US Supreme Court poised to ban affirmative action in university admissions | Hacker News Reader

US Supreme Court poised to ban affirmative action in university admissions

nature.com

130 pointsonetimeusename277 comments

Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class. Instead of using race as a factor, they can just use family income as a factor.

Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says. If so technically you're not supposed to use it, because the 14th amendment (which is what AA is based on) mandates "equal protection." Reverse discrimination isn't equal protection.

That said, racial politics in the US are all weird. First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

As a POC, I'm always amazed at how well advocates manipulate everyone to get what they want. Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. It's pathetic.

“Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip”

It’s more that they are terrified to talk about it because they risk being fired from their job and losing everything for talking about it. And they’re also not allowed to talk about how they are not allowed to talk about it. So this is the way it comes out.

Yup, keep your head down. Accept everything you're told even if you agree with it or not. There is nothing to be gained by asking questions.

This frightens me because it sounds like the setup for a preference cascade, where everybody realizes that they aren't alone, that everybody else thinks as they do. Suddenly the familiar order inverts almost overnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification#Gener...

To some extent, you see the real preferences when it comes to single-issue referendums (since the vote is secret, and there are no secondary "tactical voting" considerations there that might skew the preference). Some examples:

https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

This is a valuable upside to referendums I hadn't considered before, thank you.

I am a white person in San Francisco and I do experience a lot of casual racism from POC. Just things like “there are too many white people here”, “that’s white washed”, etc as well as mild harassment on public transit.

I am often the only white person in any group, so comments like these among acquaintances get tiring, and I have nobody to talk about it with, partly because, according to a lot of these people, I am privileged despite me growing up in a far poorer neighborhood and single mother household.

While you are not wrong at all, neither is OP:

In many cases, the cowardice is served with a side of genuinely internalized guilt.

Its served with a healthy portion of irrationality.

Who are liberal white people afraid of? What group has power and what is their game?

They themselves. Some liberal whites are at the sebior level will exact the whip to get them in same group thinking...pretty much like Dems that always act in unisons as compare to Rep for decades.

Lawyers and HR people

Targeting poverty/income as oppose to race seems like such a no brainer to me. It still solves the same problem, except that it wouldn’t ever discriminate and if there was equal equity in poverty you’d expect equal equity in targeting it.

You know theres a shit ton of poor white people right? Its like people dont know that or something.

The DEI org at my company sent a mail out a few months ago saying how much the wage gap was between blacks and whites are, which is funny given that now Asian women have average higher wage than white men

The average wage gap is driven by billionaires. Poor blacks and whites are all....poor. And theres no need to measure the tallest midget even if theres a slight difference after you net out the .1% who drag up the averages for whites.

That’s not how medians work

Im well aware of how medians work (1 type of average). The gaps are often calculated by the mean.

Specifically a lot more poor white people than spots available in these schools. Asians are a “problem” taking up too many spots and are doing this from a position of only being 6% of the United States. Whites make up 57% of the United States.

This means you can easily fill these schools 100% with white students if you use only income as the proxy.

I personally believe the only fair course of action is admission by merit and then attack anyone racial disparities seem in each years admission at a different place in the pipeline.

I see some practical challenges in that for university admissions. What measures of poverty and income would you use and of whom? The high schoolers themselves will all look similar (as could be arranged at least). Many could arrange their income to look how would be most advantageous in a specific admissions year.

What’s wrong with using measures of merit of the applicant? GPA, standardized tests, application including essays, letters of recommendation, etc. The desire to find ways to improve upon direct measures and the hubris to believe placing these thumbs on the scales will make things globally better is somewhere between puzzling and mystifying to me.

The issue with using measurement X is that it quickly gets gamed.

Having a freshman class filled with people who’s parents wanted their kids to get into a good school isn’t the goal. Standardized tests for example are surprisingly gamble especially when you consider things like bribery.

Elite collages for example want their student body to look a specific way. One slice for ultra wealthy, one slice for foreigners, another slice for XYZ.

Low income and (to an extent) wealth are also gameable. Especially if you're well off and privileged.

> Having a freshman class filled with people who’s parents wanted their kids to get into a good school isn’t the goal.

Interesting - what is the goal according to you ?

> The issue with using measurement X is that it quickly gets gamed.

Goodhart’s Law[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

What exactly is meritorious (adjective: deserving reward or praise) about any of that?

Are you asking what is meritorious about GPA, standardized test scores, or an essay they wrote? Or something else?

Yep, those things. Are kids like trained animals, we praise and reward them when they do tricks for us?

If admissions to an elite or selective university is a reward, then yes, we do (and IMO should) reward them for strong performance in terms of GPA, SAT, or admissions essays.

More broadly, I absolutely praise and reward my kids when they do things that I believe are worthy of such feedback. Sometimes that's for achievement; sometimes that's for effort. It's part of the feedback process inherent in raising children; if you have a different approach that you prefer for your children, I don't have any objections to you using your approach.

That’s a great analogy, and also summarizes why it’s so problematic to make race a factor for college admissions. It makes minority kids engage in performative diversity in order to appeal to mostly white college admissions officers.

What would you call your job and your salary if not reward for tricks you do for others?

Since someone is paying me, presumably someone finds my output useful.

Does anyone think another book report on Anne of Green Gables is useful?

When I was doing alumni interviews I reserved the top rating exclusively for applicants that had ever had a real job. Not three weeks allegedly building houses in Central America, not an internship for well connected teens, only things like flipping burgers. That’s meritorious.

Are you rewarding them for the five-millionth book report on Anne of Green Gables? Or are you rewarding them for the learning process they went through that (almost incidentally) resulted in five-millionth book report on AoGG?

We already measure income for Pell grants, etc.

Race is massively harder and more biased. You’re black = assumed excess difficulty in life? What about white but just came from a refugee camp? What if your family has been poor for many generations?

There were reasons to say a black person’s life at $50k/y income is harder than a white person’s, and the same with boys vs girls, but things have changed quite a bit. Specifically society has mixed a lot more, immigration and interracial children have significantly changed the landscape, to say nothing of the fact that girls outnumber boys in college!

A family of 4 making $100K in Des Moines isn’t the same as a family of 4 making $100K in NYC either. Maybe two families are making the same, but one has their housing paid for.

I think the hurdle should be high for including adjustments to the applicant’s demonstrated ability, and looking at a year or two of tax returns isn’t going to give you a reliable picture. I have a deferred compensation system available (and I’m just a schmoe employee). If it was critical to their application, I could make those two years of tax returns look however I needed.

It's important to note that universities have been throwing money at using these proxies but still fall far short.

California's constitution banned affirmative action in the 90s and huge, well-endowed facilities like Berkeley have been unable to remedy their plummeting minority enrollment: https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/end-of-affirmative-acti...

Having spoken to some folks at (admittedly smaller) universities that work with such problems, substitute methods like income and zipcode are simply not as effective – not by a long shot.

Using something like census block as a proxy for social class also can be gamed. I live in San Francisco where there is a confusing and frustrating school lottery that gives preference based on neighborhood of residence in an effort to help lower income families.

Some wealthy friends we met at the playground moved to a (snazzy new) condo at the corner of a low-income census block for a year or two so they could get their kid an advantage in the SF kindergarten lottery, successfully getting them into their first-choice school on the other side of town. Then after the kid was enrolled for a few months, they moved to the (higher-income) neighborhood where the school is located.

