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Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

wsj.com

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Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#121

Post by guynamedloren »

jedberg wrote: post #37
chernevik wrote: post #13

Set standards, let people meet them, and don't worry about what they look like.

That's one way to do it, but then you just perpetuate the biases inherent in the system. For example if the standards include "child of an alumni", that's not very fair. If the standards include GPA, that's not very fair to someone who went to a school that doesn't offer AP tests. And what they look like is important because certain people experience life very differently depending on what they look like.

No idea why this is getting downvoted. Perpetuating biases is a very real issue.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#123

Post by xvector »

markdown wrote: post #112
ipnon wrote: post #100

It's discrimination any way you slice it. You can't lower the bar for one person without raising it for another so long as the class sizes remain the same. If elite universities are about providing education (a valid point of critical contention), then systematically barring Asians from entry is the same class of injustice litigated in Brown v. Board of Education. It's not enough to say you can learn calculus just as…

Quoted post unavailable.

Racism is not good for society. You cannot justify holding Asian-Americans to a higher level because "they can handle it."

Asians are part of society too, and yet Asian-American children have dramatically different and more stressful childhoods than their counterparts - a constant churn of studying, stress, and pressure, compared to the relatively carefree childhoods of their peers.

It disgusts me that you can say "this is good for America" - are Asian-American children not Americans? Asian-American children have to go through a nightmare to have a chance at opportunities comparable to their peers, simply because of the color of their skin. This is the literal definition of racism.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#124

Post by Wiseacre »

lazide wrote: post #111
Wiseacre wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Einsteins are out there that never had the upbringing and resources he did?

You aren't going to fix that by only letting folks with terrible upbringings in important positions. You'd need to start fixing those terrible upbringings, and likely wait a few generations.

Who is saying only one thing should be done? You can see free lunch programs and free daycare but you can also see that is not a panacea by itself.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#125

Post by markdown »

ipnon wrote: post #115
markdown wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The point is there is no difference between Harvard's current admissions policy and telling the marginalized Asian students, "great application, but we don't accept your kind here anymore." It's not right when it happens to Asians, it's not right when it happens to Blacks, it's not right when it happens to anybody.

No post body was provided.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#126

Post by yibg »

chmod600 wrote: post #105
TeeMassive wrote: post #2

What is the mainstream Progressive justification for discriminating against Asians?

The basic idea is that there are lots of positive feedback loops, so initial conditions matter, and people can end up in a spiral up or down. The theory goes that adjusting things along the way can correct for those positive feedback loops. There are two big problems though: One is that it tries to correct by using race as a proxy. Middle class black americans and African immigrants get the advantages, poor asians ge…

The rationale also seems strange to me. If we're talking in economic terms, Chinese Americans (taking one subgroup) didn't start out wealthy but rather historically were a poor, marginalized group (etc Chinese exclusion act). So at least in that case initial conditions didn't seem to matter.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#127

Post by dshpala »

markdown wrote: post #125
ipnon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is there is no difference between Harvard's current admissions policy and telling the marginalized Asian students, "great application, but we don't accept your kind here anymore." It's not right when it happens to Asians, it's not right when it happens to Blacks, it's not right when it happens to anybody.

Quoted post unavailable.

Wait, are you saying that it'll be better for US to copy India's caste system?

Let me guess which caste you think you'll end up.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#128

Post by yibg »

goodoldneon wrote: post #48
yhoneycomb wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not beat around the bush here. It's "messy" because it's racist against Asians.

How do you suggest we increase admissions for under-represented groups?

By figuring out why they're under represented and fixing those?

Is it income disparity? Single parent households? Lack of funding for schools in poor communities? Why can't we focus on addressing those and leveling the playing field rather than picking one way to group people (by race in this case) and artificially tipping the scale? Why not by gender, or family income, or height or beauty? Those all have impacts to life outcome too.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#129

Post by SamReidHughes »

jquery wrote: post #96

[flagged]

> The conservative WSJ using Asians as a wedge against Black people,

Actually, they're using them as a wedge against universities, because (in their opinion) they're communist-infested indoctrination centers that scam humanities majors out of six figure sums of money. Harvard would be ruined if it had to turn itself into UC Berkeley.

There's also the angle of chipping off some of the Chinese- and Korean-American electorate.

> Corporations implement AA because it’s shown diversity increases profits for a number of reasons.

I suppose you could cite some weak sociological studies and pretend they're strong research while ignoring those that find the opposite correlation.

> I see very little curiosity about why AA might be a good thing.

There is an actual argument there, but you're not giving one, the user "markdown" is.

Edit: Sorry you got flagged again. I guess HN's mob censorship strikes in both directions.

Re: Asian-Americans fight back against school discrimination

#130

Post by yibg »

This seems very much related to the equal opportunity vs equal outcome debate. Affirmative action seems to be very much about equal opportunity. What I don't quite understand is why the fixation on race? Why not on family income or any number of other parameters that impacts education, future earning potential etc?
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