Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

Two points:

1. For all the logical/social contortions, judgment calls, distorted selection standards, tuning, and subjective assessments involved to create the "desired" class of students (thousands and thousands of hours of applications, reading, discussion by admissions officers, students writing essays that emphasize their overcoming disadvantage)... how much better an outcome or result does this create than simply allowing some objective standard to dictate who gets in, or random selection above a certain bar?

Is there any way to say how much better we do for so much effort? Other countries apply strict bars for admissions -- do they do worse? Why do we think that this produces any much better outcome? Is it just to make us feel better?

2. By what principle are administrators of universities limiting their actions or extent of tuning? Do they apply this believed solution to university admissions just because that is their domain and have it under their control? What makes them think that this is the solution to inequality? And if this is the solution, why are they so meek about it and don't instead completely overemphasize every group that needs more representation?

How do they know when they've achieved the goal? How do they know whether a new goal needs to be set? When "equality" on some dimension is achieved, will that be the end of it? Is there an end to this? Will other groups be not so lucky to get such attention when their turn comes?

Unsatisfactory answers to all these questions make me not support how AA is implemented in the US.

You mean there is no school before that?

> Affirmative action makes the world a more just place.

No it doesn't -- race-blind admission standards make the world more just, affirmative action make people like you feel as though they make the world more just. Big difference.

There's obviously no evidence to suggest standardized evaluation of academic excellence favor any particular racial genetics. The fact that today in the US, race-blind admission causes over/under representation of certain racial demographics is thus entirely due to social-economical and cultural factors. We can therefore expect that once those factors are equalized, then the results of a standardized race-blind admission process should naturally reflect the racial demographics of the general populace.

Unfortunately, just as those social-economical and cultural factors are the cumulation of damages done by racial oppression over many generations, so too its undoing will take generations to fully accomplish. And yes, that does mean you may likely not live to see that day. But the seemingly easy path of using affirmative action to force an outcome so that you can pretend to live in a just world is entirely the wrong way to tackle this problem, and will only serve to make the world worse for everyone involved.

This is pure, 100% anecdote, but, I remember at my first tech job, there were basically 3 teams working on different aspects of the product. I, a white male, was on a team with 3 other white males. There was another team of around 5 or 6 who were all Chinese. The last team was probably 10-15, all Indian.

All these people were damn good at their jobs, but it was rather interesting how the demographics fell.

What weight does Jessie Jackson's opinion hold? Believe it or not, he's often a target of jokes in Black America.