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I have said this for years. Asians, particularly Asian males, are the only racial group in America subject to overt policies meant to disadvantage them on the basis of their race, and nobody cares. Asian immigrants to the US tend to embody more than any ethnic group precisely the characteristics that are supposed to constitute America. Meanwhile we're playing games of trying to tease out how implicit bias might be impacting XYZ, or taking population outcomes as evidence of systemic bias impacting other groups, when disadvantages put on Asian individuals are explicitly laid out as systemic and on the basis of their race.

Meh. Happens to us white males too. Adversity makes us stronger or something.

I recall the pleasure of riding a slow, long school bus meandering around the city for 3 hours a day for 4 school years because there were "too many whites/Asians" at a school on the same block where I lived. Gotta love bureaucratically-proscribed "equality of outcome" policies foisting inequity of treatment externalities onto individuals based on their race. Definitely not racism, because racism can't happen to white males due to the celebration of the hierarchy of victimhood, right?

> Asian males, are the only racial group in America subject to overt policies meant to disadvantage them on the basis of their race

I'd recommend reading The Color of Law, https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...

Redlining has been illegal for 50 years. I'm aware of historical policies.

And those people who were affected by it are still alive and still living in its shadow. The damage has already been done and it's going to take more than one generation before its affects start to fade.

Where did I make the claim that people's circumstances today would be unaffected by history?

That's not the only subject of the book

here's a more recent example than redlining https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/sausalito-school-segre...

> A California school district outside of San Francisco agreed to desegregate its schools on Friday, after a two-year state investigation found that the district had “knowingly and intentionally maintained and exacerbated” racial segregation and even established an intentionally segregated school.

> In the Sausalito case, the state said the district had violated the equal protection clause of the California Constitution.

> The settlement, filed in state court in San Francisco...

Sounds like it was (a) not overt (if it took a two-year investigation to establish it), (b) illegal, and (c) eventually punished under preexisting law.

> and (c) eventually punished under preexisting law. While I agree with you on this point, punishment does not mean repair or restore, which is the sad part.

Prevention, through detection (which goes to your point of "(a) not overt (if it took a two-year investigation to establish it)" seems like the better thing for these sorts of circumstances, but is a lot more difficult to achieve. Part of me, possibly naively, believes that transparency is the answer, so that those of us who care can determine things without a 2 year investigation, but that feels... too simplistic. Not sure what a better answer is, though.

If blatant is not overt in this context then I'm curious what the overt discrimination against asian males is?

I’m an Asian male. How exactly has it disadvantaged you?

I think you should maybe re-read what I wrote.

It was pretty clear.

> when disadvantages put on Asian individuals are explicitly laid out as systemic and on the basis of their race.

What exactly have I been disadvantaged in?

"Asian" in American lingo usually doesn't include Indians. It's basically Chinese/Japanese/Korean.

Oh, you assumed I was Asian. Now I understand your original post.

The areas Asians are disadvantaged in are college admissions and hiring practices. There is an active lawsuit against YouTube for issuing freezes on hiring white and Asian males, on the premise that they needed to hire more people from other racial/ethnic groups. This is simply not something that would happen to another minority group. The people that tend to otherwise fixate on racial identity and collective privilege will typically also conveniently ignore Asians, whose successes in this "white supremacist" nation throw a bit of a wrench in their world view.

> There is an active lawsuit against YouTube for issuing freezes on hiring white and Asian males, on the premise that they needed to hire more people from other racial/ethnic groups.

I've interviewed with Google multiple times without issue

> whose successes in this "white supremacist" nation throw a bit of a wrench in their world view.

Interesting that you should mention that, because perceived/actual white supremacy is a reason why Asians are voting overwhelmingly against Republicans today.

Since race is merely a social construct with no consistent objective basis, smart applicants should check whichever box gives them the most bonus points at that particular school. It's not lying. Or if they're uncomfortable with that, just leave it blank.