Being nominally in a census block with slightly higher school lottery priority is a well-understood perk of some of these fancy new condo buildings, and may even drive some amount of gentrification.

(That doesn’t necessarily mean that advantaging people from lower income neighborhoods in school choice isn’t helpful, but it’s pretty hard to set up systems that actually measure what they’re intending to measure.)

It sure seems like a no brainer. The fact that colleges don't use it tells me that it wouldn't "solve the same problem" otherwise they would do it. They know the details and can see how it would work out.

I'd guess it would help lots of low-income Asian students. There are so many of them with pretty good test scores and grades. They might end up swamping the affirmative action beneficiaries under a socioeconomic program. That would be good for some types of equity but it wouldn't "solve the same problem" as affirmative action.

I think the problem is that advocates do not believe that race is a just proxy for socioeconomic status. There also seems to be a common belief now that justice for past wrongs means equity of outcome, not only equality of opportunity.

I'm not going to try to defend or argue against these beliefs, but I think a big difficulty in these discussions is that people aren't even understanding each other's arguments and worldviews. Of course, looking at and staying focused on actual data and research would be nice, but frankly that's not easy because social science data tends to be messy and social science research is extremely difficult to do correctly. You also have to be able to at least define and agree on operational goals/outcomes, which might be a challenge in and of itself.

> Is "race" (and its manifestations) is a protected class? I'm not sure what the law says.

It's listed explicitly in the Civil Rights act of 1964, except I don't think it mentions something that applies to this situation - the phrase "affirmative action" was created just to get around it. I guess this will be about whether it applies/should apply here in addition to the rest.

This is somewhat confused. The equal protection clause limits what state governments can do. There’s a doctrine interpreting it called suspect classifications, and race is the most important of these. (Gender is quasi-suspect.)

There’s also a series of federal and state civil rights laws that regulate the private sector. These laws create protected classes, of which race is one.

> First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

Not only that, but the way that "Whiteness" is obsessively referenced in so-called "liberal" discourse as some kind of master oppressor status is outright disgusting and can only be fairly compared to the very worst kinds of Nazi propaganda. There are significant amounts of white people in the U.S. today whose ancestors were serfs kept in bondage, and this state of things persisted even longer historically than the enslavement of people of African descent in the U.S. and Caribbean.

That goes a bit too far in the other direction. Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage. That includes slaves brought to the US and the Caribbean; slavery was rampant in Africa as well.

> Most people everywhere have ancestors kept in bondage.

True, but serfdom persisted in some Eurasian countries well into the 1860s. This makes it plausibly quite relevant to present times, in a way that other forms of bondage might not be.

My point is not that white people don't have oppression in recent memory, but more that everyone has oppression in recent memory. And if you dig back further and further, you just find heaps and heaps of more oppression, and it ends up impossibly messy to do an accounting of historic wrongs and try to right them in the present day (which doesn't even touch on the question of how giving privileges to people now somehow rights the wrongs done to their ancestors).

Why?

I wouldn't go quite that far. But it seems counterproductive to vilify a large group of people based on their skin color, because it's likely to cause significant resentment and backlash in the near to medium term.

My understanding is that income based affirmative action would actually have little effect on racial demographics. Hence why this isn't really discussed by these top colleges.

In other words, top colleges would just be full of poor whites and asians (instead of middle-to-upper class whites and asians, without affirmative action).

> As a POC, I'm always amazed at how well advocates manipulate everyone to get what they want. Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time.

I don’t think you’re giving liberal white people enough credit. They’re playing a smart game. If it wasn’t for conservative and moderate POC going along with them, white liberals would be a political minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...

They turn up the dial on racial conflict to keep that coalition together. Who put Joy Reid on MSNBC to call half the country racists every day?

White liberals use POC the same way they used “blue wall” Midwestern voters. They don’t care what any of those groups thinks—which becomes apparent whenever the dominant view within one of those groups contradicts white liberals, whether on social issues or even on affirmative action. They’re objects of white liberal benevolence.

“ Race in the US tends to be a proxy for class.”

This doesn’t seem to be a case in the top universities, which usually fulfill their diversity requirements by pulling from the elite class.

There is very little class diversity in our institutions and that is ripping the country apart.

I mostly agree, but:

>Liberal white people are ridiculously easy to guilt trip, and they keep falling for the same old shit time after time. It's pathetic.

More than anything, I wish people could speak/write about social/political issues without the spittle directed at whatever the highest level group is that their "enemy" group is a subset of (liberal, conservative, black, white, men, women, etc).

I think the law should treat people in a race blind manner. But race is also a component and proxy for culture and economic and social position. It’s fair game (and important) to talk about white liberals. What they believe, what their motivations are, where their interests lie, etc.

> First there was no such thing as race, then suddenly everyone was using race for everything, and now only white people can't use racial terms. WTF?

I don’t follow your first assertion. Pretty sure that an “Act concerning Servants and Slaves” aka the original Virginia slave codes first introduced “race” by way of limiting length and terms of indentured servitude for “white Christian” indentured servants. Under these terms, the acts then categorized “servants important and brought… who were not Christians in their native land” as slaves unless they converted to Christianity.

If that’s not explicit enough, the acts pretty distinctly name conditions for “negroes”, “Jews”, “Moors”, “mulattoes”, “Mahometans” and “Christian whites”.

Technically you are right that there was no such thing as race in American politics. But it was literally created by elites to divide working class former indentured servants, natives and Black freedman, ostensibly in response to Bacon’s rebellion where these groups found their common enemy in elites. So really it’s not that weird that things are as they are today in our political system.

There is some confusion about the definition of "affirmative action". The original definition from Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 requires that government contractors "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin".

What the supreme court is poised to do would in a sense reaffirm the original principle of affirmative action.

Admissions everywhere should be blind to color and privileged influence. There's no way to apply affirmative action without racial discriminating. Scholarships though should be weighted towards those who actually need it.

There is a school of thought that specifically decries being "color blind" as complicity in oppression.

Those sound like the same people who would like to make “micro aggressions” illegal.

There's school of thoughts on many (infinite?) things.

But only a few of them have taken hold over institutional decision makers.

Lol being “color blind” went from being championed to deemed racist itself so quickly in the US

That's because it's not--and never was--about any kind of logical, rational argument. There is only people seeking power, looking to exploit any historical injustice, differences between people, and institutional behavior to gain power over others.

So you're saying these things exist because the ruling class, which is already in power, uses them to... make sure they remain even more in power?

The US is a diverse place, and these ideas date back to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

And that is the school of thought that requires there to never be progress. If society is actually colorblind, racism disappears because everyone gets treated the same. There would be no more boogeyman to point to. It would mean that if some still lagged behind, for whatever the reason, and whatever they may look like, that it is actually their fault. That's silly, of course, because oppression comes in more dimensions that just race.

But race is the key to the game plan for people in that "school." There can be no new dominance hierarchy with colorblindness. Those claiming colorblindness as oppression, are merely those seeking to invert the oppression and get their turn. I once read someone express it as "rather than trying to do away with the jackboots once and for all, they're trying the jackboots on for size themselves."

That sounds nice but is impossible. Privileged influence oozes over the university system and pretending it doesn't or just trying to eliminate the biases that help the disadvantaged only serves to increase the advantages that the privileged already have.

Then make it a lottery.

