Affirmative action? Are you mad?
Perhaps you're unaware of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ...
Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!
Perhaps you're unaware of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russ...
Affirmative action is not the same thing as making it artificially harder for a discriminated minority!
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04...
"Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans."
In Russia a minority like Jews are asked special questions in admission tests to make it harder for them to get in, while in America a minority like Asians are hit with a penalty of 450 points in SAT to make it harder (15 times harder) for them to get in. There's no difference.
If elite American universities didn't penalize Asians, they would almost literally have no non-Asian students. This is because Asian-Americans optimize the entire lives of their youth around maximizing their admissions chances to elite universities. There's racism here, but there's also just Goodhart's Law, normal old American anti-intellectualism, and the proper acknowledgement that standardized exam scores show very little about a university applicant's real life prospects.
Part of turning 18 in the USA is making the transition from subservient child to independent adult, over a period of years (usually by 26 you're considered definitely adult or way behind). Part of the problem with Asian-Americans is, they don't make the transition. Striver-immigrant culture and extreme focus on family (at one time a part of Jewish-American immigrant culture too, often more an immigrant thing than a particular culture's thing) cause people to overoptimize their kids' upbringing on being good little subservient worker-bee children, often leaving them semi-crippled when required to function as independent adults.
And then let's not even get into the cultural differences in areas of authority, ego and freedom between East Asia and America, which put Asians at a severe disadvantage due to their inclination, ground in by "Chinese mothers" over periods of years, to expect being ordered around all the time.
Before anyone calls me a vicious racist, a Chinese student in a class at university once referred to me as "more Asian than the Asians". I like to look back on how completely wrong he was :-).
I still think "affirmative action" is a clumsy and not entirely correct way of describing what he's trying to articulate. But he's not trying to be as provocative as he comes across. At least I don't think (?) he is?
It's insane to say discriminating against a minority is like affirmative action for everyone else. So if I don't like Bob I could phrase it that it's not that I don't like him--I do!-- it's just that I like everyone else better (including other people I dislike). And for someone to fall for that would be ridiculous.
Affirmative action is not just for minorities... in some (many?) places, the historically excluded group form a majority.
It is practically the same. When it comes to limited entrance, you can't make it easier for a certain group without making it harder for the rest.
Say you have a minority that's 1% of the population, and unhindered it would also make up 1% of enrollments.
If you don't allow that minority to enroll, you're increasing the acceptance chance of a majority group member by just over 1%, while decreasing the acceptance chance of the minority member by 100%.
The correct way to describe this is then most definitely discrimination against the minority, and not affirmative action for the majority.
Essentially it was more difficult for Jews to get into university, neutral for Russians, easier for Tatars and some other minorities and extremely easy for what's called Northern Minorities (they had - and still have special quotas, no exams necessary)
Speaking as 1/4 Russian-Jewish, 1/4 Chuvash, 1/8 Latvian and 1/rest Russian.