How Japanese Americans Built a ‘Useful American Life’ in 1940s Chicago | Hacker News Reader

How Japanese Americans Built a ‘Useful American Life’ in 1940s Chicago

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29 pointssamclemens12 comments

And they are still discriminated against at elite American universities where despite awesome grades, test scores, and extra curricular activities, the universities somehow find them lacking in “personality”.

No, the problem is artificially adjusting admission criteria based on the race of the applicants to achieve "correct" race distribution on the campus.

The core question is: what should a "correct" ethnical distribution be on campus?

Should it roughly match the composition of the general population?

Should it be biased towards ethnicities historically suppressed?

Should it be totally independent of ethnicity and only focus on highschool exam results?

In the end this is a political question. The naive answer would be option #3 which has the downside though that it does not account for prior discrimination in primary/secondary schools that all too often favor students of white middle-class parents due to a combination of factors, so the modern approach is more or less option #2.

One could argue that universities should not be concerned with any prior discrimination. We should have loose coupling and encapsulation. Universities should have their own independent admission criteria that are as objective, reasonable and meritocratic as possible. If you have a problem with discrimination elsewhere (e.g. primary/secondary schools), that is where the problem needs to be fixed. If the school system is incapable of preparing students to the standard required by the universities, it is a problem of the school system and needs to be fixed there.

For e.g. a science degree, ideally money, social skills, extra-curriculum activities, athletics, socio-economic background should most likely not even enter the equation. Once you have designed the system, you can then try to get the actual implementation as close as possible to the idealized design.

Even fixing the discrimination in primary/secondary schools would not fix the apparent discrimination at universities though - poor people and especially poor black people will still be under-represented on campus, as they do not have financial help by family to attempt education (not just tuition which is coverable by student loans, but also things like moving to the university and other travel costs), or they are needed to work to help their parents make rent.

Affirmative action and targeted help/assistance for these groups automatically goes out of the window as soon as the focus is entirely on prior achievements/grades.

It is a difficult problem. On the one hand, money problems should not prevent a bright student from studying at a university. On the other hand, some degrees at some universities for some people are a waste of time and money, and the time would've been better spent learning a trade.

To make the problem a bit simpler by considering the extremes - if a student is so bright and capable that they get into MIT or Harvard on merit alone, financial difficulty should not be preventing them from studying. However it is done, the kid and, if applicable, their family, need to be made financially secure for the duration of the studies.

It's funny to call it naive approach when it works perfectly well in many European countries. The so called "modern" approach doesn't even favour disadvantaged students, it simply favours children of well-off favoured minorities parents. And in addition it creates animosity because of favouritism and makes other students think that the students from group with lower entrance requirements are less capable even if those particular students would be able to enter on their own merits.

If there is any discrimination in primary/secondary education, it should be fixed instead of trying to engineer society by introducing "good" racism (which actually hurts Asian minorities).

>It's funny to call it naive approach when it works perfectly well in many European countries.

That's mostly because our universities are publicly funded and require no or extremely low tuition, meaning the only money young adults need for academic education is for their living costs (rent, food, internet, beer). This lowers the barrier of entry - and it also gives those students a chance to try who are not sure they can pull through because they do not need to be afraid of losing years of their lives AND have a six figures debt mountain.

> And in addition it creates animosity because of favouritism

Scholarships to cover living costs are quite common here (Germany) for gifted students and they don't cause much animosity, although there has been a growing debate over racial and financial inequality (i.e. that most people applying and getting them don't really need them due to their family's background).

> If there is any discrimination in primary/secondary education, it should be fixed instead of trying to engineer society by introducing "good" racism (which actually hurts Asian minorities).

As said below, discrimination exists in the university system as well. As for affirmative action hurting other minorities... the system can and should be tuned there.

I’m an Asian living living in northern Europe. I never have to mention my race on any kind of form. A lot of things in the US baffles me.

Somehow I hadn't really thought about whether the discrimination in university admissions against Asian Americans in general affects all sub-groups, like Japanese Americans for example. Is this the case?

>the universities somehow find them lacking in “personality”.

It is a pervasive stereotype of all Asians in the US to this day. Unless you act bombastic, are loud and spew BS, you are considered "not leader material". It is all about posing and not actual effectiveness.

I also find it shocking that internment policies didn't fix all long term racial issues.

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