Asian American groups accuse Harvard of racial bias in admissions

Great Debates
441

Harvard has a clear history of racism. It exercised racial discrimination for most of its history. And yet it had a great reputation for most of that time. As long as the discrimination is in favor of those in power, discrimination can work in your favor.

You sound like one of those Ayn Rand types that say that we should permit discrimination because the businesses that discriminate would be putting themselves at such a disadvantage that they will eventually fail. There are exclusive country clubs that have been practicing discrimination for a long long time and still remain very prestigious.

442

https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/Newsroom%20and%20Events/Publications/Economic%20Trends/2015/Racial%20and%20Ethnic%20Differences%20in%20College%20Major%20Choice.aspx

You keep making assumptions about Asians based on stereotypes. Why do you do that? Can I make assumptions about black students based on stereotypes?

443

Did you miss the fact that virtually EVERY Asian organization involved in the lawsuit supports affirmative action? Sure there are some selfish Asian groups that want to pull up the ladder behind them but this is not the attitude of the overwhelming majority of Asian groups.

444

Everybody is. There is no majority.

445

I think there was a brief window of time in the 1970’s and early 1980’s when a minority was a minority and if you had 10% Asian 2% black and 3% Hispanic, you would just say you had 15% minority. This didn’t last more than a decade or so but during that time the whites opened the doors to Asians wider than they had been opened before. Then when they realized that Asians didn’t really count in the politically correct sense, they started to put all the Asians in a single basket and restrict the number of admissions from that basket.

446

Affirmative action in its original sense was not intended for diversity (that rationale was adopted later to justify extending affirmative action to Hispanics and other underrepresented minorities). in its original sense, affirmative action as intended to right past wrong and try to reverse the effects of past discrimination.

Some people say 50 years is long enough. SCOTUS in a recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act seems to think the time may have come to revisit these remedial measures.

The folks on the anti-AA side tend to point to IQ gaps and argue that the field has been leveled and any differences in achievement is the result in innate differences in ability.

Folks on the pro-AA side don’t think AA will have achieved its purpose until socioeconomic disparities between races effectively disappear.

447

Affirmative action opened doors that were closed to them almost regardless of merit.

448

Blacks lost about half their entering class at Berkeley but the absolute numbers lost was small (~125)

Whites lost a small percentage of their entering class but the absolute number was in the thousands.

I don’t know how it would play out at Harvard (they have a significantly higher black population than Berkeley) but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a net loss in white admissions that was greater (on an absolute basis) than the loss among black students.

But once again, these Asian groups support affirmative action, they just want to play on an even playing field with their white counterparts.

449

Some of those donations are subsidized by the US government in the form of a tax deduction.
Some of the University’s income is subsidized by tax exemption.
Much of the research if funded by the government.
Much of the tuition paid to the school is subsidized by federal student loan guarantees or outright tuition grants.

450

Is this a baseball event? **Damuri Ajashi **is hitting home runs left and right.

451

Race in this case refers to a wide variety of peoples, not one from a specific country. I don’t know if the enrollment pool is large and diverse enough to expand it, but I have no problems with that in theory.

It all depends on if they were marginalized purposefully historically based on the kind of specious reasoning that kept out people of color

I’ll explain it anyways even though I didn’t answer to the contrary. The purpose of AA is to promote diversity through races because historically racism has kept people unfairly out of schools. This discrimination is bad. AA was created to deal with that. It doesn’t mean racism is the only problem and it doesn’t mean AA is the only way to deal with racism. This whole discussion seems to forget that when people talk about the poor unfortunate white or Asian kids that are being harmed while completely ignoring the kids of other races that have been harmed for far longer and more severely.

So helping some group like the Southern Baptists if they were historically discriminated like blacks were would not be hypocritical. The fact that AA doesn’t deal with religions doesn’t make it bad. It may be that religions don’t need it, don’t want it, or wasn’t discriminated in the first place, I don’t know, its simply not covered. So you can throw out any minority and I will answer that yes, if they have been discriminated in the way that AA was created to deal with, then they should be helped. There may be some exceptions out there but generally promoting diversity is a good thing and I completely support a program that did that.