My expectation is 5-4 with kavanaugh dissenting to majority to keep affirmative action in place. Kavanaugh explicitly has only female clerks in order to help resolve the systemic inequality, so ideologically I would expect him to go for it.

Kavanaugh explicitly has only female clerks in order to help resolve the systemic inequality

Well, that could certainly be one reason.

Choosing to only hire from one gender seems like discrimination

'affirmative action' (sometimes 'positive action', 'positive discrimination') per the title is exactly that - discriminating the 'other' way to try to balance the scales as it were.

(I'm not saying it's good, personally I think it's a bad approach to a good goal. Would likely never be in my favour though, so pinch of salt etc.)

It's going to work initially, but I've never seen it have the clause that 'this will result in equality once we hit the correct percentages' or that 'AA will finish at this point' because that second stage is difficult and will rip off the band-aid.

Isn't that illegal when it comes to hiring employees?

Of course that varies by jurisdiction, but yes the UK, EU states, and US have a (variously termed) concept of 'protected characteristics' that cannot be considered in hiring.

I agree with you, I don't see how affirmative action is compatible with it, whatever one's thoughts on it, but it seems to be an area nobody's wanted to touch. (Consider that you'd have to be the non-marginialised, thinking yourself wrongfully not-hired. Hard to imagine - in the UK - political appetite for it as a state lawsuit or regulation.) I wouldn't be surprised to see it blow up at some point though.

you could be right, but aren’t they looking more towards constitutionality, then their own ideologies?

Sure, but cognitive dissonance is one hell of a drug

Or maybe everyone is guided by their own ideologies, covered up with a thin veneer of constitutional arguments.

Sure that's an explanation for that.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/20/brett-kavana...

That could be a true allegation, but by making it without evidence you're creating a standard that someone could only satisfy by hiring only men. None of those guys actually care about affirmative action, they're doing it as a fig leaf of civic-mindedness, and that means they'll drop it instantly if their reputations would ever be better off without it.

No additional information, but if you Google images of his clerks and then for images of the source for that claim, only one that appears to be trying to look like a model is the source.

Kavanuagh was working within the system, or at least able to find a rationale within it.

It doesn't mean

a) that he agrees with the system

b) that he can't find another way to reach the same result in a new system

He believes the issue is that there are too few women who are clerks in the highest courts. It’s the fastest way to contribute to the perceived resolution of the issue from his point of view.

Interestingly, he only brings on pretty girls, to the point where people advise interviewees to sex themselves up a bit for interviews with him. Thank God he's fighting systemic oppression.

Note that Title VII, banning discrimination in employment, doesn’t apply to judiciary employees, which law clerks are. Since the Harvard case involves Title VI (a parallel provision relating to discrimination in education) that’s a significant distinction.

Most courts try to limit the scope of their rulings as much as possible though. If the case before them only concerned the question of race/ethnicity, and the issue of gender or sex never came up, then Kavanaugh could probably find enough wiggle room to justify joining the other conservative judges and striking it down.

Are they also going to ban other forms of structural bias like legacy admissions?

It makes sense to start with overt discrimination, that's a lot more clear cut

I'd actually go further and say that banning nebulous forms of bias really just makes work for consultants and other rent seeking that tries to craft arguments that some statistical result is or isn't biased. If an organization wants to do that, fine, but government and law should not go down the road of making general rulings on handwavy stuff. In a specific case, the courts are always an option.

Lawmakers would have to make legacy status a protected class first, presumably.

It's my understanding that these universities aren't selectively admitting people because they are required to due to "protected class," but rather they desire to not have the admissions "overrepresent" certain highly qualified groups (asians and Jews being the biggest groups that are overrepresented iirc).

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Sure, and racial discrimination is presumptively illegal. Affirmative action is the acceptable carveout to this presumption. These no presumption of legacy admissions being illegal, however...

> Affirmative action is the acceptable carveout to this presumption.

Note that this is pretty much an urban legend, with little to no basis in law. "Affirmative action" when originally introduced as a standard was very clearly defined as acting to ensure that racial discrimination would not occur. Non-discrimination is, and has always been, the overall goal.

That may have been the goal, but it was never the metric that was measured.

Can confirm, official guidance from the U.S. government says "equal employment opportunity is the goal, affirmative action is the tool to get there."

"Affirmative action" originally meant just that it wasn't enough to say "okay, we won't discriminate" - employers had to take some active measures to ensure discrimination didn't happen, but it didn't prescribe particular measures. That sounds vaguely reasonable. But over time affirmative action warped in most peoples' minds into establishing racial preferences.

> Affirmative action is the acceptable carveout

Well this is likely to change. Affirmative action is zero sum: it’s impossible without discriminating against some group on the basis of a protected class.

> affirmative action is zero sum

Not sure that’s the definition of zero sum. Presumably it’s correcting for some existing discrimination. Maybe it over corrects, maybe it under corrects. Highly unlikely that the balance remains the same afterwards.

Not what GP was referring to, but discrimination is not signed. Injustice cannot be "corrected" with more discrimination, it only increases.

Zero sum meaning it you give one seat to a group then you have to subtract one seat from the other groups. It has nothing to do with history

The goal is to increase diversity and support marginalized groups, not to “reduce overrepresentation” of socially dominant groups.

What's the difference?

East Asians are socially dominant in the US? That’s news to me.

Whites and East Asians are socially dominant in many professional fields (e.g., relevant to this forum, computer programming) compared to some other groups, though you can certainly also find plenty of racism vs. East Asians in the USA.

though you can certainly also find plenty of racism vs. East Asians in the USA

Harvard’s admission’s office, for example.

Hollywood as well, there's a notable dearth of East Asian male leads in Hollywood movies. (Latino male leads as well. Hollywood uses Black actors for to meet their diversity quotas, and largely ignore other minority ethnicity.)

Yeah, Amazon's LotR Rings of Power was pretty remarkable for casting a Latino guy as a central character in the role of an Elf. It worked out pretty well, but I would have preferred if his hair was long.

AA does the latter.

They both admit more blacks and fewer Asians. I assume Jews are lumped in with other whites.

Funny that we seem to be heading further away from just admitting 'students' and more into categorisation. Working as intended?

I mean, they say openly that the desire is to have more of certain groups such as Black and latinx people. But you suspect the decision-makers at universities are really thinking "we want fewer Asians and Jews", and just pretending that they want more of other ethnic/racial groups as a cover?

This is really a different conversation than "legacy admissions" (the name for letting the children of former graduates in preferentially, possibly especially when the former graduates are donors) -- which are so far understood as completely legal because there are no legally protected clases involved is what the GP was pointing out, I think, but which constitute a pretty significant % of some university's admissions, and which are disproportionately certain racial-ethnic groups too.

There is no difference between telling me you want more Black and Latino people and telling me you want less White and Asian people when the game is zero-sum.

If you think it makes no difference, why would you insist on saying it the one way?

Meanwhile though, back to legacy admissions... so acknowledging it's a zero sum game, increasing "legacy" admissions means saying you want fewer students who aren't children of alumni. This means fewer first-generation college, fewer people from working class backgrounds (including white working class backgrounds, of course), and fewer Black and latino people.

If you also want to increase the number of students who are children of donors (which happens) -- it means decreasing most of those categories even more so.

