In Supreme Court brief, Yale and peers defend use of race in admissions
news.yale.edu
news.yale.edu
Unlike applicants whose identities have been affected mainly by their socioeconomic or geographic circumstances, applicants whose formative experiences relate to race or ethnicity would be denied the opportunity to convey their full, authentic selves when competing for admission to selective schools like Amici.
And so we guarantee that millions of Americans will have a formative experience that THEIR race (various Asian groups) are allowed to be discriminated against. Instead of being rewarded if they follow every rule on how to fit in and succeed.
Let's be clear. The schools are literally fighting to let them continue excluding the grandchildren of people who were put in a camp for being the wrong race (Japanese in WW 2). Separately those same teenagers have to deal with a world where hate crimes against Asians just jumped. Locally in Orange county it is up over 100%.
This is just wrong. And that people who support the policy claim to be for "tolerance" is just hypocrisy.
Society isn't conscious and people aren't microbes. The analogy of a cytokine storm taking out healthy cells to drive off infection becomes grim when the "healthy cells" are people.
Maybe, maybe not :P
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconsci...
Unjust discrimination is complex, often subconscious, and deeply rooted in institutional structures and culture. It's too complex and elusive to address directly beyond the obvious removal of explicit regulations (desegregation) and finger wagging. Those things have already been done and yet extreme inequalities persist, so addressing outcome is the only way people can think of to go any deeper.
It starts at kindergarten and before. Minority children should enter schools where they have a chance, with the resources to take advantage of that chance. But we don't. And here in California, blacks graduating high school on average only read as well as 8th grade blacks.
Attempting to create equality of outcome after that is a lost cause.
I can think of a dozen policies that would be more effective at helping blacks than discriminating against Asians at elite universities. My favorite example is that research says that homework provides little net benefit on average, but specifically hurts children in disadvantaged families where parents themselves lack the skills to help their children understand the material. Therefore dramatically reducing homework will help blacks. (And will also make families with teenagers much less stressful places.)
Does a bridges proper engineering rely on detailed emotional understanding of Shakespeare?
Human language is only 5,000 years old they say. Leaving human intuition for quantity millions of years to fine tune itself; enough food, enough heat, to prevent biological death.
Nothing about human biology is fueled or relies upon grammatically correct English and everything to do with correct use of mathematical measurement.
Because of the internet and the vast amount of knowledge accessible in English only.
Even you, who is calling it "gibberish" is forced to use it to participate in these thread.
It is very similar to violence. People abhor violence when it done against the wrong person and love violence when it feel justified against the right target. This is why laws regulating violence is often written to be as broad as possible. If you give people the right to turn to violence when they feel its justified, you get mob justice which only create spirals of more violence.
When people feel extreme inequalities persist even when laws should prevent them, people reach for mob justice. Riots, occupations of buildings, looting and shooting. The result is rarely that the extreme inequalities goes away. The cure is almost always the same, which is restricting violence even further and working directly at removing violence from institutional structures and culture.
What if a large percentage of people decided to exclude you from everything for some arbitrary reason. Just you.
People know who you are and pass you up for jobs, promotions, home loans, value your contributions less, etc.
The reasons don't make sense. They're impervious to argument. In some cases people deny that they're doing it, or seem genuinely unaware, but they're doing it just the same.
To you. Only to you.
Nobody is initiating violence. Nobody is actively stealing from you or harming you. They're just boycotting you, excluding you, assuming the worst about you by default...
What would you do? How long would this have to go on for you to turn to violence if nothing else made any difference?
Excluding people from everything in modern society causes harm. Starvation, exposure to the environment, psychological harm, atrophy of muscle and body. Excluding people from health care lead to further harm and eventually death. Taken to the extreme and we got murder.
If a majority of people voted to allow murder and violence then the most likely outcome is a civil war, but if in this thought experiment we are talking about only allowing murder and violence towards a single person, the best strategy would be to flee and seek asylum.
If we however limit this thought experiment to an degree which isn't murder and violence, and within the already set limits that government laws has specified (such as the European law of human rights), then if a large percentage of people decided to exclude me from a limited number of things, the best approach would be to political active to make the law even better while at the same time personally avoiding those people. No violence required. Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolent resistance is a good model when laws are unjust and need changing.