And before anyone asks, yes I’d feel the same way if my race (incidentally Asian) was harmed. I don’t want these Asian groups to bring this suit to Harvard, I want to have less Asians like me (since we’re overrepresented now), like possibly any future kids I have, in Harvard if it means some black or latino kid can get in

That’s why I said THE Asians, referring to just the groups that made the complaint.

To me, there is little difference between the two reasonings. The past wrong was based on race. AA effectively diversifies enrollment by race.

I am not one of those people. Within hours of the SCOTUS ruling, we had states try to limit voting rights of minorities indirectly by restricting voting days and hours, and installing voter ID’s and other things while increasing military absentee balloting. Racism is alive and well, but now it just hides better. The SCOTUS ruling was a travesty

I’m closer to this extreme than the middle position

452

It’s true that one of the justifications for race-based AA–and perhaps AA in general–is past injustice to a group. Whether this is a philosophically justifiable position is a somewhat different debate.

A given individual is not necessarily the representative archetype of his “group,” not necessarily personally injured by antecedent injustice, and is not able to rectify what happened to those already dead. Nor, for that matter, will he necessarily even rectify injustices to the living. A wealthy recipient of race-based AA is perfectly entitled to stay within the wealthy class and simply be the beneficiary of some good luck wrt to where the rules are right now.

Race-based AA has no opportunity test, by design. If you correct for opportunity, it’s been shown over and over again that you lose race-specificity for preferences. Within every SES tier, the exact same rank order for races in performance outcomes will emerge. At a top SES tier, blacks will outperform asians in basketball; underperform them in academics. And the discrepancy will be so profound that asians at the bottom of the SES tier will outperform blacks at the highest SES tier. Therefore you need race-only based AA to achieve racial balancing.

Then there is the problem of “group,” even when self-identified. Should “black” be a group that includes a recent Nigerian immigrant from a relatively wealthy background into the same group as a poverty-stricken student from a Chicago ghetto whose ancestors were enslaved? Are recent Hmong immigrants from the lowest social tier of their source country in the same “asian” group with the American kid whose parents are doctors?

These are not fundamentally solvable problems, philosophically. Race-based AA does not “correct” any past injustice since there is no such thing as extending remedy to the dead, nor does race-alone AA attempt to extend an opportunity-based remedy to the living.

What race-based AA does is cosmetically balance outcome by race (and specifically, the OMB-based self-identified groupings). That is all it does, but at the level of society, it is both reasonable and beneficial to achieve that cosmetic balance.

The complaint at hand in the OP accuses Harvard of racial bias, and the short answer is that the complaint is valid. An absence of race-alone bias in the admissions process would result in very lopsided racial cosmetic balance. (At CalTech, about 40:1 asians to blacks.)

So while the complaint is correct in its accusation, the defacto effort to cosmetically balance by race should be allowed to stand. It is incorrect that asians are not taking the place of blacks, and therefore “support” race-based AA while being opposed to anti-asian bias in admissions. A matriculating group has a finite maximum, and is therefore a zero sum game. Without race-based bias, almost no blacks would be admitted to elite institutions, even when their applications are normalized for SES opportunity.

453

[quote=“YogSosoth, post:451, topic:720183”]

That’s why I said THE Asians, referring to just the groups that made the complaint.{/quote]

So when you said “THE Asians are selfish,” I should have read that to say “SOME Asians are selfish?”

There is a HUGE difference. What past or current injustice has our society committed against Hispanics that would justify this sort of race based remedy?

AA was not meant to create diversity, it was meant to level a playing field that WE had tilted against blacks through slavery and Jim Crow, what did we do to Hispanics that compared to that (or the genocide of American Indians). If you want diversity for diversity’s sake then just be up front about it and just admit that you are applying a higher standard to Asian applicants and lower standards to white and Hispanic applicants in order to get a particular racial mix beyond what would be required to remedy past injustices.

Unfortunately your opinion matters far less than the opinion of 9 justices in the Supreme Court. Frankly the DOJ needs to do a better job using the other parts of the VRA to strike down laws that have disparate impacts on voters along racial lines.

Then you are effectively saying that merit is simply not as important as proportional socioeconomic success between races. Why limit proportional success along racial lines to socioeconomic success? Why not say that the entertainment industry must have 15% black starring roles and 5% Asian starring roles, etc.

