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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

American culture has a long history of having an anti-intellectual streak. A football player seen as a hero, while a boy good at math is seen as a "nerd". It's the problem of bad neighborhoods, where the most popular kids in schools have the biggest fists, and who encourage or even force kids more interested in learning to "not be dorks", thus keeping them in the trap of poverty.

There are many reasons why this dynamic could arise. The problem is that it's not entirely gone even now, after like 50 years of "nerds" in engineering and finance having some of the most enviable career paths.

Facing it should be especially hard for Asian kids, as it used to be for Jewish kids in Europe: a different parenting culture helps them achieve more earlier, and actually like studying.

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To play the devil's advocate, if these poorer neighborhoods, which may correlate with race, have a culture that discourages kids who study, that might actually be an argument to take race into account, if there's say, a black applicant whose score isn't as good, but it's competitive and they came from a bad place and overcame the odds. Due to my own values and experiences, I'd empathize with someone who values intellectualism but has been kept down due to their outside circumstances. It's an unfortunate situation and I would hope that the kid's hard work pays off.

However, I think that this should stay as judging individuals and their circumstances and putting them in the context of the environment, and it should not justify wide-scale generalizations like secret quotas hidden with personality tests, etc. As you point out, such things further anti-intellectualism and penalize Asians and Jews for working hard.

(It would also be more productive to support people in those neighborhoods from the start, such as by supporting elementary schools, instead of waiting until college admissions.)

What about the poor asians like my parents who immigrated here, after facing rampant discrimination in their homeland, lived in a poorer neighborhood, because that's all they could afford as new transplants, were enslaved by their own family, but managed to break out of that, go to school again to get into their dream job, and who now want to send their two sons to the best schools in the country?

Why shouldn't those circumstances be taken into account? Perhaps it's because -- as a race -- most Asians are too proud to talk about this in their admissions essays, and moreover, their intellectual accumen would tend to indicate that these -- frankly minor -- issues are not important when considering what school to attend.

What we should really be talking about is why anyone -- Asian or black or whatever -- needs to elicit the sympathy of some old WASP to attend school. The whole 'write a sob story' trope is true because this appeals to popular white culture. It's time that ends, and we let adults run the show.

Yes, I agree completely. Because I personally don't come from a poor background, I fell into the racist trap against my own race of forgetting about poorer Asians (who may also live in such neighborhoods, and may be bullied if they locally comprise of the minority). Thank you for correcting me and for downvoting (I assume).

I also agree that the current situation of having to write a touching essay for some WASP is messed up. To be fair, not all essays are sob stories and people actually warn that it shouldn't be all sob and you need to show how you grew, but the whole idea of essays and personality is so vague and subjective, and kids get so stressed over writing a good essay.

EDIT: Offtopic, but looking at your username, do you happen to be the author of the Haskell BEAM library?

in this case, should'nt the root cause (bullying and bad school environment) be addressed?

if this was in a completely different sector, where a small more powerful subset uses strength, we would use terminology such as 'anti-competitive practices', 'coercion' etc.

I don't have a solution, but strongly feel that addressing the root cause prevents the child from being victimized in the first place, rather than acknowledging his reality and providing the crutches that help him get to a levelling field in the real world.

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