How about if you restrict the number of admitted students who will need financial aid to attend so many total dollars of aid -- this is done completely openly and admitted, most colleges do not practice "need-blind admissions", meaning it's easier to get in if you can pay the full cost, which, as you say, acknowleding the zero sum nature of it, means they want fewer people who they believe will need financial aid (by not offering admission to those who they think do, they don't get the opportunity to figure out how to pay for it)

Are people upset about "affirmative action" equally upset about these things, which, as you say, are telling us that colleges and universities want, and are acting upon that desire, fewer first-generation students and fewer students from working-class and poor backgrounds, as well as fewer Black and latinx students?

Why or why not?

2+2 is equal to 4

But when I want to say 4 I do not say 2+2. Because despite being equal, one is easier to understand

Indeed, Harvard in particular institutes their anti-Asian racism by systematically rating Asians lower on "personality" in order to get their numbers down. And that's according to the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

Legacy status probably should fall under disparate impact. Roughly, race neutral policies that result in racially unequal cost are equally suspect as explicitly racial laws.

Even if it "falls under disparate impact", so what? It's not illegal to merely have a policy that incidentally has a disparate impact across protected groups.

Yes it is

Well, I guess someone should make a lawsuit about that, if people are concerned about this issue.

Seems like things are moving that way.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/10/30/lega...

Legacy admissions are a major benefit of getting into those colleges in the first place. They aren’t just educational institutions but rather signifiers in the American class system, which is partly hereditary.

Worth noting by the way that legacy admissions are themselves racist in favor of the types of people who were allowed into those schools several generations ago… i.e. white people.

When you say "i.e. white people" can you explain how legacy admissions benefit some white kid from the trailer park or Appalachia or whatever? Because it really sounds like you're describing something that benefits a specific class, not an overall race.

Oh it doesn’t benefit the kid from Appalachia at all, in fact that kid must squeeze into the slice of the white quota that hasn’t already been carved out for legacy admits.

Rather, I find it rich how much these schools bend over backwards to claim they’re ensuring equity and progressive morals in their admissions while simultaneously maintaining the regressive and archaic practice of legacy admits, which are implicitly racist in favor of (the most privileged subset of) white people.

Then doesn't this prove that Affirmative Action is structurally racist? The vast majority of white kids don't benefit from legacy admissions, and so the system forces them to "squeeze into the slice of the white quota that hasn’t already been carved out for legacy admits."

So now what impact do we suppose that has on racial harmony when we're telling millions of kids to get bent because they have the wrong skin color and were too poor to be looked upon kindly by the institutional powers? And now we sit here with a surprised pikachu face at this rise of racial anger.

Nature should stop writing this crap and go back to covering science instead of politics

Science lives in universities. It's a relevant issue.

Science lives online. Universities are mostly parasitic at this point, seeking only to maximize their endowments while burdening the youth with debt.

In what fields is that true? Is that even true in computer science?

Well let's test that. In what undergrad class (any school, you pick) is there information and wisdom not found freely online?

Unfortunately science and politics are not actually separable things. People, including the courts and politicians, use biological arguments to justify their policies and opinions. Scientists have to be aware of the political ramifications of their work, and how their work is being used and mis-used.

That sounds like a suspect take. If someone's studying how some plant cells work, or discovering new stars, they're discovering information for the long-term of humanity's collective knowledge.

Everything is political, you can't sit still on a moving train, etc. The fascists said that this or that art or science was Jewish art or Jewish science. The Marxists said that this or that art or scientific take was bourgeois art or bourgeois science.

What you said about everything being politics reminds of Foucault's arguments, comrade.

The goal of science is to seek the closest possible approximation of the truth. But if I publish a paper about some detail of how brains work, and someone starts using my work to justify oppression of some group - i have a responsibility to the truth that I am seeking to at VERY least publicly say “my paper doesn’t say any of that you prejudiced dingbats”

I mean I support that view that a misrepresentation may need to be called out.

I'm not convinced that this is evidence in favor of 'all science is political', the stance of postmodernists. It's all ideology, it's all political, there are institutional trappings in society that are unavoidable, etc is the crux, and it's far-reaching, as no one can escape a political position. It's a suffocating viewpoint we're seeing played out painfully in the culture wars: you're either with us or against us, state your position, etc.

I guess how I understand the “everything is political” thing is that every idea has a political angle. Maybe that is a helpful distinction. Like… the discovery of penicillin isn’t political - it’s the result of someone exploring the biological world looking for medically useful things - but the fact that we paid someone money to do that was the result of a bunch of political choices like money for hospitals and schools, a system of government and taxation to supply that money. And the consequences of it’s creation had geopolitical consequences like a change in the cost in lives of waging war, or changing some sexually transmitted infections from deadly to treatable which in turn changed our social values around sex.

The truth isn’t political. But what we choose to study, and what we do with the things we learn is political. Politics is just a second-order phenomenon. There is what is happening, and politics is how we feel about what’s happening and what we’d like the collective humanity to do about that.

For example, a social scientist might submit a range of articles to HN in order to record, quantify, and study the personalities drawn to different topics. A board owner might use this information to attract the conversational tone they'd like to see.

Social science isn’t science.

Speaking of memes, this is one.

Social science includes: "academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, human geography, linguistics, management science, communication science, political science and psychology.[1]"

Now if you're saying that you have issues with some of the common methodologies or lack of repeatable experimentation in anthropology or political science - that's one thing, but if you're saying that linguistics, economics, and archaeology are not science? I do not agree.

Something is science if it uses the scientific method to generate knowledge. The fact that the knowledge generated is highly dependent (e.g. "in mid-century european society, we've found that A and B are likely result if C and D are present") doesn't make it not science. That's a limitation on the conclusions, not a built-in invalidity of the knowledge. There is plenty of knowledge generated by physics, biology, etc. that is highly dependent too.

   Unfortunately science and politics are not actually separable things.

Let's test that theory. What was political about the Milky Way forming?

The political part is whether or not a teacher is allowed to teach it. That's how politicians get their hands into science.

Also, in a world where 5G causes cancer, the MMR vaccine causes autism, Lysenkoism exists, and where fossils were buried by the devil to trick the faithful, any scientific question that has any bearing at all on world is also a political question.

So to clarify, the formation of the Milky Way wasn't political, correct?

I think it's important that we quickly dispel the "Everything is political" disinformation. Bumper sticker philosophy is hot garbage.

The formation of the milky way isn’t science. Science is how to study and learn about and interpret the formation of the milky way - not the event itself.

And yeah, it’s political. If astronomy wasn’t political nobody would have been ex-communicated over claiming basic facts about it. “The milky way formed over x billion years in this way” is a statement that has consequences for the place of religion in our society, the value of studying our place in the world beyond what impacts us on a day to day basis, and an assertion about the word being causal and not subject to manifesting whatever type of world you want.

Science can't be politics, by definition - or it doesn't work.

In politics, there are things you can't say or do because you will hurt feelings. If you make science political you have ruined science. You are left with just politics. Which explains why certain people think science is political. In reality, what is left of science or what is acceptable in science after they have had their way, is political.

But that is not science. Science shouldn't care about your feelings.

> Science can't be politics

That's not what anybody is saying. The thing I said was "Science is political", and that is not the same idea as "Science is politics". Science is political is just saying that what gets researched is influenced by politics, and how that research is interpreted and absorbed by society is influenced by politics, and that's a feedback loop.

