Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by birdyrooster | Hacker News Reader

Asians in America are more often rich (Indian, Japanese, Chinese immigrants, not Korean or Vietnamese refugees), in some markets more so than whites (e.g. Los Angeles), and have much more power and access than latinos and blacks. The system is broken and adding more Asians (broadly) does not make it better. There are sub-groups of Asians which are vastly more underprivileged than other Asian ethnicities (Japanese-Americans are ~10x more wealthy than Korean-Americans in L.A. [1]). Affirmative Action isn't intended to just give non-whites opportunities equally. It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged, focusing on the most disadvantaged first (descendants of American slavery, refugees of war, etc).

Or, instead of focusing on first principles of justice and equity, we can continue to just hand-wave the difference of ability and struggle that exist between asian immigrants and flatten it all into "asian" giving benefits to the most privileged of them.

In my industry, European-Americans and Asian-Americans have teamed up (unwittingly or otherwise) to limit diversity because they make up the vast majority of the labor and take many opportunities that could go to blacks or latinos.

[1] https://www.frbsf.org/community-development/files/color-of-w...

>Affirmative Action isn't intended to just give non-whites opportunities equally. It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged, focusing on the most disadvantaged first (descendants of American slavery, refugees of war, etc).

Is that how the harvard applications questions are structured? ie. do they ask "are you a descendant of american slavery or refugee of war?", or do they ask "what is your ethnicity, white, hispanic, black, asian, mixed, other?". I'll be more willing to believe your explanation if the questions are structured like the former rather than the latter. However, in my experience I've almost never saw the former.

> It's intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged,

No, it literally isn't. Bakke in 1978 said that affirmative action is justified because diversity benefits everyone. It is not supposed to be used to favor historically disadvantaged people, and of course, after Bakke, universities don't claim to be using it for that purpose.

Of course, you may say that the universities are lying through their teeth when they claim that. You'll probably even be right. But taking them at their word, affirmative action is not "intended to restore equity by giving greater opportunity to those historically disadvantaged".

they might not be rich, but most of them are solidly middle/upper middle class and have a strong family structure in which the parents take a very active role in their childs life and future. This is not to say Asians don't work hard, in general a lot of them work very hard and have high standards for themselves, but i would say that if they went to a state school vs Harvard, i would bet their future outcomes wouldn't be too different. If someone from a under represented minority who came from a poor family managed to get into Harvard, their future outcomes might change a lot, they could finally get access to a sort of "knowledge" that middle and upper middle class give to their children since the time they are born, a knowledge on what the world is really like and what is possible in this world.

I just want to point out that this is part of the premise of the original article:

> Harvard’s admissions policies make me especially queasy, because the burden rests so heavily on Asian Americans. Still, it advances the important goals of exposing students to a somewhat broader range of colleagues and helping to lift more underrepresented minorities into positions in the power elite, which remains heavily white.

Generally, going to prestigious schools benefits under represented minorities more than it benefits Asian Americans to an extent that affirmative action can be effective at addressing systemic inequalities, but it's still discriminatory against Asian americans to do so. It's a matter of opinion whether it's a good tradeoff or not

Is there anything that the admissions committee can do to make sure that admission is totally discrimination free? Even evaluating by pure test results would mean that there is systematic discrimination towards the unprivileged. Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?

The thing is that there's two levels of possible discrimination; systemic discrimination and admissions discrimination. Pure test results are discrimination free at the admissions level, but they don't address systemic inequities. To accommodate for systemic inequities, we use admissions discrimination. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing; the author thinks it's a worthy tradeoff.

> Asians are extremely well represented at top schools, i'm not sure what they are fighting for?

The truth is that Asian Americans have to get higher test scores / GPA / extracurriculars to get into prestigious schools. It's true that this might have a positive affect on reducing systemic discrimination in the long run, but it's hard for Asian American applicants to accept that the burden should be placed on them.

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