For this statement alone the left can label you as far right. In the past 10 years or so, I repeatedly hear a consistent message: we fight for equal outcome. And of course, identity is a critical factor, if not the only factor, in this fight. I'm actually very curious how the American elites reach this conclusion, and how they reconcile the bloody history of people pursuing equal outcome (or in the name of it).
Reconciliate is a post construction of 'reconciliation'
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144 is relatable for a lot of people.
The next few elections will possibly shake some of this out. I just hope it doesn’t swing too far the other way.
I have doubts that this is the real reason, but legally they need to cloak it as that.
Imagine coming from such a place to America, and seeing here women are wearing that symbol of oppression as a fashion statement. It just boggles the mind. Its analogous to if you were an American slave in 1800s, got your freedom and sailed to the UK. And on landing saw blacks in the UK wearing chains as a fashion accessory. It seems so disrespectful towards your struggle.
I would point out that chains are indeed a popular fashion accessory.
I think that telling people what to wear removes power from them. It isn't contradictory to believe that telling people that they must wear something and telling people that they must not wear that thing can BOTH be dis-empowering.
So while I think you should absolutely share your experiences and the feelings you get when you see others wearing a hijab, I absolutely do not think you should push for laws that make it illegal to wear one.
Indeed, it does remove power from them. It is also something which every country, every culture, and every religion has in common. They all put in rules about what people are allowed and not allowed to wear. The support for those are also quite high when people are forced to think about them, but since they are such an omnipresence, it like talking to fish about water.
It is a rare event that I find a person who honestly believe that people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear with neither government, culture or religion being able to overrule that decision.
When a more powerful group imposes a dress code on a less powerful group, it absolutely behooves us to second guess ourselves.
> people should have an inalienable-right to decide from themselves what to wear
It seems pretty evident that dress and style is a form of self expression is is thus part of our right to free speech, and sometimes also protected by freedom of religion.
Both of those "inalienable rights" are subject to abrogation in specific contexts and so is the right to dress how you like, but that doesn't mean it isn't a fundamental human right.
Similar is the specific contexts which such rules may be broken. Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?
We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?
I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks. Fair? Unfair?
Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception. Fair or unfair?
The list goes on and on. Depending on a person cultural, religious and political views people will think some of those are fair and others not. Very few find all of them unfair and want to give people the right to determine that themselves, which is why finding such person is such a rare event for me. Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.
This is BS relativism and you seem to be attempting to dismiss any culpability for cultures that impose unfair dress codes that primarily impact those who aren't making the dress codes and are less power or out groups.
> Nudists are generally only permitted in very narrow defined and small nudist zones, like say a specific beach behind a hill and behind a forest on the outskirts of a city. If the same would be applied to Hijab so that it would only be allowed in small and special Hijab zones located out of sight of everyone in the furthest located place, would it feel fair or unfair?
I think nudist are often treated unfairly, but there are different degrees to that unfairness in different areas. Other there are still default nudist spots in areas where nudism is legal since there are also community aspects.
I think allowing hijabs in some areas only or banning them in some areas only is less unfair than a blanket ban, but is still unfair unless there are legitimate safety concerns and the laws cover the entire class of headwear.
I would say that laws against nudism seem less targeted at a low power out group than laws against hijabs so seem like a greater abuse of power.
> We have situation like, should a male buss driver be allowed to wear shorts, or is it fair that the company dress code say that men should were suits and women skirts regardless of hot it is?
I think the company should be legally required to allow/offer uniforms that work in the environmental conditions their employees face. I don't think gender based clothing restrictions are ever fair.
> I know a person who had to quite his job because wearing socks hurt his feet so much and the dress code strictly required socks.
Unfair, unless there are safety concerns.
> Some people has been fired because they refused to remove jewelry where the dress code forbid it. Those jewelry was religious in nature and such the wearer felt they deserved an exception.
Unfair unless the rule was motivated by safety.
> Personally I think people should have the right to wear or not wear what ever they want as long it doesn't cause physical harm to an other person, but that is me.
I think there are other legitimate reasons to impose dress codes (safety, reputation, etc.) but what those codes are, how they are targeted and how they impact those effected all matter when it comes to justifying those codes.
Take nudist. When did you last time hear about a nudist politician that advocated for nudists rights. Would you disagree that being openly nudist would harm a politician chance of getting elected? That to me is a rather clear definition of a less powerful out group being openly discriminated against.