> If you make science political you have ruined science

The endeavor to remove politics from science is a VERY good one, but you can't tell me that politics doesn't exist within science. The money for scientific research largely comes from two sources: Government, and commerce. They have agendas - the influence of the funding source on the results are well documented - which is a perversion of science, but further than that the TOPICS they chose to fund vs the ones that don't get funding are a way that politics influence science. The conclusion of a paper funded by some company may be true, but the fact that we know that piece of data is in service of some agenda. On top of that, there is the politics of how orthodoxies within science rise and fall - it's not a straight line walk towards the truth.

> Science shouldn't care about your feelings.

Except science does care about feelings and I would argue it should care. The main drivers of what gets researched in science are, as I said, what the funding sources want, AND what the people doing the research care about. That second part is all people's feelings. There is no scientific reason to cure cancer, it's not a threat to human existence, but when people we love get sick we want to help them. That's feelings in science - not in the conclusions, but in the directions we go and the consequences of the work. These kinds of feelings, that drive us to care for each other, are the heart and soul of science. A cold heart makes for bad science, in my opinion.

    Science is political is just saying that what gets researched is influenced by politics

Yes, that is a problem. As explained above. But the people I'm referring to (who not only exist, but in large numbers) are the ones that insist "everything is politics", presumably with science included in everything.

It'll do so as soon as politics gets its fingers out of science and universities.

I’m cool with that.

We could start by defunding public universities who refuse to fire professors pushing their political views on young, vulnerable students.

Sure, we can get started on that right after we're done with defunding and firing politicians who push their scientific views on young, old, and uneducated people.

Or is that not what you mean when you say that you want science to be disentangled from politics..?

It's weird the same politicians that get their boxers in a twist over scientists doing politics have no qualms about professing all sorts of ignorant and insane opinions on medicine, climate modeling, toxicology, engineering, neurology...

Cool with that too.

Let’s start with the politicians who use the excuse “we’re just following the science” to seize power and hold it as long as possible.

I will point out, for the record, that over the past two years, the overwhelming majority of emergency orders surrounding COVID have all expired or been rescinded, or have been watered down into nothingburgers (If they weren't to begin with). Yet, we still have, had, and will continue to have half of congress full of, say, climate change deniers. Do you have a planned plan and timeline for when, and how they can be defunded and fired?

Since we've largely solved the problem you've brought up, it's fair to ask when we are going to get to the other half of the equation. These guys have been running the show for decades, by now, with no signs of change. You do want us to get to the other half of the equation, right?

If not, you could have just said up front that you want your political enemies destroyed, and we could have cut the conversation off five posts ago.

    the overwhelming majority of emergency orders surrounding COVID have all expired or been rescinded, or have been watered down

Too late for the countless people forced to give up bodily autonomy in order to stay employed, and for the ones who were brave enough to tell the fascists to kick rocks knowing it would cost them their jobs.

Trying to influence the racial make-up of a class is, let's admit it, loathsome racial engineering.

Honest question: why don’t universities use socioeconomic status (SES) alone for admissions? Don’t they get IRS docs for financial aid? And given that disparities tied to SES affect child development and opportunities.

They get information from the FAFSA form from some students. (If I don’t expect to get any substantial aid, I don’t plan to participate in FAFSA process as it’ll have no benefit to our family and is none of the schools’ business otherwise.)

To the extent any SES-sourced disparities have left a given student less scholastically prepared than the school’s standard, should the admission action be to admit or reject?

FAFSA - https://studentaid.gov/apply-for-aid/fafsa/filling-out

There are structural inequities in society than benefit one group more than another. Jamal’s family could make the same money as John’s but the world they meet at birth is not the same.

Just say what you really want: Equality of Outcome

You know, the system that puts less qualified people over more qualified people for no other reason than virtue signaling.

The feel good system that kills competitiveness, decreases efficiency and slows progress.

Why is looking at income disparity okay, but not other disparities?

I understand a less stratified and segregated society provides a better life for everyone, and do think that education is the tool to counteract bias.

There’s typically 5 types of stratification, economic, social, gender, race, and ethnicity. To just choose economic as the only focus really does not make sense to me.

How would you rank order those five on their impacts to the developing child and the opportunities they get?

Billy and Jamal are similar students, who get in the same kind of trouble. Billy gets an informal talking to, while Jamal gets dealt with by a police officer, with consequences to the rest of his academics and childhood, because policing in his town isn't color-blind, and doesn't give two figs about equality of opportunity.

Fortunately, the color-blind, impartial post-secondary admissions process looks at their two cases and determines that obviously, Billy would be a better student, and admits him.

We can all sleep easily, knowing that equality of outcome was avoided, by simply closing our eyes to all the stages in the pipeline where equality of opportunity was denied to Jamal. All it took was an alliance of color-blindness and just a little bit of actual blindness.

Equality of opportunity only works if we take steps to verify it. We don't, and gatekeepers can neither verify, nor enforce it. That's why they prefer equality of outcome - because that's something they can do something about.

Ah yes, Tall Poppy Syndrome. How quaint.

> Billy and Jamal are similar students, who get in the same kind of trouble...

> ...but they don't face the same consequences, because one the agents with power over them does not believe in equality of anything

> ...and later arbiters of equality of opportunity either can't see[1], or choose not to see a pivotal moment when equality of opportunity was denied to one of them

Which of these is the tall poppy, exactly, and how on Earth is this chain of causal events by any means fair, under any value system?

Equality of opportunity doesn't work if you don't verify that everyone's actually had it, at every step in their life. Which is also why it doesn't work. That's not to say that equality of outcome doesn't have serious criticisms against it, either.

[1] It isn't their job to look.

OK now do Sasha and Malia Obama vs some kid from the trailer park.

See, skin color is a proxy that only serves to institutionalize racism towards those who are already powerless.

The majority of poor people in the country are white and we're telling them (not the Legacy white kids) that they can piss off because they do not have the right skin color. Then we turn around with a shocked look on our face at all of the rising racial resentment. Gee, what could possibly be causing all of this..?

But what does that mean for going to college?

You just want to get a college degree and ppl are bringing up your ancestors- wtf

> why don’t universities use socioeconomic status (SES) alone for admissions?

Why ? What does SES have to do with going to college ?

Clarence Thomas himself was a victim of affirmative action, only fair that he is part of removing it I guess.

Clarence Thomas was a beneficiary of the “affirmative action” afforded to underqualified so-called conservatives in law schools, clerkships, judicial appointments, and the legal profession in general.

The Federalist Society is more or less an affirmative action program. It has gotten to the point now that ambitious law students pretend to to far-right ideological positions they don’t hold just because the competition for clerkships is so much easier among who suck up to these extremists.

> The Federalist Society is more or less an affirmative action program.

In the same way that legacy admissions are probably the most powerful affirmative action system, perhaps.

Reminder that the UC system hasn't had affirmative action for decades -- not saying good or bad, just a source of data

If this actually happens, what will the demographics at top universities end up looking like?

The universities have been doing a underhand work around for affirmative action for a long time now. In particular the ivy's have been allowing certain races more leniency on standardized tests and other performance metrics in order to promote so-called diversity.

I do not expect this to change. They needed the above workarounds because it is often the case in the recent decade that white people in particular were reaching minority status in their population. This would mean white people would be entitled to affirmative action treatment at their university. According to dogma this is certainly not "diverse" and therefore, not good. I'm not going to spend 20 minutes hunting for source as this has been discussed here on frontpage topics for the last few years. It's common knowledge at this point.

