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Comment by hannasanarion | Hacker News Reader

Unequal outcome is not indicative of racism, it is racism. That's the point: racism is an outcome, not an intent. An unknowing, unfeeling beurocratic system can be racist, even if there isn't a speck of racial bias in the hearts of the practitioners and designers, simply due to historical quirks as you point out, or design mistakes.

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So your argument is that Harvard is racist if it doesn’t discriminate against Asian applicants? So that they are not overrepresented among the student population?!

No, my argument is that "it's just numbers! they don't have a soul!" is not a valid defense from accusations of racism, because the statistical systems can be racist in their design, and there is no "racist meter" you can apply to check. The only way to know if a system is fair or not is to check whether the results you're getting are the ones you want.

FWIW, your usage of the the term 'racism' is not at all what most people mean when they use the term. The vast, overwhelming majority of people do not think in terms of systems. They think in terms of agency.

"vast, overwhelming majority of people"

You gonna back that up?

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/racism

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/racist

No mention of what the person I was responding to was talking about.

Right, and if you look at results, you see that there's too many Asian students, relative to their proportion in the general population. So how do you solve that? One way is to up the bar at the admissions, and require Asians to score better relative to other ethnicities, in order to be admitted. Do you think that makes the system fairer?

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