Similar, male buss drivers are a typical lower class worker group. You don't see many of those becoming politicians. Classism is often said as being the biggest cause for discrimination, especially when in combination with racism which itself can be a proxy for class. This is how companies can get away with dress code that actually cause directly bodily harm (overheating).
Some groups receive more sympathy, and which one those are is based one culture. It the same reason why some religions get more respect than others. A common argument I see when people justify this exceptionalism is when the religion is one of the big ones. Majority religions get more sympathy than minority religions, and the smaller a religion is the less their views get respected.
As an example, Muslim cultural behavior get more respected than practitioners of Wicca, Satanism, Missionary Church of Kopimism, and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How would you rank those in term of power/out group definition?
The chains of a chattel slave are popular fashion accessory where now?
The point isn't that the "hijab empowers women." The point is that a woman should be able to choose for herself whether to wear the hijab or not. Autonomy, and all that.
Telling a Muslim woman she can't wear a hijab is just as oppressive as telling one she must wear it.
A hijab is a religious garment. The confederate flag is a symbol of treason and slavery. Liberals leave it up to the individual to practice their own faith as they wish, so it's not frowned upon any more than a rosary is.
Unless you're also now telling the Amish and Orthodox Jewish communities how they have to dress? While we're at it, Mormons also have religious dress codes for women. And Hindus.
> Most black men couldn't balance a checkbook / But buy a new car, talkin' 'bout, "How my neck look?" / Well, it all looks great / Four hundred years later, we buyin' our own chains
The focus on Asians is because of a doctrine that discriminating against Whites is very good and correct, because they deserve it.
Maybe. I think it's because they are a small population being discriminated against heavily, versus a much larger population being discriminated against mildly. It seems far more egregious in the case of Asians when you look at the disparities in test scores required for admissions to these institutions by race.
Create a minimum criteria to succeed in a program and simply randomly choose the students from that pool is a reasonable solution that avoids much of the discriminatory issues and likely results in a more diverse student body.
Now it is necessarily true that if we try to discriminate in favor of some group (eg blacks), we must necessarily give them an advantage over another group (eg whites). But the motivation there is arguably to help the historically disadvantaged, and not specifically to hurt whites.
But there is NO argument for doing what these universities are doing. To identify racial groups that they want to discriminate against because they are too good. I see no difference between policies to discriminate against Asians today and historical policies to put quotas on how many Jews got accepted. And I doubt that there is much coincidence about which universities engaged in both policies.
Although this is what they claim, it's hard to believe sometimes. Look at the meltdown that accompanied some smart alecs putting up posters that said nothing beyond "It's OK to be white". Wokesters went mad and started tearing them down anywhere the posters were found, implying that in their mind it is actually very much not OK to be white.
Of course, the problem here is that the woke aren't actually using race words to mean the actual skin color. It's all coded speech to hide the true target of their hatred - anyone who isn't as far left as they are. That's why they go nuts when they encounter black conservatives, or why you see white people are perfectly OK criticizing things like "whiteness". They aren't engaging in self criticism there, they've just established a convention amongst their community that "white" is coded speech for conservatives.
Scott Alexander has a great essay that examines this in depth:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
This is an argument put forth in bad faith. The thought - agree or disagree - is white individuals in America have systemic advantages that persist due to historical social practices the manifest across many years of education and just existence in life in America. It's not about "deserving less" but about acknowledging they nudges in their favor many had along the way.
I'm not going to debate the veracity of that thought on a forum, but it's not some sort of punitive belief.
It seems that this is simply the argument for why the punitive belief is just.
In other words: in some decision-making settings non-White groups have a procedural weight in their favor to minimally counterbalance the way society has objectively and still measurably disadvantaged them for generations. If you want to call that "punishment" because White people "deserve it" then fine. However, I personally think that's semi-dishonest semantics that may be technically correct in the most literal sense of the word, but is not expressed in a way commensurate with the parlance of our times.
I fully agree that certain individuals face significant structural disadvantages. I actually think that most people, including those seeking social justice, are blind to many of those structural disadvantages because they find them distasteful to admit, and too adjacent to racist talking points.
