter is that the whole issue consists of many moving parts and circumstances. You say "Asian", but who are we even really talking about? That's a pretty diverse population. And it doesn't consist solely, or even mostly, of superior performers. All of the dysfunctions that many like to label as being exclusively 'Black' or (maybe) 'Hispanic' can easily be found among "Asians", too. And we still haven't even gotten to talking about which "Asians" from "Asia" are here and how they got here, or why.

> What are these Asian applicants supposed to do...

1) Question whether their understanding of admissions criteria is correct;

If they believe that their understanding of the admissions criteria is correct (I don't believe that it is based on personal experience/inside knowledge and research), and they believe that they meet the criteria for admission, then...

2) Start asking some very tough questions about why the bar is lower for everyone else; or

3) Opt out and do their own thing instead of seeking validation from, and validating, a system that for whatever reason(s) doesn't seem to value them appropriately.

Again, the entire issue is pretty complex, far more so than I've ever seen anyone here make it out to be. Which is why I hope you'll actually check out the video in the linked post.

It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1], and there is no educational / societal intervention can reverse its impact on Black kids' education and many many other aspects in their lifes.

Yes there are two criminal justice and police reform.

> Your assumption is wrong

Perhaps...

> It is because the extremely high percentage of Black kids living under single parenthood family [1]

This is wildly unsourced - what data do you have (ideally across nations/racial categories) for this?

Wildly unsourced? The person you're responding has a link right there in their comment with a government source.

Where in that link does the case for single-parenting causing poor outcomes get made? Why is pointing to a spreadsheet sufficient evidence for a complex outcome?

This and the other sibling comments seem focused on single-parenting and not the rest of the GP argument (which I still maintain is unsupported).

This is such a well known fact that calling it unsourced is like calling a claim that the sun rises in the east unsourced.

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

And to make things even worse, they don't have the same electoral potential. Stripping voting rights from felons is incredibly immoral, IMO.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...

Unequal enforcement of the law is certainly a major problem, but I have no objections to excluding from governance oversight those people who refuse to comply with that governance.

I know couple of people who are unwed couples but they claim to be single mom and work partime so they get daycare assistance. Not sure how widespread this because that might be inflating the single mother numbers.

Nowhere in that link does single-parenting affects educational outcomes.

According to the link, 65.3% of black kids live in single parent families vs 34.8% of all kids living in single parent families. This is for America only, which is the context of this story and this thread.

Even so, I want this to be a country where single parents can thrive and get the help they need. I think all children are entitled to health care, food, and school. I would add shelter, but that is a tougher nut to crack, and that free food (at school) and free health care for kids are themselves low-hanging fruits when it comes to supporting the children and making an environment where they can thrive.

> Even so, I want this to be a country where single parents can thrive and get the help they need.

Why do you think single parenthood is rising, or that adoption opportunities are drying up? I doubt there has been a time in the history of mankind that is more accepting of single parenthood, or where it's been more possible to raise a child on your own. Women by and large aren't financially obligated to give up their children in this day and age, and with society becoming more secular it's socially more acceptable to be a single parent.

Further, what makes you think any institutional policy, or anything at all, can fix single-parent households having worse outcomes than two-parent ones? It's just simple logic: two parents tend to meet children's needs better than one because there are two of them.

One suspects that the rise of single parenthood has more to do with the accommodations society is making for single parents (and their lawyers) than with those it makes for their children...

And, interestingly enough, AAs only have 17% of kids in single parent homes, the lowest out of every race.

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