I think the supreme court is making the smart choice here because affirmative action is often being ignored by the universities. There's no sense in even having it if they are defining their own rules to select for non-asian, non-white students. The existence or lack thereof of this ruling will not change the current bigoted admission policies of the ivy's.

In which Ivy League universities were white students reaching minority status?

Ivy's were one example of the problem. Not of the white minority. As far as I know, ivy leagues do not have a white majority (owing to the legacy membership programs at many of them). However, one article [0] points to this happening in the midwest. It is also becoming the case at my local university who follows harvard's doctrine of race-based SAT/GRE admission standards.

[0] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/08/29...

The linked article uses a strange system for calling white students a 'minority'. If you count everyone who is not 'white' as one group then sure, but that makes no sense. In this discussion here people are speaking of 'Jewish' 'Asian' and 'Black' students as distinct, yet when 'white' is counted then everyone 'not-white' get grouped together. 38% white with 20% asian and 10% black, etc, does not make 'white students a minority'.

Also, it is incredibly difficult to take the 'white' demographic label seriously when it comes to people concerned about it becoming a minority because it is not a demographic that can be joined. A black person and white person have a child, and that child is black. There is no way for a person of color to have a 'white' child, while the opposite is true for a white person having a 'child of color', so therefore the 'white' demographic cannot do anything but become smaller and smaller until it ceases to exist.

If 38% of the students are white, then white students are a minority. That's not playing with words, that's a basic understanding of words.

You believe that 'minority' as a demographic term literally means 'anything less than 51%'? What happens when there is no '51%+' cohesive group? At this point is not the term 'minority' meaningless since every group is now a minority?

That is, in fact, what "minority" means. When there is no 51%+ group, the largest group is a plurality. We do have words for these things.

I am referring to definition 1b: the smaller quantity or share. Which one are you referring to?

Definition of minority

1a: the smaller in number of two groups constituting a whole

b: the smaller quantity or share

2: the group or political party having the smaller number of votes

3a: a part of a population thought of as differing from the rest of the population in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment

b: a member of a minority group

4a: the period before a person reaches the age of majority

b: the state of being a legal minor

(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minority)

If a group has 49% share, and there are 10 other groups that each have 5% share, will you still call the first group with 49% as a minority group? does n't make sense to me. As per your definition, then every group will be defined as a minority group.

Yes, indeed, every group under 50% is a minority group. In the scenario you outline, the group with 49% is the plurality, but no group has the majority, therefore all groups are minority groups.

what does "minority" mean then if not that and why are you saying that?

I saw a comment on HN that broke-down Ivy league representation vs population representation. Non-jewish whites were very underrerpresented but jewish whites were overrepresented.

Is that a meaningful distinction? And was this data legit?

A lot more Asians at top universities.

Wow this is the worst comments section I have seen in the history of HN.

How about people take a minute to look at what the actual effects of affirmative action at universities had been instead of just trotting out tedious talking points?

All the comments about "I thought Nature was a science journal" are so silly. Sociology is a science.

Hard science or soft science?

Biology and Physics are hard sciences because you can make falsifiable claims and predictions.

Sociology and criminal justice aren't, because they don't lend themselves to the same. It doesn't mean they're invalid.

Most liberal arts disciplines involve a lot of essay writing and reading opinion pieces. Sure, there is the analytical argumentation, there are sound and unsound arguments, interesting claims worthy of consideration.

Since people keep getting the implementation of affirmative action wrong, it should be scrapped and replaced with something else. Most people's experience and opinions of affirmative action are based on bad implementations.

You aren't supposed to hire candidates based on any form of quota or race or protected class. This is what keeps happening and has sowed disdain across all society. The guidance is lacking and the people with power to change it are all afraid of talking about it.

There is going to be a certain percentage of the voting population who is going to be very upset in a few years after they found out just how much AA has been helping their admission numbers [1].

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-uncomfortable-t...

The ivy league admissions process is incredibly corrupt and broken.

I worked as the IT person in an top ivy league admissions department when I was younger and got to know the admissions officers very well.

There are many factors in admissions, but race is a very key factor. I remember one choice comment one of the admissions officers said to me ("If I see one more white kid from New York with a 4.0, I'm going to start throwing them straight in the trash").

None of the admissions officers were white, Asian, or Indian (as I was), and all were very comfortable talking about how they tried not to admit such candidates. After all, incoming classes need to have a certain percentage of specific minorities. Interestingly, because these schools look to raise GLOBAL leaders, those quotas must represent global race proportions (with a couple of exceptions).

The other revelation was the vast number of students admitted from "the list". A list of students whose application is pre-approved for admission by the dean. These are children of benefactors, employees, and teachers, and each of their close friends and relatives.

It doesn't sound so bad until you realize it amounts to about 20% of each incoming class!

Such students can only be rejected if the admissions officer writes a letter to the dean explaining why. None of the admissions officers had ever written one.

Of course, since most of the students on the list are white, they become the majority of white students admitted.

The nature article, moreso political opinion, fails to point out: The supreme court isn't even ruling on this opinion take.

The supreme court has already ruled its illegal if an unqualified person receives benefits over a qualified person. Which is an important point the article completely fails to address.

The current case is in such situations where that law was violated. Which is common knowledge now. Affirmative action placing unqualified people into schools they should not be in, leads to them racking up debt and flunking out of the school. This has been detrimental to the minorities they propose to be helping.

The large problem of racism is when you ban the racist, they imagine a new legal way to harm minorities. These racists need to be stopped and banning affirmative action is how you do it.

It’s going to be really cringy watching liberals call out Thomas for having “internalized white supremacy” for agreeing with the majority of Black people that race should “not be a factor” in college admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...

"Poised" seems strong, they're just about to hear the first arguments...

I can see why they used poised. Affirmative action is an tool they use to reduce the inequality caused by historic events (jim crow era). Absolute equality helps only people which start line was moved before others.

Poised means it is about to happen. But I don't think anyone knows which way this case will go. Maybe they will ban it, maybe they will affirm it. No one knows...

You can make a pretty good prediction based on the people in the court and their political opinions which makes poised an accurate assessment.

Assuming that is true (and I am sympathetic to it) they're still going to spend a few months hearing arguments and then writing it all up. The chances they will give a ruling without going through the motions is basically zero right?

The biggest losers of the affirmative action are asian Americans.

I have white cousins who are second generation drug dealer’s children. I have black cousins who are members of the local golf country club. Which one deserves affirmative action to get into college? By every measure, my white cousins are worse off. Sure, neither are Harvard bound. A reliable car, and an apartment in a city with strong job prospects are what my white cousins need, and I try to provide. My black cousin’s need help with their golf short game… so do I.

Given that there is a single counter-example, best throw the whole program out. Unless it works with 100% efficiency and effectiveness, then it isn't worth doing.

That’s not a fair assessment of what the comment you replied to said.

I'm guessing (hoping) that your comment is sarcasm, but in any case, it's worth being explicit about that choice, since we all know that implicit sarcasm is not communicated well in this medium.

You are using anecdotes to disprove data.

You know very well that statistically speaking, the argument for affirmative action is in one direction, your own personal acquaintances notwithstanding.