454

“We” meaning you and I? I can’t speak for you, I did not, and do not, tilt against blacks through slavery and Jim Crow.
“We” meaning society at large, or some given ancestral group, at large? Possibly, but both those are dead. This is not your ancestor’s society, and your group is not your ancestral group.

Nor is it possible for race-based AA to correct a “legacy” of injustice. That would be “opportunity-based” AA, where the legacy of limited opportunity is being corrected. However race-based AA does not look at opportunity; it looks at race.

All sorts of human groups have always executed dominance over other groups. Black populations happily enslaved other populations; native americans happily stole land from, and slaughtered other native americans when they could. That certain groups have ended up with the short stick in our history books is a function of where we are in history, who records the history, and who dominates most successfully. It’s not a function of which group has some sort of inherent debt because they–and they alone–execute social injustices. Crapping on the weak seems pretty built into the nature of every animal, including humans.

As a society, we collectively decide a greatest good. In the US, we have decided the greatest good is cosmetic proportionate representation for broad socioeconomic outcomes by OMB self-identified race/ethnicity groups. We have decided that is quantifiable for academia and most formal workplace positions; it is not easily quantifiable for entertainment-related positions such as movies, stage or sports.

Where we can quantify proportionate representation we do, and we value it over a pure merit-based system.

So if you are Harvard, blacks are competing w/ blacks; asians with asians. The meritocracy is within groups; not across them. If you consider an asian applicant against a black one, it is correct that there is a racial bias against the asian in the sense that, if the asian were placed in the black group, the chance of acceptance is much higher than were he placed in the asian group.

455

“We” meaning society. The legacy of those injustices are obvious to anyone that doesn’t have a blind spot to it. Very few Asians were slave owners or beneficiaries of segregation/Jim Crow but almost all Asian groups line up on the side of AA despite the fact that it doesn’t help them at all anymore.

For example, if we took all the white people in this country, beat them, forced them to work for free, raped their women, sold off their children and stripped them of their constitutional rights for 400 years then spent another 100 years passing laws that made them second class citizens then I suspect that the white population would still be struggling with all sorts of problems even 50 years after we stopped doing all that horrible overt shit and merely discriminated against them on a much more subtle basis. Exceptional individuals can overcome that and pull themselves up by their bootstraps but it isn’t really fair to suggest that everyone should be able to do that.

If things were perfectly fair, there MIGHT still be a racial disparity in socioeconomic outcomes but it wouldn’t be nearly as severe as what we have today. And the fact that you focus on the fact that there MIGHT be a difference no matter how fair we are as a justification to ignore our obligation to be fair is just baffling to me.

456

Lol no. It’s just that alot more men fail completely. But on standardized tests men reach the upper ends of the scale at a far larger measure than women. FAR. Especially when it concerns math which is the most objective of subjects.

457

Would you care to generalize out the principle you’re advancing? I don’t think that oppression has zero effect on academic and socioeconomic outcomes by group, but I also think that there are some pretty blatant counterexamples.

During what time periods and geographic locations would you call the Jews heavily oppressed, for example?

Well, the men failing out of school still count, I think. Really, it depends on what you’re looking for. If you have one pool with 8 average students, 1 genius, and 1 delinquent, and another pool with 5 genuises and 5 delinquents, it’s entirely possible that not only will the first group score higher on average (1005 + 05 ain’t all that hot), but if a delinquent will cause more damage than a genius can remedy on average, you really do want to pick from the first pool.

458

They don’t count for Harvard.

Women are far behind when it comes to how many genuises they produce.

459

In the white mistreatment world you describe, would it then correct those injustices to offer to wealthy whites special advantages because they are white?

This is the sense in which offering special advantages at Harvard to blacks does not correct any past nor current injustice.

On average, black matriculants at Harvard are there because they were given special consideration for race, and on average the blacks admitted are from high SES backgrounds, and do not represent/typify those blacks currently suffering from injustice. In order to get a black cohort capable of taking advantage of a Harvard-level of academic rigor, you need to draw from the highly-advantaged black SES pool since that’s where the highest-scoring blacks come from.

460

Cite please.

Meanwhile this about the difficulty recruiting the top achieving low income kids (and they are out there) to places like Harvard.