If one recognizes that structural advantage exist, as we do, the questions become the appropriate methods and timeline for resolving inequity. This last one is particularly complex, and almost never discussed in any context. The reality is that even in the best case scenario, true equality without a hand on the scale will be a multi-generational project.
Regarding methods, I think it is important to note that while racial groups share many similar experiences, suffering takes place at the individual level, and individual circumstances vary widely. Heavy handed policies that treat all blacks or all whites as equivalent to each other will always have a lot of inherent injustice and collateral damage baked into them. A poor white immigrant from Ukraine is not the same as a rich white bankers son. A rich black immigrant is not the same as poor inner city child with the baggage of 200 years of systemic racism.
When folk talk of procedural advantage based on race, what many people hear is "you are acceptable collateral damage".
I think the more the conversation admits who will suffer and benefit from efforts to reduce inequities of birth, the more honest and productive discussion we can have.
I think this is a semantic distinction of your own making. I don't deny either exist, phrase it how you want. I said "procedural advantage", you can say "procedural disadvantage" if you must. It's "deserve" and "punishment" I have a problem with.
> Independent of supporting justification, I think that denying the concept of procedural disadvantage while proposing procedural advantage is also dishonest semantics.
Agree. And I believe we owe it to marginalized groups to put our hand on the scale. How hard we press I believe can and should be debated.
I generally agree with the rest of your statement. There is no way to have a perfect system, but that acknowledgement is usually used to justify doing nothing vs. doing something and thus reinforcing (and potentially worsening) the disparities.
Assuming Affirmative Action is still in place, once the current generation of Asian Ivy League grad's kids start applying for schools, this issue will start to apply to Asian kids as well.
[1] https://www.thedp.com/article/2019/09/penn-upenn-philadelphi...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/less-than-half-of-us-chil...
However, nobody is entitled to a slot in a private university.
Public schools should optimize for equality of opportunity, but private schools should be free to use other measures as long as they dont go against civil rights act. This includes maximizing profit or legacy students.
https://www.chicagojewishnews.com/how-many-jewish-students-a...
Key summary:
> "Today Yale joined peer institutions in stating emphatically that student diversity is essential to the missions of American universities and promotes educational excellence for all students,” President Peter Salovey said. “Our amicus curiae brief makes clear that the way we consider race and ethnicity as part of individualized applicant review is crucial to achieving a richly diverse academic environment that enhances students’ educational experiences and maximizes their future success. Yale stands firm in supporting universities’ established right to compose incoming classes that are diverse along many dimensions and in its commitment to enrolling students from all walks of life."
I wish I had more understanding of the topic. Diversity seems to have two dimensions to it: (1) diversity of thought, (2) diversity of background. Diversity of background would seem to encourage more diversity of thought, which I think is typically desirable, but has this been proven out/quantified? Conversely, governance seems to be a lot harder (i.e. require more authoritarian approaches to get goals accomplished) where there is diversity of thought. Please note I'm not making a normative statement here.
I ought to expand on this since this comment will surely be controversial. I make no comment on which view is right or wrong; but suppose the conservative view were favored, and any disagreement with the ideology got your fired from your job, publicly shamed, made a pariah, etc.? Would you feel comfortable sharing dissenting opinions? There is no open debate, no sense that truer speech will naturally win out over disfavored speech, no sense that people have the right to say and think unorthodox beliefs.
On the other hand, academic malfeasance does occur (e.g. Alzheimers research in recent decades), so the system is far from perfect, but the risky/rewarding incentive is to absolutely decry the current state as being completely wrong. Consider Nassim Taleb's popularization after the Great Recession as a great example, or earlier Paul Krugman's transaction cost theories.
See https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1.ht... for the shocking level of acceptance of Marxist ideas in the social sciences, despite a lack of anything resembling evidence for it. And a tremendous amount of evidence that attempts at implementing Marxism have done insane amounts of damage to the world.
But https://www.johnlocke.org/academics-support-discrimination-a... speaks more directly to your question. Conservatives are discriminated against in academia for being conservative.
Why would we police evidence-based thought in academia?
But it is not. Evidence for Marxism that I've seen boils down to rhetoric. Evidence against Marxism involves mass famines, low economic productivity, failed predictions, and so on. Therefore a significant fraction of Marxists in academia must support it for reasons other than the evidence.
Even among academics, there are many different schools of Marxist thought.