That is essentially the core difference in viewpoint, though. Whether to treat people as individuals or broad statistical classes.

That really depends what metrics you think are relevant.

On the one hand, the average black person in the US is more disadvantaged than the average white person. That much is true. If you meet a random person, and they are black, statistically they are more disadvantaged than if they were white.

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure it's the case that for almost any given threshold of disadvantage, there are numerically more whites below it than blacks, simply because there are more white people in the US than black people. So if you are a university with hypothetical applicants drawn randomly from the population, the majority of the disadvantaged applicants in the pool are white, for most thresholds of disadvantage.

A system that treats disadvantaged whites, who are quite numerous, as if they are advantaged, based in the colour of their skin, is incredibly unjust, and creates deserved resentment. Frankly, even if disadvantaged whites were less numerous it is still incredibly unfair.

AA based on poverty and socio-economics directly, rather than the colour of one's skin, would be more just (and is more how things are done where I'm from).

Wrong. You’re using data to ignore people’s problems because their skin isn’t the right color. Get rid of affirmative action and replace it with income/poverty level. Basing it off of race will always be racist, and never be fair, as highlighted by GP’s example.

He's using an ethical argument, not a numerical one. You're using the latter.

Person 1 says, don't generalize ideas of privilege since it isn't fair to certain individuals that stand out as edge cases.

Person 2 says, the statistics say the majority of the cases the generalizations are consistent.

This conversation is a category error.

The fundamental problem with this "statistical justice" approach is that it results in lots of small personal injustices, but the latter is what people are going to notice - especially when, like OP, it comes from their lived experience. And they will judge the whole system based on that lived experience.

A just and fair society is like a fractal - it can't be fair "overall", it has to be fair at every level as you zoom in. There are no shortcuts here; with them, at best, you can create a society that pretends to be fair.

Hard to say who deserves it in general, but I really do think that universities should deliberately seek out as wide a range of backgrounds as possible, given that there is no shortage of motivated high-achieving applicants from across the range. How to grant them the freedom to do so, without allowing their decision-makers to descend into capricious bigotry, is a major institutional challenge for the 21st century.

From what i read about the processes, both are helped by aa, because currently the group with the biggest disadvantages currently are asians(to a varying degree).

You're aware that there are admissions policies in place that seek to bring poorer people into universities, correct?

Are outside observers good at predicting how the Supreme Court settles lower court disagreement?

In this case, there is no disagreement in the lower court. Both the district court and the appeals court upheld affirmative action.

No. Two things one should never try to predict: the end of the world and what the Supreme Court will do.

I read something recently (maybe on SCOTUSBlog?) about how oral arguments might not have much of an effect on the decision of the court, and that by the time the arguments are heard, the justices have already researched and studied the issue, read the briefs, etc. and likely have already made up their minds. However I don't recall the study methodology or the source, take this with a grain of salt.

Why does this article capitalize the word "Black" but not "white"?

Not this publication, but most discussions I've seen of this use essentially the same points: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

> White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.

Just… wow.

This is some next level nonsense.

At the end of the article there's a little note: "This piece has been updated for clarity. An earlier version included an explanation that was off-base". I got curious and looked up the initial version on the Internet Archive, and it was that paragraph that changed in the most drastic way. The original said:

"AT THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to racial groups. Black is an ethnic designation; white merely describes the skin color of people who can, usually without much difficulty, trace their ethnic origins back to a handful of European countries."

As you've noticed, this became:

"AT THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists."

Correct me if I'm wrong but this seems to have just started a few years ago? Suddenly news publications all started capitalizing "Black". Maybe it was to provide parity with ethnic groups named after locations with proper nouns, like Asians, Hispanics, Indians, Pacific Islanders, etc.?

Of course a decade or two ago there was a push towards "African American", which has two capital letters, but that didn't quite catch on.

If White people want to be capitalized, maybe we can call them "Euros"?

Recent yep, but your guess is wrong. A cousin comment linked to a Chicago Style Guide post from around the 2020 riots where they mention it's a recent change other publications have made and they're following suit.

The change is to refer to "the Black identity" instead of race. Whatever that means.

> If White people want to be capitalized, maybe we can call them "Euros"?

I think this would be controversial. While a lot of White Americans are proud of their ethnic background (I'm a quarter Irish!, I'm an Italian American), many are not. Maybe because they have mixed backgrounds, don't know where their ancestors came from, or because their ancestors fought or fled wars with those European ancestors. For instance my great-grandfather left Europe in disgust after WWI, and after coming to America told his family that they were going to be simply Americans.

According to wikipedia, 6.6% of Americans self-identify their ancestral origin as simply "American". Most of these are visibly white. Many of them are descended from British people, and quite possibly don't want to self-describe as British-American because America was founded by a war to terminate that connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_ancestry

Interesting. I don't have studies but anecdotally many people seem to tie their hyphenated-Americanism to their last name. Of course that just follows one lineage. You could be 60% British, but have an Italian last name, and describe your ancestry as Italian-American.

Mother of god...

Do you want to know the “answer” or do you want to know the answer?

This will go away eventually.

That's sort of an antisemitic question.

In what way is that question antisemitic?

not sure but i know it started as a porn thing

That's what the Chicago Style Guide recommends, and a lot of outlets use the Chicago Manual to guide their editorial practices.

https://cmosshoptalk.com/2020/06/22/black-and-white-a-matter...

It's a hint that we subconsciously pick up. Because capital letters indicate a group with a name and an identity ("American", "Bavarian"), which strengthens the idea that being black is an identity. There are many more, but if you try to talk about these hints, you will just sound like a crazy person. Any tech-savvy person could probably figure out a way to search the articles of the last 20 years and see how often there are articles in which the words "Black" and "white" appear, in contrast to "black" and "white".

Basically most news agencies started doing this after AP pushed it.

https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Black-American, like Irish-American or Italian-American, are seen as a unique, somewhat homogeneous identity and culture. White-American isn't. So they decided not to capitalize it on that basis.

The approval rating for the Supreme Court has never been lower. https://news.gallup.com/poll/402044/supreme-court-trust-job-...

Thankfully approval rating has nothing to do with Constitutionality.

... and constitutionality has nothing to do with the SCOTUS decisions.

Their job is to find it, not court (pun intended) approval rating.

The job of SCOTUS is to make a decision.

Whether or not that decision has anything to do with the Constitution is anyone's guess. And in the case that their decision clearly defies the Constitution, there is nothing that anyone can do about it.

In other words, like every other part of the government, their real job is politics. The only difference between SCOTUS and Congress is that the former is conveniently shielded from public opinion.

> And in the case that their decision clearly defies the Constitution,

How can anything “clearly” defy the US Constitution, when it is drafted in such vague and sweeping language? (Not just the original document, even moreso later additions such as the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.)

If the framers of the document didn’t want to give SCOTUS such immense discretion to decide what it means, they should have written it with more details, precision, elaboration - which would have narrowed the Court’s hermeneutic freedom.

I would like to remind you that the framers of the Constitution did not give SCOTUS any discretion to interpret the Constitution. That was a right seized by them in Marbury v. Madison.

How are they supposed to make decisions under it if they aren’t allowed to interpret it?

You can’t apply a law without interpreting. If the courts can’t interpret the constitution, they can’t apply it either. Marbury v Madison was just stating the obvious and inevitable consequences of having a judicial branch.