Interestingly I've seen the question often as "which do you identify as", which you can definitely lie on. If I said something like "Asian" instead of "Caucasian" it would definitely be lying because I don't actually identify as Asian.

> If I said something like "Asian" instead of "Caucasian" it would definitely be lying because I don't actually identify as Asian.

What if you did that day? Is there a need for a long term self-identification to qualify as the minority of your choosing?

The question as commonly understood is asking about your family geographical/cultural heritage. Your family heritage is constant. So unless new information has come to light recently or you're really confused about your heritage, I don't think it makes sense to be changing your ethnicity/race on a daily basis.

One could feel Asian because you're in a Chinese immersion program speaking Chinese 24/7, but if you don't have any ancestors from Asia more recent than Ghengis Khan, you can't really self-identify as Asian for the purposes of the question as commonly understood. It's not like one's family heritage changes if one's circumstances change.

There is no such common understanding. Everyone has their own subjective understanding of such questions. Who are we to judge whether they're right or wrong.

Please justify your assertion that self identification of being Asian should be cut off based on ancestry at 1227. It seems awfully arbitrary. Do you actually have a logical reason for picking that year, or are you just making things up to suit your own preferences?

Language is common understanding (within boundaries). Sure, there is subjective understanding, but only to a point. As I understand it, the concept of ancestry in English implies a certain immutability. You can't be Asian today and African tomorrow. You can't identify as Eskimo one day and Pacific Islander the next (barring a rather unusual situation). You can't change identity like clothes. There are words for people who do that, though, "actor" being the kindest. If you want to redefine the meanings of these terms, fine, but then we're no longer using the same words, even if the syllables happen to sound the same.

I never said 1227 and don't know why you are picking that year. I picked Genghis Khan because supposedly most everyone has some of his genes.

Identity is more than just saying you are an identity, it's a reflection of how you actually see yourself.

If you actually see yourself differently then you can actually change what you identify as.

This means you need to actually see yourself differently to not be lying and you can't just pick and choose based on a whim. For example I'm a huge nerd and even if I tell people I don't identify as one it doesn't change how I see myself so it's just a lie. Though as time goes on I'm doing less and less nerdy hobbies so I feel less a part of that group so in the future I might not feel like a nerd at all so if I say I don't identify as a nerd then I'm telling the truth. Doing what you are saying requires being able to actually believe you are part of those different groups.

Define your terms. How does one differentiate between a whim versus a deeply held belief? Is there a time limit involved? Some objective measure of sincerity?

"It's not a lie if you believe it."

- George Constanza

> Interestingly I've seen the question often as "which do you identify as",

Self-identification is a weird metric. I mean, I'm pretty sure bigotry's about how others see a person rather than how a person sees themself.

Yeah but those generally align and it's not like you can just poll a bunch of people they have known. If you have a better way to practically do it for people I would be interested

Well it isn't lying in the sense that it adheres to the currently popular concept that everything is subjective. I really like this response since it forces the question "Are there valid categories of people yes or no?".

Why do we need to penalize or give special treatment based on race? Why is race even a metric?

Because they understand that many students are disadvantaged or advantaged based on race. Affirmative action is meant to counter that.

Wouldn't parents income be a good proxy for a disadvantaged background for college education purposes?

This unfairly penalizes students whose parents recently came into money. Early education is important, and it is unfortunately often the case that parents who work hard to become successful financially don't have as much time and energy to put into their children. Such children may be disadvantaged during critical years and now have the additional challenge of being penalized for their parents now being wealthy.

So the parents could provide N years of tax records showing they recently got money.

What about measuring wealth and education quality instead of race? If I'm a rich black/latino I have more advantages than a poor Asian/White/Jew student.

By the way, I know it shouldn't matter but I'm latino (Dominican). Looks like nowadays you have to have an specific race to have an opinion.

