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Comment by KPGv2 | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly

I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.

So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.

Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.

How else are they going to balance out all the legacy admissions?

Why does an hard working non-legacy white boy deserve less of a shot than a non-legacy black one? Why should he be penalized because someone else’s father with a comparable skin tan was accepted 25 years ago?

43% of all white students at Harvard are legacy, athletes, directly related to faculty, or have family that donated to the university. That number falls to 16% or lower for black, latino, and asian students.

75% of that aforementioned group of white students would not have been admitted had it been based on merit. 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories.

Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1060361

> Why does the average applicant need to be penalized when their grandparents legally could not attend these institutions? I think it's pretty obvious why people have such reactions to DEI when it's literally just "legacies for people who legally were barred from participating".

Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter. Suggesting that preference for legacies be removed is a fine topic on its own, but it's orthogonal to explicitly discriminating against individual applicants based upon the color of their skin.

Since you clearly feel strongly about this topic, I'll ask again. Why should the poor white kid with no legacy relationship get cast aside for some other non-legacy kid with a tan?

> Averages are meaningless, only individuals matter.

Exactly. We shouldn’t treat similarly situated people differently because of group averages. That’s the definition of racism.

It’s also irrational in practice. If you want to compare whose grandparents had it harder, Indians and Chinese are clearly entitled to the most affirmative action.

Discrimination didn’t magically end with the Civil Rights Act, either. American universities are still mostly good ol’ boy networks in all the relevant ways.

You’ll notice that most people arguing against DEI rarely perform meaningful analytics. Because when you do look at the data it tells the tale that the same centuries old systemic biases are still in play.

This is obvious to any adult in the room. But the benefactors of said biases do not want to acknowledge it since it lays bare their utter mediocrity.

> The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.

Wow, I am extremely happy to know that all racism ended in 1964!

Marijuana was made illegal in 1937 and it stopped being used completely for the next 70 years.

Should we be giving Swedish people special treatment and privileges in 2025, or how long until bygones are bygones?

>Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"

I am going to use the crap out of that reference whenever I see people on HN creatively redefining Europe to exclude parts in order to dishonestly back up some point.

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