The evidence against Marx's theories isn't "mass famines, low economic productivity" but his failed predictions of worldwide revolutions.
This may not be fair, but I am going to hazard a guess that you haven't read much of Marx's work and are instead operating off a pop cultural background understanding. That's not a bad thing, that's true of most people. One possible reason for the prevalence of "Marxism" in the social sciences is that I would suspect that they are more likely to have read his work and are probably self identifying as "Marxist" under a pretty different definition of the term than the one used in pop culture.
Second, I wouldn't call myself particularly well-educated on Marxism, but I know somewhat more than the average person. And you're right that a Maoist is different than someone who studies Critical Race Theory, even though both may self-identify as Marxists. (And conversely both may NOT self-identify as Marxists even though Marxist thought has a deep impact on both.) However the "big fat zero" for Marxism includes, as far as I know, all derivative theories as well. But there are enough of them that I know little enough about that I won't recommend being particularly confident of that stronger statement.
Yale is the epicenter of the woke mind virus attempting to destroy civilization.
Paul Graham's immediate chime of support shows it isn't just a piece of random silliness on Elon Musk's part. And other things I've seen (eg the harassment of Amy Chua) certainly fit.
This amicus brief speaking up for racism and discrimination (as long as it is against those funny looking Asians) is a minor piece of the general pattern.
Therefore the brief is arguing for racism and discrimination against Asians.
What is particularly galling is that the argument in the brief is defending the university's ability to pick students who have been affected by their race. Thereby implicitly arguing that Asian-Americans have NOT been affected by their race.
Meanwhile, back in reality, hate crimes against Asian-Americans are up over 300% nationwide: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c....
I will answer your question with a question:
If the Supreme Court requires universities select their student based solely on standardized tests, and consequently this results in our top universities being made up of primarily of foreign nationals (there are billions of Chinese and Indians, and it is illegal to discriminate based on national origin), would you favor that inevitable outcome?
Be sure to include the outcomes of racially motivated structural policies into your assessment and you will shortly recognize "the soft bigotry of low expectations" is a different metric altogether (one that PG has spoken on, where the average performance in-group is much higher than overall average, indicating you only hire cream of the crop from that group).
The hypothetical here doesn't match that.
Completely anecdotally, but I had two Asian colleagues from poor households. One got a full ride to Harvard and the other to MIT. Whereas, the smartest person I've ever personally known was accepted to Harvard but not given any financial aid. He was a white male with a drug-addicted mom raised by his grandma in the slums.
In a rules based system, you get in or don't based on your qualifications and prerequisites. You can predict how the system will act in restricting you. It is fairer.
In a system where everyone must be judged, it leads to exercises in capriciousness, which is what we're seeing now. "We have too many that look like you, we need a different assortment of appearances." That's arbitrary. "Your story made me sadder than his story, you get in." That's an awful way to run a system.
That's how you get aristocracy with arbitrary power. It's what every monarch of the old systems lorded over the peasants. We're just recreating it in technicolor in all of our non-governmental systems, and it just seems so utterly foolish. The claims for why we're doing it seem noble, but they always seem that way. What this arbitrary mechanism always achieves is the opposite of its stated intent.
This has been my argument against “post modernism” and “my truth” nonsense. You can’t have a legal or social system that is selectively applied because of a story or your feelings.
It is definitely not an advantage, since the janitor’s kid is unable to pay tuition and unlikely to donate money to the school. These schools are primarily focused on maintaining their huge endowments and their over-hyped reputations.
[1] https://www.fivefourpod.com/episodes/parents-involved-in-com...
I think diverse racial representation is important, but is maybe better viewed as an indicator of success rather than a metric to optimize. Especially at a university, diversity of thought and academic talent should be the primary factors (imo).
If we look at purely merit metrics at the bottom of the funnel at university, then based on the approach these universities are taking, Asians will have the best merit metrics, and Blacks the worst. I fail to see how this could possibly promote a good social outcome. People are going to notice and stereotyping is going to kick in.
> The median family income of a student from Yale is $192,600, and 69% come from the top 20 percent.
I would suggest to give this task of measuring diversity of thought to social scientists. If universities want to go by that metric then a rigorous and measurable definition should be the first step.