It's not a single axis of (dis-)advantage. A wealthy black person in America has economic advantages over a poor white student, yes. But the black student will have disadvantages based on their skin color that a white student wouldn't have. There are a lot of people advocating for entirely replacing race-based affirmative action with economic/wealth-based weighting but they're not mutually exclusive.

I would argue that wealth is significantly more important than color of skin.

Yes race matters. But your social class and financial means matter far more in most casss.

Policies like these based on race are precisely why students are disadvantaged by race.

We must stop looking at arbitrary and superficial physical attributes to determine a person's character if we are to ever get past all of this racial nonsense.

There is clear discrimination in the world. If you were a black person in my southern state, where the schools were worse in minority (usually the same as poorer) areas, the treatment from the police is worse, when you go for a job in high school they won't hire you to be in a front facing job like a waiter because you are black, you would see it. So what do we do, ignore it, because some white guy gets their feelings hurt that we try to give these people help? We need to help them. If you argue we don't need to, then it just seems heartless, and probably you are in a position where this is invisible to you.

This is a really difficult problem, trying to help increase opportunity. We run into reverse racism of a kind, with today's "too many qualified Asians" (because they are good students) in Harvard problem where they are trying for a diverse student body, but what does diverse really mean? Before this there was similar descriptions of too many Jewish people at colleges (in the 1950s I have read). No one ever wanted more of my kind of person either (white guy, a single parent but middle class) in my whole career and life - yet I should also state most of my coworkers my whole life in tech have mostly been middle class white guys. My parents were not about to be able to donate a million bucks to Harvard so I could go, they didn't go there, and neither did I. If Harvard allowed the best prepared students to go there, then there would be more rich legacy white kids and more Asians.

That sounds pretty racist to me. Basically saying that any race they give the upper hand to is poor in their eyes.

Well, because on average, Asians are more intelligent then whites, who are in turn more intelligent then blacks.

So, for example, when NYC has special schools for the smartest minority of students, these schools end up with mostly Asians and whites.[1] This is racist.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/nyregion/gifted-programs-...

I think you mean "than", not "then". "than" is the word that fits in those phrases.

You are correct! Then = time, than = comparison.

Maybe that is why I got downvoted. ;-)

How is it racist? The school is for the most intelligent/academically proficient students or whatever its criteria is, and that's how the select them. If that subset of the population is, for argument, 99% white and Asian, it would be suspect if the school was anything but 99% those two. It doesn't matter that the population of the country as a whole is not.

* more intelligent based on available but extremely fallible metrics

Because they are standardizing scores for "intelligence" and performance so adversity related to race puts some people at a disadvantage.

It was an adversity score, not a diversity score.

It is about equal opportunity, not equal outcome

That's not how diversity success metrics are reported though. It's said to be a travesty if half the number of women as men choose a STEM major

Well, no, and here is the Crux of the issue with affirmative action, and possibly one of the strongest base drivers of the cleavage between the American left approach to race and equality, and the American right approach to the same.

These policies attempt to achieve equality of outcome based on the implicit presumption that given equality of opportunity outcomes will be equal among various demographics. Thus any systematic inequalities are, without much in the way of hard evidence (a limitation of the related fields of psychology, economics, and the like) immediately explained by uncompetitive social norms of successful groups, i.e. racism/discrimination - unlocking the justification for penalizing those on top to equalize outcomes for those on the bottom.

The result of this implicit and fundamentally unproven assumption is the conflation of equality of outcome with equality of opportunity by the modern American left. This is a point of consternation for those near the center and leaning right primarily because it punishes success without allowing for the possibility of personal/internal explanations for discrepancies, i.e. cultural factors independent of poverty which limit economic success, and/or things like proven heritability of intelligence. Further, one could argue that such a conflation optimizes economic equality over merit, which is probably worse for society overall.

When you allow the most competent people to rise to positions fitting their competence, they can create wealth for everyone.

They can do whatever they want to do and can get away with.