The government is burying the anti-Asian violent hate crime crisis

There isn't a mechanism to prevent "Nazis" from winning a primary election. The Republican candidate for an Illinois congressional seat is elected, not appointed. The GOP, of course, repudiated the candidate.

> SATs are racist (to tptacek's point I'm on the progressive side, but I do think Biden agrees with me here [Biden education]). I don't know how you look at the data [SAT stats] and come to any other conclusion. We can discuss how much is solely the SAT vs. institutional racism, but the facts are pretty clear.

What’s the operative mechanism for that “racism?” And how on earth did white people design a “racist” test on which they underperform Asians?

> Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes

I’m not sure what’s more offensive, the pop psychology, or the implication that I’d think or do my job differently if I were a white guy.

> Race-aware admissions policies have lifted countless millions of racial minorities in the US out of poverty and had a profoundly good effect on our society.

I don’t think you have the basis for asserting causation here. The largest upward economic mobility in the last 50 years has been experienced by racial groups that don’t benefit from preferences in university education (poor Asians such as Vietnamese).

> We're seeing increasing diversity in almost every good place: board rooms, operating rooms, the Supreme Court, millionaires, etc. etc. etc.

That’s because millennials are much more racially diverse than baby boomers. Outside of academia and Supreme Court appointments, racial preferences haven’t been practiced (because they’re unpopular, including among Black and Hispanic people). Racial preferences in corporate board selections are a new thing.

And the long con is efforts to keep Asians from doing the math and realizing that, when they’re 7% of the population but 35% of the engineers at FAANG, that “racial representation” math is contrary to their interest.

> I get this is frustrating for folks when they're denied admission, and I definitely understand to some degree the feeling of unfairness that comes with it being because of who you are (race, gender).

That’s not actually my frustration. My beef is that progressivism puts white people in charge of deciding what’s best for minorities. “Racial representation” for example is something white people want more than anyone else. Listen to “Nice White Parents.” Something you hear over and over is minority parents saying they don’t care so much about race-balanced schools. What they want is their mostly Black or Hispanic school to have the same resources as the mostly white school. On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Justice Thomas has said similar things. Overwhelming majorities of Black and Hispanic people support school choice. It’s white progressives that oppose it because it tends to decrease diversity at any given school. And of course polling shows that the majority of people in every minority group opposes racial preferences in both college admissions and employment. Prop 16 in California lost every single Hispanic-majority county. But white progressives love racial balancing, and continue to advocate it over minority opinion, because they end up in charge of systems of racial gerrymandering. When a minority kid writes a diversity essay, or a minority academic writes a diversity statement for tenure, it’s overwhelmingly white progressives that will be in charge of evaluating that against their worldview.

And because white progressives have different interests and incentives than their minority coalition members, they have to lean pretty heavily on the propaganda to keep minority voters, who have diverse and often conflicting interests, in line. This became glaring to me as someone from a Muslim country during the last few years. You got these efforts to cultivate “Muslim” identity, but in a way that’s divorced from what the overwhelming majority of actual Muslims think. That was mediated through folks like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, who gained prominence not because they authentically represent what American Muslims want—remember these are folks who preferred Bush over Gore not that long ago—but a version of Muslim identity that flatters and appeals to the white progressives that control the media and platforms.

This is fair; I didn't really cite anything for this claim, but it's pretty well accepted. The University of Michigan (undergrad and law school) had a couple of cases go to the Supreme Court about affirmative action and consequently put together lots of research to defend its position [0].

Some specific research on the educational benefits of diversity [1] ---

White students with the most experience with diversity during college demonstrated:

- the greatest growth in active thinking processes as indicated by increased scores on the measures of complex thinking and social/historical thinking (confirmed in the MSS and IRGCC studies);

- growth in motivation in terms of drive to achieve, intellectual self-confidence, goals for creating original works (confirmed in the CIRP study);

- the highest post-graduate degree aspirations (confirmed in both CIRP & MSS studies);

- and the greatest growth in students values placed on their intellectual and academic skills (confirmed in the CIRP study).

...

Students who took part in the IRGCC as first-year students, compared to a matched sample who did not participate in this program, showed greater growth over four years in active thinking, stronger citizenship engagement as seniors, greater acceptance of difference as compatible with societal unity, greater growth in perspective taking, greater mutuality in orientations toward their own groups and toward other groups, and greater understanding of conflict as a normal, indeed healthy, aspect of social life.

A bit about the legal system and the SAT [2] ---

A 1987 report of the Michigan Supreme Court, reached the same conclusion, noting that "the presence of minorities in the profession increases public perception of fairness." And a 1998 report re-affirmed that position, stating that by "reflect[ing] the diversity of the constituency it serves," the justice system avoids "[t]he appearance of bias, as well as the reality of bias."

...

For example, the SAT measures only about 18 percent of the factors that determine freshman grades. Even that small predictive value decreases over time. SAT scores are thus less predictive of sophomore grades, even less predictive of graduation rates, and even less predictive of professional success.

A warning and a reality check [3] ---

The impact of race-neutral admissions would be especially drastic in admission to professional schools. The proportion of black students in the Top Ten law, business and medical schools would probably decline to less than 1 percent. These are the main professional schools from which most leading hospitals, law firms and corporations recruit. The result of race-neutral admissions, therefore, would be to damage severely the prospects for developing a larger minority presence in the corporate and professional leadership of America.

...

By the year 2030, approximately 40 percent of all Americans are projected to be members of minority groups. More than $600 billion in purchasing power is generated by minorities and more than one-third of all new entrants to the workforce are persons of color. In this environment, a diverse corporate leadership can be valuable both to understand the markets in which many companies sell and to recruit, manage, and motivate the workforce on which corporate performance ultimately depends.

---

The idea here is that postsecondary education is really the gateway to power and prosperity in the US (sure there are other roads, but at a high level this is true). If we only use test scores--like the SAT--we'll shut out racial minorities from the process. The consequences of this is that education will suffer, our businesses and markets will fail to serve racial minorities, and faith in institutions will weaken as racial minorities are barred from the educations that will give them access to economic prosperity and impactful roles in our society. Furthermore, diversity is great for education for every student, not just the direct beneficiaries of affirmative action.

[0]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/

[1]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/gurin...

[2]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/intro...

[3]: https://diversity.umich.edu/admissions/research/expert/bowen...

Good answer; thank you. (I didn't expect that detailed a response...)

OK. Fair enough on all of this. The distinction you're drawing between interventions to improve gender parity and interventions to improve racial parity (or representation or whatever) make sense, at least in the sense that I understand where you're coming from. (I do not agree, regarding racial preferences for Black students, and I think it's a stretch to call something we've been doing for half a century "guinea pigging", but I'm not trying to persuade you, just to understand you).