If you can't measure success then you can't evaluate it, and if you don't write it down then you can't critique it. Right now they use a few single bits of information, a person race, to determine diversity of thought. That would never be accepted in a scientific research looking at diversity of thought from a rigorous definition.
It's been a similar case for Eastern European Jews, Russians, Indians, etc.
I don't understand why Hispanics should get a leg up in admissions just because they haven't gotten into schools in a high enough proportion. It seems to me the issue is supply side. You need to change the number of qualified applicants by convincing more kids to focus on college admissions.
I look for the best surgeon not someone with some race to do a surgery on me.
most arguments i see for affirmative action are on the face not logically consistent. but it feels more like the type of policy where people choose what action they want ahead of time and then desperately scramble for any justifications possible.
I believe it can result in hiveminds of similar people, since meritocracy is so focused on measuring and comparing based on a limited set of criteria. Over the long run, narrow groups of similar people do not make an innovative society.
This is true whether it is seats on a bus, distribution of aid money, or college admission.
You cannot give race based preference without simultaneously race based discrimination
So I think a policy fix is in order.
Which results in a downstream effect of other perfectly good candidates being filtered into lower quality institutions due to no reason of their own.
Systems can and should select for the best candidates.
If this is true, would that by extension mean the official platform of the Democratic party openly supports and endorses racial discrimination?
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-Democr...
Is every individual of a particular race innately imbued with some magical ability or perspective?
What if you have a Chinese father and a Russian mother and you grew up in Kenya?
Brown is not black, and I am not my hair color
https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...
It's a direct attack on the concept of merit. Some of its ardent proponents aren't too shy about this fact either. [2]
This chart [3] by the Economist is illuminating: In Harvard undergraduate admissions, a person of the wrong race with top 10% academics has a chance equal to that of a person of the right race with bottom 40% academics.
[1]: Note the Orwellian name.
[2]: E.g. see https://postmeritocracy.org/
[3]: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-e...
So whatever the policy does, the outcome is actually heavily weighted in favor of Asians vs. the share of the general population. Now, why is that? I would suspect a large share of second-generation immigrants in the pool (many immigrants I know push their kids much harder than average at academics), but I don't really know. Both "white" and "black" are underrepresented at Yale, but it looks like that is largely because of the non-resident students (who probably pay full tuition, helping to subsidize everyone else, if it's like the state school I attended).
I find it odd all the accounts suddenly interested in the outcomes for minority share races, but only for ones that are actually over represented (and therefore more likely to get into Yale than average, by the numbers).
I don't like it either, but if they are going to be racist, just do what you need to do.
What would prevent me, a white guy, to declare being a black woman if that gives some advantages?
This would not be the first time people fraud, and here it is even hardly fraud if all that is needed is a declaration.
Many years from now, we will be holding these black people accountable for the generational harm and un-earned benefits they've stolen from our current generation's youth.
This is a pretty extreme assertion.
It's not a 100% indicator, but its essentially what the quoteunquote CRT in schools was meant to show.
Many black communities are not poor simply because they're poor, but of on-the-books policies of redlining, discrimination, and overpolicing that enabled a wealth gap to form in the post-war period. Many white families were able to buy houses, build generational wealth, etc while many black communities were prevented from buying homes, getting loans, all the way to their neighborhoods being wholesale demolished for highways, malls, power plants, etc.
Being colorblind has the byproduct of ignoring real material policies and historic events that contribute to modern conditions. It is a fact that generational wealth enables rich students to afford SAT prep classes, have parents that can take them to extra curricular activities, and have the ability to not need a job during their teenage years.
Race-based affirmative action is meant to equal out these factors to an extent. Whether it works as intended is another matter.
Cases of "Working hard" and "picking yourself up by the bootstraps" is statistically negligible in the grand scheme.
Great! So looking at socioeconomic status will also address socioeconomic status caused by racial discrimination. Glad you understand and agree with the parent.
Tax returns? Paystubs? Accounting for wealth generally?
Wealthy folks typically don't make a large wage, they receive a dividend on investments and large loans against collateral.
Note that this is critical to consider if we are to discriminate based on socioeconomic class.
How do you identify race? After all, it's just a social construct. We're not DNA testing and doing the one-drop rule are we? Its' self-reported. At least with socioeconomics we can look at household income and tax returns.
It's definitely a thorny process whichever factor one adopts to benchmark process outcomes against.
