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Comment by fipple | Hacker News Reader

As an Asian American I hate how we are “white” or “nonwhite” situationally, to our maximum disadvantage. We’re nonwhite so we get racist jokes in middle school and don’t get cast as leading actors. But we’re white enough to keep out of Harvard and for us to count as “whites and Asians” for tech company hiring.

WTF are “Whites and Asians?” Whites own America, good and bad. They wrote the Constitution and they wrote the Three Fifths Compromise. They created the racial oppression system that Asians fought their way out of. And now because we’re successful we’re just bucketed in with them when convenient to anyone but us.

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Do you think affirmative action is something like pay back or reparations for all the stuff people who were white did?

AA is supposed to be about raising groups who have been systemically disadvantaged to raise them to a fair playing field. This isn't supposed to be everybody except whites get help. Its supposed to be help for those whose racial identity is the reason why they are doing so poorly. Asian Americans are doing well in the U.S. [1].

The only way you can sell AA is if you say its to help people by race. Its not to sell it as a program to disadvantage whites...

The whole issue is that AA for race really generalizes advantages and disadvantages for a race and trades advancement of the race in exchange for some merit and fair consideration for the individual. Maybe there is a balance, maybe its gone to far, maybe it hasnt gone far enough. But the point is that it pisses people off because they are no longer treated like an individual and a person unfairly carries the history of people who had the same skin color as themselves.

If a white person struggles to get somewhere they can now blame AA. If a black person gets in they can have an internal struggle wondering if they really earned it, as well as the judgment that they might've only made it due to their race.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Just to be clear, Asians are doing well despite their racial identity. Given an actually fair playing field, Asians would have dominated as the Jews did and do.

There are plenty of Asian majority countries where Asians have a fair (or even unfair in their favor, relative to their country's minorities) playing field. I assume you expect those countries to dominate the world in future?

No, or rather, not necessarily. Asians in the US are a very different group from Asians in Asia. Recent immigrants are heavily overrepresented, and I believe that the difficulty of immigrating to the US from most Asian countries selects for fairly capable people.

That being said, Asia does account for a ridiculous proportion of the world's population, so it probably wouldn't be a bad bet to bet on an Asian country becoming the next dominant superpower. You know, on purely general principles.

I understand, but to be clear, AA is not about undoing all injustice. Its about treating everybody fairly but accounting for people who are dug in at 0. Making it from the projects is really different than making it from a suburb. If asians are in the suburbs along with the whites, equal treatment is exactly fair.

The point is that we need to move on. AA makes it so people who have fallen far behind have a chance to catch up.

> the Three Fifths Compromise

Since this is one of my common beefs...

The compromise was written at the behest of the Northern, non-slave states. The Southern slave-holding states would have been perfectly fine with five-fifths representation for each slave. Further, the point of the compromise was to limit the Congressional power of the Southern slave-holding states and was not intended as a value judgement as to the worth of slaves.

Yeah, I know that. I’m Asian, remember :)

The compromise was that the Northern states gave southern blacks any representation. The correct value was actually 0/5ths for slaves, not 3/5ths or 5/5ths. Southerners wanted it both ways in that they could justify slavery because blacks were property - more akin to a beast of burden than a farmhand - and not humans with inalienable rights, but when it came to the census, they wanted blacks to be counted as humans, even though they could not vote and had no representation in both the state and federal legal system.

> even though they could not vote and had no representation in both the state and federal legal system.

That wasn't actually always true. In many places there were no race requirements for suffrage and if you were a "free negro" who met the other then-qualifications (male, land owner, etc.) then you could vote. Of course, hardly any black men of the time did, not least because they didn't even have citizenship.

This is how we, unlike most other countries, ended up with birthright citizenship after the civil war. It was another compromise. The former slaves don't get citizenship but their children do.

And the issue with counting non-citizens is still true today -- the census still counts non-citizens and federal representation is apportioned based on the census, so the states with large non-citizen populations get representation disproportionate to their number of eligible voters.

> In many places there were no race requirements for suffrage and if you were a "free negro" who met the other then-qualifications (male, land owner, etc.) then you could vote

Assuming the local official followed the law as written (hint: they didn't). Much like they would have for most of the post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights Act era, they would have simply come up with an excuse not to let the rare free blacks who met the legal qualifications vote.

That's basically any successful minority in any country ever until time does its work. For example, it wasn't until recently that open discrimination toward Jewish people was accepted at certain prestigious universities.

I don't like the label "asian" and "white", they make very complex mosaic look like monoliths.

The US Census Bureau's labels (White Caucasian, Jewish, Hispanic, etc.) is singular in that its the stupidest and most harmful nomenclature ever created, even contextualized with US history.

It has introduced conceptual confusion at every level and is all the more devastating as it is the standard mental model people use to reason about these issues.

It is setting back the US by at least a few decades, the time people realize its inaccurate, and discard it as what it is: trash.

Because Jewish people are over represented in many aspects of the US, finance, media, universities. Didn't someone say here that they make up 20% of Harvard? What's their overall population in America, 1%?

They are conveniently white/white-passing and such can take advantage of that.

Yes, because WASPs clearly think of someone named Aaron Shapiro as one of their own. C'mon.

There has been a historical bias against anyone who is not WASP and this bias subsist to this day. And that's not restricted to jewish people or asians.

I have seen lots of disdain for some of my french coworkers despite their talent and value-add and overheard "banter" (behind their backs, mind you) that would have been unacceptable for any other minority.

So, as you see. This is not a matter of white/not-white/white-passing. It's clearly an issue with the cultural identity of the majority-minority of this country and multiple thick layers of biases that need to be scraped.

You could argue that the Holocaust killed off a lot of the less successful Jews (the ones too poor or unskilled to leave areas occupied by Nazi Germany).

If you killed off the least successful 50% of white Americans, then white attendance at Harvard (presumably unaffected) would go up relative to the (now halved) white proportion of America.

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