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Comment by qubax | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, harvard and the left repeatedly say we should live in a colorblind society. Race is not important and it isn't even real. It is a social construct of no importance to who the person is. They tell us only raicsts are obsessed with race and only racists see color.

On the other hand, harvard and the left are obsessed with race. So is harvard and the left racist? Aren't they supposed to be colorblind and not focused on a person's immutable characteristic? By giving certain racial group an unfair advantage, aren't they condescendingnly assuming these racials groups are inferior. Doesn't that make them patronizing racists?

If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?

From where I stand, harvard's admissions policy seems like blatant condescending and patronizing racism.

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That's a MASSIVE straw man. Harvard won't argue that, and nobody who studies race and equality issues will argue that.

I'm assuming that you are looking for actual discourse on the topic. The issue of color-blindness vs. race consciousness is pretty well-trodden territory in the context of studying racism. If you google those words, you'll find plenty of literature about it. I just tried it and there are several good discussions of the topic in the first couple pages.

The short version is that colorblindness doesn't address the "rich get richer" effect, so if you want to close the gap, you're going to have to look at ways to create catch-up mechanisms.

If we are all humans and equal, why does race matter? Who cares if the humans attending harvard are all white or all asian or all black? We are humans right?

You're assuming that the default behavior is fair. That's fundamentally not true. If you're looking for the actual argument made by Harvard and "the left," then this is it: the default is unfair, and the goal is to make it fair.

How is “the rich get richer” a racial issue?

Wealth in the US correlates strongly along racial lines. The rich getting richer widens wealth disparities between races and communities, which in turn widens the gap in political voice, both because of money and education.

There's a reason the EEOC needed to exist.

So why don't we address the issue at its root and use wealth as the primary factor for diversity versus the proxy of race?

Race is by itself a root cause. You only need to look at the white nationalists who've come out of the woodwork recently to see that.

Case in point, do you think this can be fixed by fixing wealth disparities? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/09/2...

> Race is by itself a root cause.

Racism exists. But there are many black and brown ethnic groups that do better than whites in the US[0]. In fact, the highest earning ethnic group in the US are brown! And immigrants from The Caribbean (who are predominantly indistinguishable from black Americans) tend to earn more income than American born whites. So while race may be an issue, the hypothesis that it is the predominant issue doesn’t seem to line up with the data.

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

This isn't a data issue, it's a problem where you're trying to bend the data to your point. Just because Indians earn more on average doesn't mean Black people don't face clear racism problems.

As an analogy, just because most people didn't get their data stolen in the latest Facebook breach doesn't mean Facebook doesn't have a security problem.

The main problem is that the catch up mechanisms don’t have a termination condition. At what point do these go away? What if for whatever reason, these mechanisms don’t actually improve anything. Do we keep adding more mechanisms?

Well, affirmative action did technically have a built in catch-up mechanism.

But really, do you think all laws need termination mechanisms, and do you only vote for laws that do? Or if you think that some laws must exist that solve permanent problems, then, well, racism has never not been a problem, it has just taken different forms over time.

Alternately, we can trust the democratic system to do the course correcting.

Yes, they say we should live in a colorblind society. But because we don't, applicants' paths to Harvard are very different, often because of systemic differences in opportunities, resources, enforcement, etc that differ strongly between races.

Thus, the theory is that the way to get to that colorblind society is by accounting for those differences and to afford greater opportunities to historically disadvantaged groups.

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