Meanwhile, everybody pays taxes so we have the data we need to not use racial discrimination.
Actually, the very wealthy _don't_ pay a ton in taxes, depending on how their wealth is invested and distributed.
What wealthy folks often do is to take lending against their assets, giving them liquidity. This is not taxable income.
This PDF looks like a good start if you want to see how it get measured during research: https://obssr.od.nih.gov/sites/obssr/files/Measuring-Socioec...
In much of the world, really. The US isn't particularly bad compared to most countries that way.
Something about the assertions made by CRT must be incorrect given what we see of the facts.
What if they didn't? What if the Supreme Court decision results in zero (or near zero) black people being admitted into Ivy League schools?
> underrepresented racial groups, including Blacks, Latinos and women
Women are not an underrepresented racial group, and in fact make up the majority of students at the University of California. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/about-us/information-...
So unless you take the perspective that colleges ought to engage in direct racial balancing against local graduating classes, it's very hard to tell a story about diversity or implicit bias here.
You would have to ask black students don't qualify when equally impoverished students of other races do.
So you could figure out the financial circumstances of these classmates, but Harvard couldn't? Or are you saying they outright committed fraud?
Does that mean that some students with higher grades/income/whatever get excluded? Yes. However grades shouldn't be the only factor in this decision. It seems that the schools are taking a holistic approach to admittance, and I support that. Granted with the Loughlin situation, school admittance practices should certainly be scrutinized. However it seems they might be on the right side at least on this one specific issue.
My speculation is that, because these are hard terms to nail down but easy to say, this becomes a perennial topic.
1. Admiting a black boy who is living with both parents and who have a net worth of over $100 million
2. Admitting a white boy who grew up in poverty in Appalachia and lived in a single parent household
Because of the US History of subjugation of African Americans that includes the horrors of slavery.
> Is race the only thing that makes somebody diverse?
Nope, but is this context of elite US university, race is the only factor for diversity to undo past crimes on black people and their exclusion form only only these elite universities but all universities.
In 100 years after more and more whites and Asians are denied positions they rightfully earned, should we reverse the races that get rejected due to their race? Blacks can then be rejected or do blacks get preferential treatment forever?
Economic diversity is important as well. You don't have to have one or the other, you can have both. Unless the school is only admitting one person per year, as in your scenario. Please don't try to distort the issue.
This is not strictly about racial diversity. The article also mentions ethnic diversity so it is clearly more than just race.
They explicitly mentioned socioeconomic situations as well.
> In their amicus brief, Yale and the other schools said that during their admissions processes, they obtain and review extensive information regarding each applicant’s life experiences, accomplishments, talents, interests, and goals. That information includes an applicant’s socioeconomic background, parental education level, whether languages other than English are spoken in the home, educational experiences, military service, leadership skills, “and all the other intangible characteristics that are crucial to ascertaining how an applicant will contribute to the university community.”
They are clearly also looking at socioeconomic situations along with race.
Maybe you should take your own advice: "Please don't try to distort the issue."
The schools seem to want to be able to use race, IN ADDITION to other factors. What is the problem?
A black person with a large amount of wealth is almost certainly in a more privileged situation than a poor white who is addicted to fentanyl. Why should the white person be put at a partial disadvantage because of his skin color? Looking at his skin color will do nothing to tell you about their situation.
Your point is "well, duh" because your comparison is not valid. The way you are proposing, it compares apples and oranges.
To my understanding, the folks that study these kinds of things would split the situations you are describing into two groups, then compare group outcome statistics outcomes by race. Racism exists when the partial correlations are significant even when controlling for the other factors for a specific group.
So here, the poor person addicted to fentanyl has it worse when they are black. The wealthy person has worse outcomes when they are black. When that is consistent, then there is evidence of systemic racism.
There really is no value add comparing apples and oranges, which is what is happening when you make the comparison here. I recommend you reconsider your argument approach if you feel strongly that this comparison has merit as you've written it.
Black people may have worse outcomes as a whole, but an individual black person may not be worse off. You cannot assume an individual is identical to the group. Black people commit more crimes. Does that mean if you see a black person you can assume they are a criminal? I don't think you can, but it sounds like following your reasoning you can.
I am fundamentally opposed to giving benefits to people just because they are in a group that typically does worse.