> You can’t apply a law without interpreting.

Hamilton observed that the courts don't apply the law. All they can do is talk about it. Which means, as he reckoned, that the other branches can just ignore them if they go too wack-a-doo.

The court's perceived legitimacy is really important, in fact.

They apply the law in reaching a decision. Enforcing that decision is up to the other branches.

If the US President and/or Congress wish to announce “we no longer accept the Supreme Court as having the final say as to what the constitution means, and will disregard any decisions by it which contradict our own interpretation of it” - they are free to unleash that constitutional pandemonium at any time - there is nothing SCOTUS can do to stop them.

This is, of course, the point, and why a court that's perceived as partisan can be very dangerous.

SCOTUS has been perceived as partisan since forever. What changes over time, is which party is calling the shots. But few can see partisanship when it is on their side.

No it hasn't. It has had periods of being more, and less, polarized, based on the overton window.

The Warren and Burger courts were dominated by liberals. Under Rehnquist and Roberts, SCOTUS has become increasingly conservative-dominated. If that conservative turn is “partisan”, why isn’t the same true for the liberalism which preceded it?

Many view the Lochner era (1897-1937) as being defined by “conservative judicial activism”. If the current conservative period is “partisan”, why not that earlier one too? But if the Lochner era is “partisan”, then partisanship has infected SCOTUS for well over a century.

> why isn’t the same true for the liberalism which preceded it? > why not that earlier one too?

I never made any claims on these other eras. It could be, an argument could be made.

but if you agree the Roberts and Rehnquist courts were conservative, then this court simply must be more so. Perhaps not as partisan as some liberal courts. You can't dismiss that this court is partisan simply because you agree with its decisions.

> but if you agree the Roberts and Rehnquist courts were conservative, then this court simply must be more so.

This is the Roberts court.

> Perhaps not as partisan as some liberal courts. You can't dismiss that this court is partisan simply because you agree with its decisions.

What does “partisan” mean in this context? What makes this court “partisan”? If “partisan” means displaying ideological favouritism, then the court has been partisan for a very long time, and this court is not fundamentally more “partisan” than its predecessors, even as the favoured ideology has shifted over time - completely independently of whether I or anyone agrees with any of those decisions. Whereas, if that’s not what you mean by “partisan”, what do you mean by it?

Constitutionality has everything to do with SCOTUS decisions, because de facto the US constitution means whatever SCOTUS says it does.

You can believe that SCOTUS has interpreted it “wrong” - but that’s just your subjective personal opinion, of no greater significance than that of anyone else.

So in other words, you are defining "constitutionality" to mean whatever SCOTUS says it means.

So if they said, "First Amendment doesn't count any more, sorry for the confusion," then I guess there is no more Constitution.

Your approach sounds like gaslighting at a grand scale. When we ask the population to set aside its own reason in the face of obviously incorrect decisions, you open the door to the end of democracy.

What’s obviously incorrect to one segment of the population is obviously correct to another.

When you say “1st Amendment”, you are talking about something invented by SCOTUS. The original 1st Amendment was a lot narrower (it only applied to the federal government not the states.) It was only in the 1920s that SCOTUS decided it should apply to the states as well, even though there is no evidence that outcome was intended at the time of its adoption (or the adoption of the 14th).

It isn’t “gaslighting”, it is legal realism, and paying attention to historical details.

> What’s obviously incorrect to one segment of the population is obviously correct to another.

That's exactly why I call it gaslighting. It brings to mind Sarah Palin's "alternative facts". Despite your miscellaneous feelings, objective reality exists, justice exists, and, ideally, the courts would be bound to follow both.

What on the earth are you talking about? The overturning of Roe v Wade?

I live in a country with no constitutional right to an abortion (Australia) - and we have abortion available nationwide, even funded by the federal government. Whatever the rights or wrongs of allowing or prohibiting abortion, is a separate issue from whether a constitutional right to it ought to be interpreted to exist in a constitution which never explicitly provides for one.

"Justice" is not the same thing as "constitutionality." The latter is a legal construct.

> So if they said, "First Amendment doesn't count any more, sorry for the confusion," then I guess there is no more Constitution.

Not how that works, someone else have to make that claim, make the argument and convince the majority. And…SCOTUS would have to evaluate the argument based on the first amendment itself and whether or not it allowed itself to be eliminated.

There’s a plausible argument that Gitlow v New York (1925), which extended the 1st Amendment to apply to the states, was wrongly decided. I can’t see how any consistent originalist could disagree. The framers of the 1st Amendment saw protecting free speech at the state level as a job for state constitutions not the federal constitution. The framers of the 14th Amendment never intended it to change that in the general case.

The Constitution can always be reinterpreted by future courts, regardless what the current SCOTUS says it does.

Of course it can. The constitution currently means, right now, whatever SCOTUS says it means right now. It used to mean something different and no doubt will mean something else again in years and decades to come. And that will continue to be true, unless some day some other institution in the US successfully takes over this role from SCOTUS. In the People's Republic of China, the final authority on constitutional interpretation is not the judicial branch, it is the legislature (Standing Committee of the National People's Congress). I doubt the US would ever adopt that system, but if it did, then SCOTUS would no longer make the final decision on what the constitution means.

What the constitution originally meant, is a fixed historical fact – although like any other historical question, we can debate the details, and there is no guarantee that consensus on such debates is always attainable.

Funny enough, the Atlantic published an argue a while back arguing Supreme Court has historically been aligned with popular views in society. [0] Makes sense considering they have no enforcement mechanism without the People, and are appointed by the presidents.

As Andrew Jackson once said, "John Marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it."

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/does-th...

True, but irrelevant, since SCOTUS does not need to run for re-election.

The court, like so many parts of government, only works if people believe in it to some degree. Like, you don't have to agree with the ruling to agree that it was considered fairly or without political or religious biases interfering. Without that trust, the court's actions/words are just a threat of state violence.

I don't see a realistic path for popular opinion to overturn a bad SCOTUS decision, no matter how egregious.

We are way beyond an Andrew Jackson "The Supreme Court has made its decision, now let them enforce it" type moment.

> I don't see a realistic path for popular opinion to overturn a bad SCOTUS decision,

SCOTUS rules on what laws mean. People can demand legislators change those laws.

... and SCOTUS can freely misinterpret those changed laws, as well.

Remember Shelby v Holder, when SCOTUS struck down an unambiguous law, unanimously passed by Congress, previously held as constitutional?

Don't tell me Congress can override SCOTUS when they obviously can't.

Sure they can. It doesn't always work, but that doesn't mean it never works. You might as well say that seatbelts don't work because you can cite a few cases where people died anyway.

And if popular support were really overwhelmingly in one direction, a constitutional amendment can change what the constitution says. Constitutional amendments can make the unconstitutional become constitutional, and vice versa. Constitutional amendments aren't easy to pass, but that's by design. The constitution should only be amended when popular support is overwhelmingly in favor of it, and when that occurs, it's possible.

I was thinking more along the lines of civil disobedience. The court has changed our norms and understanding of what society is supposed to look like and do... for instance when it integrated a segregated society. It can't do that if people resist what it says because they see their decisions not as what's "right" but as partisan actions

Hasn't been lower when looking at data going back to 1972. It would be really interesting to see what approval was like going back another 100 years.

Can't quantify where there's no data.

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